I am nearly 50 years old. I recall as a youth that the public library was a place where we were supposed to be quiet. I noticed about 5 years ago that when I would go to any library within my city or county that there were people talking in regular conversational volume rather than whispers, and some kids were even playing. When I complained to the librarians they remarked that “it’s a different world now and we try to make the library more family friendly, like a community center.” I have no problems with a “family friendly community center” but I have to ask, am I the only one that believes that the library should not be functioning as one? Anybody else have any thoughts on this?
According to several of my librarian friends no patrons were coming into the “library voice” libraries.
My current library has a glassed in “Quiet Study Area” and I’ve found that the study carols in the YA area on a second floor are usually pretty quiet.
I’m only a few years behind you and am settling in to the realization that very few things are how they used to be, or how I would like them to still be.
Carrels. Although the idea of study carols is interesting. But not quiet.
I blame cell phones. Or, rather, people who can’t set them on vibrate and then not answer them.
I asked the head librarian if it would be possible to put some chairs or benches close to the checkout counter (but not in the way) for people who had disabilities that make it difficult to stand in line for a long time. I was told no, it would be a hazard to the children who run around the area.
Dagnabbit. I knew it was wrong and meant to look up and correct it before posting, but then my son asked me a question.
Oh no, no, no. I’d have a hard time keeping quiet. Children running around are a hazard for the rest of us, as well as themselves and therefore not to be tolerated. By all means let them run out some excess energy, but at the park or in a separate multi-purpose room in the library, but not in the checkout area.
Since you’re looking for opinions, I’ll move this to IMHO (from MPSIMS).
I just noticed at my library today that the service desk where you check out a Chromebook to check your email is out in the middle of the children’s area. The desk is in a horseshoe shape and the guy sitting in it hat gotten three or four of those rolling carts full of books and walled himself in behind them so the rabid kids running around wouldn’t keep plowing into him. He made a fort!
One librarian’s opinion…
If kids are running, you need to stop that shit. Convince the librarian on duty that if those kids fall that it would be a bad thing. Most libraries don’t tolerate that shit.
Secondly, libraries are noisy nowadays because they’re much busier than they’ve ever been. I’ve looked at the door counts for the library I work in going back to the 60s. The number of people that walk through the door in 2012 in a single day is roughly ten times the 1960 number. And with computerization, it’s much much easier to check out an armful of items as the circulation numbers are (conservatively) 100 times greater today.
Wow…this surprises me.
Your numbers imply that today, 10 times as many people are reading, and those people are reading 10 times as much material as in 1960.
But , on the other hand, they say that literacy is declining,today’s pop culture is a culture of stupidization, etc, etc.
Which is true?
The first one, sort of. Let me explain.
The library of 1960 didn’t have music or movies or even much in the way of children’s books. The library of 1960 was built around adult non-fiction with a few important fiction books mixed in (at least, that’s how my Public Libraries professor told it). The library of 2013 has all of these things and then some. So it’s not surprising that circulation numbers are much higher.
That said, literacy is NOT declining and today’s pop culture is light years ahead of the pop culture of years gone by in the intellectual department. The idea that people are reading less is something that jerks use to unfairly tar the kids today. It’s bullshit and it has no connection to reality.
twitter and facebook don’t count.
Twilight might not be high literature, but it’s still literature. As is The Hunger Games. And both are better written than some of the classics of the genre that I had to read for a course on teen literature.
I haven’t seen a rise in the desire to read books by kids. They seem more enamored by computer games. But if they’re reading Twilight and The Hunger Games in large numbers then good on them. We read a fair bit when I was a kid. Mostly SF.
If the modern library hadn’t changed it wouldn’t exist.
I know people who want to abolish public libraries entirely as useless drains on public resources (we’ve had at least one thread on that here). On the other hand, when our local area suggested cutting back on library hours in order to save money during the Great Recession the outcry was such that hours actually wound up being expanded.
The more people who use the library and find it worthwhile the more likely a library is to be well-funded an adequately staffed. My library currently has extensive audio and video collections, is expanding into e-books, has community classes, community meeting rooms, tax advising resources this time of year, children’s activities, tutoring from elementary school through adult literacy and English as a second language, free computer access to county residents, computer classes, job search resources, and probably other things I’m not aware of. It has foreign language items not just as dusty, seldom used tomes but also periodicals and contemporary/popular literature.
Yes, sometimes it gets a little noisy. Especially the main branch library, but at least that one has the kids’ area in a separate wing and, like I said, rooms that can be used for quiet study.
If the choice is between a noisy but well used and well funded modern library and no library at all I’ll take a little noise. Then again, I’ve always been the sort that can study and concentrate with moderate background noise. I’ve always felt a bit sorry for those that require absolute silence to get work done.
By at least 1965 or so, the public libraries in Fort Worth had a lot of fiction, both for adults and for kids. That’s when my mother started taking my sibs and me to the branch libraries on a regular basis and occasionally to the big downtown library. I go to the same branches nowadays, and the shelf space that’s devoted to fiction is about the same, and the libraries haven’t been expanded. We also had bookmobiles come around every week. I’m sure that the selection on the bookmobiles were mostly light fiction, though I might be mistaken. I know that I enjoyed them very much. Now that I’m older, I can appreciate the challenges of choosing the starting selection of books for a bookmobile. Back then, of course, I didn’t. This was in the Fort Worth library district. I know that when we moved to a smaller town in Missouri, I was extremely disappointed in the selection at the branch libraries and at the main library. By that time, I was 14, and while I still read quite a lot of juvenile/cadet fiction and non-fiction, I was mostly reading stuff that was written for adults.
Of course, the libraries in the 60s didn’t have movies to be checked out, because most people didn’t have a way to play the movies. I remember that my grandparents had some sort of movie filming and showing device, but this was considered a fairly rare luxury, and I think (but I’m not sure) that the films were pretty fragile. Records were also quite fragile, they were easy to break and if they got overheated at all then they’d warp. I THINK that I remember seeing some records available for check out back in the 60s, but they probably would have been classical music. I know I was checking out records in the late 70s from the Air Force Base library in Torrejon, Spain. I can’t remember if they had 8 tracks and/or cassettes to be checked out as well.
I never understood the expectation of quietness in a library. I mean, what’s the purpose of it? If it’s because some people have trouble reading when there’s noise around, well, tough luck for those people IMO. They can check out the book and go home if they want quiet.
Besides that, a library is no longer purely a place to read. They have computers, DVDs, CDs (music), and so on. And I’m not sure about elsewhere, but here in Glasgow libraries really do pull double duty as community centres: What's on — Glasgow Life
You’ve got stuff like entertainment for young kids, homework clubs for older ones, computer/numeracy/reading classes, MP surgeries, jobseeking advice/support groups, etc.
That’s what it’s like in the US too. The only people that think “A library must be quiet” nowadays haven’t been in one in decades.
What if you’re a 98 year old man reading the newspaper on one of those giant wooden sticks, huh?
(I guess you could turn off your hearing aid in that case.)