The future of libraries

[Eric]

Is this CNN article sensible, a wind-up, or what? This is it:

The future of libraries, with or without books - CNN.com

[beelzebubbles]

It's on the level.

The library and librarians are definitely in flux and redefining their role in their respective communities.

How do I know this you may ask? I worked in a start up library in a small community as a volunteer and as the director for a number of years. I am also two classes away from a Master's in Library Science. These are issues I and my peers often discuss both in and out of class.

[beelzebubbles]

What no answering rant? How disappointing.

[Chapman]

Those look like "the facts on the ground" in the libraries I visit.

[hdw]

Originally Posted by Chapman

Those look like "the facts on the ground" in the libraries I visit.

Yup, it sounds, or rather reads, familiar. There's a school of thought that just getting kids inside the four walls of a library is a good result, even if they just run around screaming or play electronic games. If a librarian tried to force a book on one of these kids they would be branded a child molester. I've occasionally read of Edinburgh libraries being caught out chucking books into skips, and at a less destructive level, the main public library here has been selling off the family silver, e.g. a rare copy of Audubon's bird book with all the lovely illustrations, gifted to the library in perpetuity by a generous lover of books and libraries. You wouldn't think this was the country that produced Andrew Carnegie, the man who donated a slice of his fortune to found public libraries for the masses.

Luckily the library I use most is a university library so hyperactive brats aren't a problem. More of a problem is their crap online catalogue and clapped-out computers which too many clumsy student fingers have knackered. Also, they have the librarian's occupational phobia about letting the unwashed masses defile their precious babies, so more and more books that I remember being on open shelves and available for borrowing are being hoisted upstairs to the 6th floor Special Collections dept. where you have to fill in a form and await the librarian's pleasure before you can consult the thing. If I sound a bit crusty, it's because I have known that particular library since it opened in 1967, and it has never been so user-unfriendly as it is now, thanks to the prevailing zeitgeist among librarians.

PS I was a librarian myself for a year before I decided that teaching might not be such a bad option after all.

Harry

[beelzebubbles]

Originally Posted by hdw

Yup, it sounds, or rather reads, familiar. There's a school of thought that just getting kids inside the four walls of a library is a good result, even if they just run around screaming or play electronic games. If a librarian tried to force a book on one of these kids they would be branded a child molester.

I've never encountered much running and screaming but they do play electronic games and chat online to friends and internet predators. They also consult the librarian about their homework and some are chapter book addicts which is what they call any book with chapters or genre fiction that comes in multiple installments like the Goosebumps series.

Originally Posted by hdw

I've occasionally read of Edinburgh libraries being caught out chucking books into skips, and at a less destructive level, the main public library here has been selling off the family silver, e.g. a rare copy of Audubon's bird book with all the lovely illustrations, gifted to the library in perpetuity by a generous lover of books and libraries. You wouldn't think this was the country that produced Andrew Carnegie, the man who donated a slice of his fortune to found public libraries for the masses.

Do not despair. This is called 'weeding' and has been going on since the dawn of public libraries. Libraries have limited space and I am afraid not all books are created equal. Non-fiction books with out-dated scientific information or misinformation, computer how-to books from the Eighties or Nineties, the scads of genre fiction from other eras that no one is interested in any longer (most fiction has a shelf life of a year or two) these things must make room for new fiction and the science of the day. This is not comparable to the burning of the library in Alexandria. It is more akin to cleaning your attic, garage or basement.

As for selling off the silver, I know that libraries often do not have the ability to care for the well-meaning gifts of their patrons nor do patrons often understand the true monetary needs of the library.

Originally Posted by hdw

Luckily the library I use most is a university library so hyperactive brats aren't a problem. More of a problem is their crap online catalogue and clapped-out computers which too many clumsy student fingers have knackered. Also, they have the librarian's occupational phobia about letting the unwashed masses defile their precious babies, so more and more books that I remember being on open shelves and available for borrowing are being hoisted upstairs to the 6th floor Special Collections dept. where you have to fill in a form and await the librarian's pleasure before you can consult the thing. If I sound a bit crusty, it's because I have known that particular library since it opened in 1967, and it has never been so user-unfriendly as it is now, thanks to the prevailing zeitgeist among librarians.

PS I was a librarian myself for a year before I decided that teaching might not be such a bad option after all.

Harry

I hate a bad online catalog. Philadelphia's is dreadful. I encourage anyone who has to choose a catalog to go with triple I. It is very user friendly.

I imagine some books are being hauled out of areas of easy access for a reason like vandalism or theft or to prevent them from being misfiled in an attempt to keep them out of one's fellow classmates hands. If these books have been around since 1967 and are still useful they may have increased in value.

It sounds like this is your view of librarians,



great scaly beasts guarding their horde.

Rowrrr!

[Eric]

I'm pleased to tell that my local library here in the Netherlands, which I joined a few weeks ago, actually has people who read books, or immigrants studying for exams (often the Dutch language, no doubt), as its average user. It certainly has a computer section (maybe as clapped out as the one in Edinburgh), but is still very much devoted to lending books to people who don't waste valuable electricity with all those newfangled reading machines that can store a hundred novels that you can't read at the same time.

There is the odd screaming baby here, but this is a little thing in a pushchair with its reading mummy, not a yobbish teenager abusing all the rules.

They did however, introduce a key system for the lavatories (another important part of a library) because they were being abused, whether by druggies injecting themselves, or teenagers pissing on the floor, I do not know.

Libraries that want to get rid of books should sell ordinary ones off cheap (as I have seen done in Britain, the Netherlands, etc.) and give away the posh ones to some other institution. But judging by some of the things that get sold off for a song, priorities have changed.

Talking of Alexandria, never mind the charred scrolls, but I wonder what kind of institution the present-day Alexandria Public Library (in Alexandria, Egypt, that is) is like, compared with the average European one. I have no insights into Egyptian reading habits, anno 2009. One article of interest in the field of Egyptian libraries is here:

http://www.sis.gov.eg/En/Arts&Cultur...0000000001.htm

[nnyhav]

Views: 'The Cusp of Every Bibliomaniac's Dream' - Inside Higher Ed

(of course, more uni than pub libs)

[miercuri]

One of my seminar teachers told us about a retired professor from the French department of our university who has no direct heirs and is thinking of donating his entire collection (which is an extensive one) to the National Library or another major public library in Bucharest, when he passes. Sadly, every single library declined his offer claiming that they had no space to add more books which so few people would check out.
The same professor wanted to check an entry in a Grand Larousse that he knew he could find at the Bucharest Metropolitan Library, only to discover that they did not have it anymore. He asked one of the librarians and she told him that it had been moved 'to the back' and maybe 'the boys there' still had it. He went and checked at the back (which was a damp storage room) and the boys there told him that he could take the Larousse for all they cared, since it was using up too much space anyway. He did not have the heart to leave it there to rot and took it home by cab.

Originally Posted by hdw

so more and more books that I remember being on open shelves and available for borrowing are being hoisted upstairs to the 6th floor Special Collections dept. where you have to fill in a form and await the librarian's pleasure before you can consult the thing

It is the same with most libraries I know in Bucharest, except for the Metropolitan, the British Council and the Institut Francais (the last two are different though). The rest of them require you to fill a form and they don't even have all their books indexed electronically. It's always a pleasure to search through dusty drawers of barely readable index cards. It seem however, that it has always been like this, I don't think that back when my parents were students they had any idea what open shelves were. At my university library it is pretty common to not be given the book you asked for right away, it always takes them at least half an hour. It happened to me to ask for a book which had just been returned by someone else and was lying on the librarian's counter, it still took her half an hour to "process" my request.

[gonfler]

From the article:

Meanwhile, many real-world libraries are moving forward with the assumption that physical books will play a much-diminished or potentially nonexistent role in their efforts to educate the public.

No. Not everyone has the patience to read thousands of pages on a computer screen. Much as I love the internet, there's no way I can give up real books and photocopied university readings. I need to underline, highlight and doodle on the margin, you know? And it seems like a lot of students are still like this. You might say, but you live in a Third-World country. It's different. Nonsense. I lived in high-tech Tokyo. Students still need books. I only know one student who uses e-books extensively. But he's a genius and can absorb math, physics and engineering textbooks inside his head. Not everyone is like him.

The library with actual books disappearing is a false alarm. It will evolve, yes, but books will not disappear. Unless we are in Fahrenheit 451.

[Eric]

Like Gonfler, I am one of those people who do not have the patience to read endlessly from a computer screen. I spend enough time in front of one translating and looking at internet websites. I want a portable thing that doesn't need a rechargeable battery, doesn't tempt me to read one of a hundred novels. This is called a book, mostly in paperback form. I can read a book in bed, in an armchair, in the pub, on a beach, and it weighs little. And I can only read one book at once.

I'm not a complete Luddite, and would perhaps even buy a Kindle or similar if I didn't have the choice of books to include dictated to me by some Big Brother of literary taste. If I want to read Charles Morgan, Johanna Holmström, Per Hagman, Inga Ābele, Mare Kandre, Rachida Lamrabet, Karl Ristikivi, or one of a thousand other authors that "no one's ever heard of", I would expect there to be a way whereby I myself can scan these and put them onto my self-tailored Kindle, paying the appropriate tuppence royalties to the author or his heirs. But I don't want to have a series of bestsellers forced onto me by the marketing manager of some multinational bookselling conglomerate with the famous "stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap" phil[istine]osophy.

[kateuic]

I don't know about other areas, but our local library is a really vibrant one. It's divided into areas for different age groups. There's a closed-in section for toddlers, with storytime every Friday. There's a homework and reading area for primary school children (it's located in a poor area and many kids have nowhere else to go.) Teenagers get another section with big bean bags on the floor. Adult readers go to the other side of the library. It's not always quiet, but it's never rowdy. The staff are excellent, always ready to help, or interested in your observations. They have a stand of recommended reads as you come in the door, and I've found a few gems there. There's a box of bargain books just outside the door, but they're usually crap! Every summer, they run a reading scheme for primary children. Children have to read six books over the summer holidays, and either write a review or design a new cover for the book. There are weekly meetings to discuss the books and to select winning reviews and covers. Every child who takes part gets a medal, and winners get book tokens at an end of summer ceremony. I think the scheme runs in UK libraries too.

[nnyhav]

Wall of Knowledge - The Long Now Blog

[Eric]

What Kate Uic describes as happening in Galway (and also the UK?) sounds ideal to me. I don't believe that public libraries throughout Europe are all turning into storehouses for CDs and DVDs, junking books. I think there is still a lot of idealism among library staff, especially no doubt in smaller towns, to get people reading books, whether fiction, non-fiction, or poetry.

Children do have to be encouraged at first by parents reading to them, but from what I have seen, once you get them going at primary school age, there are many who read a lot of books, especially in the years before puberty sets in.

If libraries have to get rid of books, it is nice when they sell off old copies for next to nothing.

[Eric]

The Wall of Knowledge idea is the antithesis of the cosy, small-town public library, which is part of the local community. The idea plumbs the depths of pseudo-intellectuality in that it is there to create an impression of learning by stacking up hundreds of thousands of books semi-inaccessibly.

They could do it with dummy spines, as used to be the case in posh stately homes where the philistine owner wanted to conceal the drinks cabinet or secret door to his mistress' apartment. But from those two photos that Nnyhav (and Alexander Rose) shows us emanates a feeling of cold, blind knowledge plus a desperate attempt to impress the masses with books as dead objects instead of founts of knowledge.

[nnyhav]

However dystopian this vision of the future of libraries may be, it pales by comparison to attempts to establish an intellect-free zone fortified by the ability to display pig-ignorance in four or five languages.