11 posts tagged “libraries”
Let me start by saying that the Colbert bit about our local library kerfuffle was hysterical. I'm sure that former ALA President Leslie Burger will be forever bragging that Colbert referred to her as "Princess Leia." I'm a little annoyed at how frizzy my hair looked, but other than that, I have no beef with Stephen.
But now it's time to provide the other side of the story. For the record, I don't work at the Nazareth or Easton library and I don't know the staff who work there. My only connection in this case was having my (New Jersey) library used to shoot the indoor footage.
The facts in a nutshell: a little boy was given a card at the Nazareth Library. He used the card to check out books for months, then took part in the library's summer reading program. A local paper took his picture and reported where he lived. In response to the photo, the library that issued the card (Not Nazareth, see the "addendum" below) left a message on the family's answering machine telling them that the Nazareth card is not valid.
Isn't that mean? Don't you just want to smack the mean library? Well, read on.
The cute little boy denied borrowing privileges at Nazareth lives in a small town, Tatamy, that has steadfastly refused to contribute to the regional library that serves their area. The town officials insist that most residents don't use the library, and they would prefer that those few interested patrons pay a membership fee that the town would
partially reimburse. Therefore, only actual users of the library would pay for it.That may sound reasonable, but imagine trying to fund the public schools solely from taxes on families who use the schools. It can't be done. Imagine exempting non-drivers from taxes devoted to road maintenance.
The town leaders of Tatamy imagine that a public library is akin to a public golf course - a recreational amenity rather than an essential public service. So to their way of thinking, membership fees make perfect sense.
Should the library have made an exception for the cute kid? Well, since giving the child a card in the first place was a library error, I'd say yeah, the library should eat it, at least for awhile. Unfortunately, the library director was on vacation when all this was unfolding, but when she returned, she did the sensible thing and reinstated his borrowing privileges until the end of the year. So he was not "banned from the library," and never was - even without a library card he could still participate in programs.
Making a broader exception than that, though, is patently unfair to the other cute kids of Tatamy who can't check out books at the Nazareth Library, and unfair to the cute kids of the surrounding towns whose parents shouldn't be expected to foot the bill for towns that don't want to pay their share.
ADDENDUM: In the above paragraphs, I deliberately simplified the funding issue, in the interest of presenting what I deem the crux of the matter, Tatamy's refusal to pay its share toward the library. If you want the more complicated version, read on:
The child in question did not actually apply for a card at the Nazareth Library. He (or actually his mother) applied for a card at the Easton Area Public Library.
Because the borough of Tatamy isn't served by a library, the Easton Library, in its capacity as a "district library," agreed to serve Tatamy residents for a modest annual fee ($25 for adults and $5 for a child). Most libraries in Pennsylvania belong to a statewide open borrowing program, in which a library card issued at one library entitles you to full privileges at all participating libraries. When Tatamy residents buy a card from Easton, they are entitled to use it ONLY in Easton. Because their municipality does not contribute toward a library, they are not entitled to the all-state open-borrowing privileges. The mistake that Easton made was to certify this family as being entitled to use all Pennsylvania libraries.
How did Easton make such a mistake? Because when the child's mother applied for the Easton card, she "made a mistake," and told them she lived in Easton. Therefore, she got an Easton card for free, and got full statewide privileges in the bargain. The clerk who processed her card should have verified the mother's residence, but instead
took her "mistaken" claims at face value.
Maybe someday, the residents of Tatamy will put pressure on their elected officials to contribute to the Nazareth Library. In the meantime, people need not weep for the cute little boy. Even when his Nazareth library card expires at the end of year, he will be able to enjoy library services at the Easton Library for a mere $5.00 a year.
Who knows what is going to survive the cutting room floor, but right now I feel like the coolest person on the planet.
For some reason, TCR glommed on to a news story about a library that denied a child borrowing privileges because he wasn't a resident of their town. The town where the family does live has refused to fund the regional library, because they think a $12/year per capita tax is too expensive for unlimited access to books, DVDs, databases, educational programs and expert research help (can you tell I'm biased here?)
ANYWAY, the politics of library funding aside, when you've got a cute kid who wants a library book, you've got a news story. Since the family didn't want to step foot inside the library that denied them privileges, they asked if they could film inside my library and just pretend it was the other (mean, anti-kid) library.
What was interesting was how staged the segment is. They wanted shots of the child bringing books to the circulation desk to be checked out. It involved multiple takes and calls of "Action!" More like a movie than a news story: this was, literally, fake news. I'm not an idiot, and I know that TCR and The Daily Show are fake news, but I sort of thought the field pieces were based on reality.
I have a feeling that TCR will end up ridiculing the "mean library", and I feel bad about being part of the ruse, but hey - I was filmed for The Colbert Report!
(by the way, if the story and my footage survives, I'm the lady checking out the books).
So, I found out today that the library has discarded books by Wallace Stegner, Anita Shreve, Anna Quindlen, Annie Proulx, Booth Tarkington, James Thurber, some guy named Tolstoy, Mario Vargas Llosa, Sarah Waters, John Updike and Thomas Wolfe, to name but a few. These aren't books that are "dusty," the library jargon for books that haven't circulated in x number of years. The page said she needed room on the shelves, and a library assistant just yanked books almost randomly. It breaks my heart.
Part of my complaint is that weeding fiction is my job. Someone junior to me discarded the books when I took a vacation day. So I feel disrespected and violated, blah blah, the usual workplace complaints. But it's not just about little old me. Our patrons are being ill-served by library staff who don't care about anything but the new and shiny. For the record, my library is not a tiny little reading room. We're a decent sized library with a collection that used to be excellent. It's so sad.
Luckily my director said to re-order the most outrageous examples. It's money we don't have, but if it means we have to order one less James Patterson, I can cope with that.
We're fighting with county officials that want to gut our funding right now; I shudder to think how they would have reacted if they saw Tolstoy in the trash.
As befitting my advanced age, I have become a curmudgeon, and as such I spend a lot of time kvetching about the dumbing down of American culture. What’s unspeakably sad is that my cherished profession, librarianship, is becoming part of the problem instead of the solution. Many people suppose that public libraries are the last defenders of quality literature. No, we buy mass-produced pablum. And if a book doesn’t circulate enough, we treat it like produce that has passed its sell-by date. We chuck it, regardless of merit. The leaders of our profession advise us to “give ‘em what they want,” and if that means discarding Charles Dickens in favor of Nora Roberts, so be it.
At least that’s the way it’s playing out in a lot of smaller libraries across the country. Libraries in urban areas might have more sophisticated patrons and more sophisticated librarians. But out in the boondocks, where I work, libraries are abandoning their role as a focal point of culture and intellectualism for their community.
Very frankly, librarians in small towns are not necessarily well-educated themselves. Trust me, the MLS degree does not make you educated. I know an MLS librarian who, approached with a question about Emily Dickinson, asked me what century she wrote in. Our country’s greatest poet! I know a librarian who literally never reads a book. I know someone in charge of book selection who once said, “Never buy a book with a black person on the cover, because no one will want to read it,” and who recently told me that she would never read a novel set outside the United States.
To say that libraries have a role in preserving culture has become a controversial opinion. To argue that “readers advisory” might mean helping a patron graduate from Danielle Steel to Anne Tyler is perceived as crazy talk. My colleagues think I am pretentious – dare I say elitist – because I read hoity-toity books. Any reader of this blog will know that I am resolutely middlebrow in my tastes, but never mind. In this new McLibraries mindset, anything more challenging than James Patterson is elitist.
I’m not arguing that libraries should be musty museums for Important, Meritorious Books that Improve the Mind. I’m all about inclusion – even for the downright crappy. But don’t let the crap crowd out the quality, in the name of some misplaced brand of populism that supposes poor folks don’t deserve any better.
The New York Times, Time magazine and other sources have reported that Sarah Palin, while mayor of Wasilla asked the director of the public library if she would be "all right" with removing books from the library based on "inappropriate content." Later, the library director and the chief of police were asked to resign for being insufficiently supportive of the new mayor, althought the director eventually kept her job. It's all pretty vague - we don't know if the attempted firing was related to the attempted censorship, and despite a chain email making the rounds, there is no authoritative list of which books Palin was challenging.
All very murky, but none of this feels very good. She reminds me of many small-minded political figures who often misunderstand libraries and have no concept of the "freedom to read" which underlies our collection policies. She reminds me of somebody I knew who wanted to remove a children's picture book from the library because of a naked...(drum roll...) ...mouse.
Did I say small-minded?
I understand that you are unhappy with the fact that the high school is forcing your child to read a book during what is supposed to be a vacation. While some of our patrons consider reading to be a pleasure, especially while on vacation, you are entitled to your opinion. Please be assured that the public library had no part in creating the summer reading policy. Report your dissatisfaction to the school superintendent.
I understand that you expected that the library would stock enough copies of each summer-reading selection so that no child would have to wait their turn. Unfortunately, the public library is also charged with stocking books for your child's grandparents, for those people in the community without children, and those children who are not yet in school. We can't allocate our entire budget on books that support your school's curriculum.
I understand you expected that when you visited the library in late August, you didn't count on the fact that the only books left on the shelf were Great Expectations, Anna Karenina and Ivanhoe. I'm sorry that all our copies of The Chocolate War are checked out.
No, I'm afraid I can't call the children who are currently reading The Chocolate War and ask if they are finished yet. I understand that you really, really need this book, and you probably need it much more than the other people who are reading it, but our borrowing policy lets people keep a book for three weeks, and we really cannot deviate from that policy for your sake.
Please be patient. And be grateful that once high school is over, your child will be able to follow your example and never read another book for the rest of his life.
The Age of American Unreason is about the dumbing down of the United States in many areas: belief in creationism
She laments the passing of middlebrow culture, which encouraged non-academics to better themselves with good reading. As a librarian, I'm also sad to see the end of that era, and to see how uninterested the library community is in preserving it. These days, the public library culture is mostly about mass-marketing and giving 'em (the presumably stupid public) what they want, meaning what the publishers tell them to want. Read your James Patterson and like it, you dumb slob, because the library is going to buy 20 copies. Meanwhile, we're discarding our Michener books (Jacoby looks fondly on those fat middlebrow tomes) because they don't circulate enough.
God bless the folks at Sports Illustrated. They decided to do libraries a favor this year and not send them the swimsuit issue. They didn't tell us they weren't sending it, and they didn't offer any kind of credit for a missed issue, and they didn't ask our opinion. They just didn't send it. Clean, simple.
Truth be told, the swimsuit issue is a royal pain. It's prone to being mutilated, stolen, and taken in the restroom (ewww). But it's our royal pain, and who the hell do these suits think they are to make our collection development decisions for us? We called to complain, and will do our best to get this issue on our shelves. For the sake of the articles, of course.
Weird. Here's Ms. Sensible Shoes fighting for the right to objectify women. It's a complex world.
In all my years as a librarian and an Internet maven, I've never had an occasion to do a Google search on the keywords "newbery award scrotum." But I wanted to catch up with the controversy over this year's Newbery winner, The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron and Matt Phelan. A passage in the book recounts an incident wherein a character's dog is bitten on the scrotum by a rattlesnake. Thankfully, the dog lives, but apparently the mere use of the word "scrotum" has given some school librarians the vapors, and they're refusing to buy the book for their collections.
Give me a break. If a ten-year-old kid has not heard the word "scrotum" before, there is a serious problem with his or her education. And while I recognize that school librarians have different selection criteria from public librarians, I don't see how any rational selection policy would mandate the exclusion of a book because of an incidence of one perfectly normal little word.
So, scrotum, scrotum, scrotum, scrotum. Ban ME, ya bozos.
Last week my library had a public showing of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's documentary about global warming. The discussion after the film was basically hope versus despair. Do we have a future? What can one person do? How can we fight the power? The next morning, a patron called and me and suggested the library do a workshop on exactly what one person can do, not just on global warming but on social change in general.
This is exactly what libraries should be doing - providing a forum for people to connect with their community and become civically engaged. I have a little committee formed - I'm tempted to call it a cell -- to plan our program and change the world, one alderman at a time if necessary. I AM SO JAZZED. I love my library and I love my patrons.
