I go to the local library almost every week.
I mostly read magazines and newspapers tho.
In the city I used to live in I did the same tho I did get a few books from interlibrary loan (ex: a book on making holograms after buying a HeNe LASER)
Neither had a good collection (small towns)
The nearby city (pop ~50,000) has a decent collection, but since I live across the river in a different state it costs big bucks to check out stuff.
As a kid I used the school/public library a lot.
Brian
I go to the library about once a week-10 days. We have a great library system (rated 2nd or 3rd in the nation) and have several branches within a 10 minute drive.
I check out the Sci-fi section, then browse around looking at everything. Usually come out with a couple of books, which I usually return on time. I can’t afford to buy many books anymore, so it’s either the library or no reading new stuff.
Since I started putting together a “Books to Read” list (mostly because of threads here or at the UnaBoard) – I’ve been visiting the library more often (about once every other week)
I usually only buy what I’m pretty sure I’ll like - either from a previous read or I’ve read other books by the same author. Even then, I’ll look at a used bookstore first before hitting the chains or Amazon.
I’m pretty happy with the local library’s selection - both with fiction and non-fiction. Their card catalog is online - so I can easily check to see if they have what I’m looking for. And if I REALLY want to read something, there’s InterLibrary Loan.
I read too quickly to buy books. I would be broke by the time I bought everything I intend to read. I prefer to check a book out from the library, then if I decide I want it in my personal collection I’ll try to buy a used copy off of Amazon.
I also like the library when I want to check out large hardback art books that would be too expensive for me to order.
I use my library at least twice a month. I travel quite a bit, and before heading to the airport, I go to the library for a couple of books. I can usually finish an average novel in the time it takes to go to the east coast. I see the people around me reading brand new paperbacks or hardcovers that were clearly just purchased for full jacket price at the airport bookseller, and half the time they don’t get past the first few pages before they fall asleep.
I wonder how much the franchise fee is for one of those WH Smith stores? Hmmm…
Gee, a thread asking about my thoughts on libraries? Pull up a chair, this could take awhile!
I grew up with an excellent branch library down the street from my house. I could walk there by myself from the age of 7 or so, and I was there several times a week. I loved that library, I have such fond memories of it. It was very well-funded and had a very large collection, and was staffed by wonderful librarians.
I never go to the library now. While I know some posters will remind me that the main branch of the Brooklyn Public is a splendor to behold, the branch in my neighborhood is pathetic. I know funding is the problem. The physical plant is not well maintained, the collection is abysmal, and while I’m sure the librarians are very well intentioned, they are not enough of them and they are over-worked. The Children’s section makes me want to weep – it’s mostly grotty paperback copies of Babysitter’s Club and R.L. Stine. Five out of six nights, the library closes at 6 PM, not even close to the time I’m coming home from work, so the whole thinig is inconvenient.
Even if I lived near a wonderful library, I’m still a book buyer at heart. I love to buy books, and have created a great collection for myself. I know it’s expensive, but on the other hand, I don’t think I’ve bought a CD for myself in over two years. However, I’m also a great book proselytizer, and cheerifully give away books all the time. It’s a good thing, too, otherwise our apartment floor would collapse under the weight. At any given time, I have a few thousand books, although there’s a lot of rotation. Obviously, there are some special finds that I wouldn’t give away or lend, but mostly I’m psyched to get books into the hands of other people (whether they want them or not).
I think my library card is still active, but I almost never go. I either buy books or borrow them from friends. I rent videos and am probably going to start renting DVDs via netflix. I know it’s kind of stupid, since I used to work at a library (my very first job when I was 16) but it’s just not convenient for me to go anymore.
I don’t go to the public library very often. The local branch of the county library is pretty bad, and I don’t want to drive up to the main branch. (I also kinda had my card taken away for some seriously overdue books, so I don’t think they’d want me back in anyway.)
I would have to pay to use the city library because I’m not a city resident, so I prefer just to use that one for occasional research. It is pretty good, though.
However, I’m always in my school library. I’ll check out whatever catches my fancy, fiction or nonfiction. I suspect that for a while there, I was one of the few, if not the only person, who would actually check out books for fun, so all the librarians know and love me. It’s a shame that the fiction section is so lacking, because it is terribly convenient.
At our house, there’s a big difference between library books and the books we own and read and re-read. Example–we own C.S. Forrester’s Hornblower novels. But recently, when my daughter got really hooked on them, we checked out several books on Admiral Nelson, life in the British navy, how wooden ships were built, etc. This then led to my son getting interested in ancient sailing, so we checked out Kon Tiki. And then a long period of interest in exploring Antarctica wherein Stapleton became a hero.
Another example–we checked out 4 or 5 video versions each of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet when my daughter was studying Shakespeare, as well as West Side Story and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
There’s just no way I could shelve all these books and videos on top of the shelves and shelves of re-readers, or afford them for that matter.
We are very fortunate to have an excellent library system and the access from home is tremendous.
I visit my branch library once a week, like clockwork, and stop by another branch library or two once or twice a month. I’m usually on the waiting list for 50 or more items and have about 70 items checked out of the library at any given time. (It runs probably about 50% books, 35-40% DVDs and 10-15% CDs.)
I actually read all of about 1/3 of the books I check out, read parts of others, and quickly realize with a few that I’m not all that interested after all.
I do buy books and DVDs, but not frequently. I buy CDs more often, but still probably only one or two a month at most. Ironically, one of the reasons I don’t buy so many books is that I tend to put books I own at the bottom of the “to read” list, because I’ll have to return library books so those should get read first, right? Plus, if I bought every book I was kind of interested in reading, I’d spend a small fortune that I can put to better use elsewhere. (It helps that I’m not ususally in a hurry to read whatever it is; I can wait for the system to deliver it.)
Our library system is pretty good, although not amazing. There are budget issues this year (and last), so we’ll see how that shakes out down the line.
In short: I love the library.
I do buy a lot of books - which is why I now use the library a lot. Too often I buy a book, and end up donating it to the library because I didn’t like it enough to keep it. What I do now is keep a wish list on Amazon, and search from there through the online services for my county’s library. I have been fairly good at being able to find a lot of things through them - and I save money and space in my apartment. I was even able to find software through them that I really wanted, but had stop being published a few years ago.
Susan
I’m about to because my book club has chosen (yet another) book that I don’t want to read and definitely don’t want to buy.
When I was little, I did all the time. Many libraries in fact (school, public, and church) and hung out there, and read there (and yes, you can stretch out and read, you just have to find the sections that other people aren’t in, it takes a while to get to know a library well enough to do that, though.) at least 4 days a week.
But since getting out of school, not that much. I’m actually in two ok library systems (King County and Seattle (which would be good, but people keep voting down the taxes necessary to pay for it)). But neither has a branch really close to where I live, and they tend to be open when I’m at work, or doing something else, and it just becomes easier to go to B&N and buy the book, as they’re open until 11pm. Especially if it’s something I’ll reread.
Plus, I forget to return stuff, a lot.
Unfortunately there is no such thing as a minor in library science. If daughter is serious about becoming a professional liberrian (and I have been one for over 20 years so I can use the term liberrian) then she will need to get a master’s degree in library science. Some 2 year colleges offer a library technician certificate. A shortage of librarians is predicted in the near future!
I just can’t afford to buy the quantity of books that I need to read. I live in a small town, and the library doesn’t suck, but it’s totally inadequate to my needs, so every week or two I drive to the nearest big city to check out as many books as I can carry.
I’ve been paying more or less weekly visits to the library since I was an infant.
Thanks, mom.
Far be it from me to contradict a professional liberrian, but there are scores of associate and bachelor’s degrees in Library Science and/or Librarianship. My source for this is The College Blue Book, 30th ed., volume 3, page 919. Whether the schools offering these degrees allow the courses to be taken as a minor, I cannot say.
The hang-up is that most libraries that actually hire librarians require an ALA-certified master’s degree. So while you can get a “lesser” degree, it probably won’t get you a job. If you don’t want a job, though, it’s out there.
I love my library. Its tiny but we’re part of a very large system with the ability to order books online to be delivered to your branch so when its ready I walk down the 10 houses to it and retrieve it (I don’t even have to cross the street :)). Honest, I didn’t buy my house just because its so close to the library… but relatives have commented upon this fact.
I read way too much to afford to buy everything I read, and I have no space to store it all anyhow. As it is I have lots of books in the house and there’s always the person who comes in and asks if I’ve read them all. Besides, I often get the itch to research a particular subject and its easy to go to the library and gather up an armful of books and satisfy my curiosity… I’d never do that if I had to buy them. No way I’m investing $75 just to learn what, say, the Kaballah is about…
I used to go to the library fairly regularly, but now I find that buying a lot of the classics I want to read is fairly cheap, while a lot of the histories I like to read are really expensive. So, I buy most of the fiction that I read and have built up a nice personal collection – a source of personal pride in myself – but I still take out regularly from my library, or reserve from other libraries if mine doesn’t have it. Older, out of print books I can usually find at my library, too. I’m overall quite pleased with it.
As to how often I go there? Ideally, I’d like go once a week to read the International Jerusalem Post and every so often The Atlantic or other magazines, since I cannot read books in a library setting, but lately it’s been more like once a month.
I go to the library also about once a week, ever since I was a kid. When I was younger my parents would forbid me to get out more than 10 books at once (because otherwise they’d get lost and acquire fines) which perhaps provides you with an idea of the amount of books I read. Nowadays I’ve checked out so many books I’ve reached the limit - I believe it’s about 50 for my library system - though not all at once.
I do buy books, but I’d go bankrupt and have to live in my garage if I bought every book I’ve ever read.
I read most of the books I check out, though not all. I often re-read books, though the ones I like enough to re-read multiply times I often buy as soon as I get the money.
I usually don’t get out videos or computer programs. I don’t think my library offers video games! Though they do offer computer games, oddly enough.
It’s pretty decent. There are 4 libraries that I go to. The biggest one is in downtown Salem (the largest town in my immediate vicinity) and there’s also a smaller library in the western part of that town. There’s also libraries in 2 other outlying communities that are close to my house.
The one downtown is pretty large and has a good selection. One of the libraries in an outlying community has the most sullen staff I’ve ever met! I hate going there because the librarians are all evil old women with a permanently pissed off attitude.
It also has a good online system. You can go to a site and look up books, reserve them, check which books you have out… et cetera. It’s really really convenient.
I’m considering a career as a librarian. I briefly volunteered at the largest library. It was a good experience and I really liked it but events got in the way and I had to stop. I’m hoping to begin again some day.
I love the library. As you may be able to tell.
I’ve gone through phases. As a kid, I was at the local library several times a week (and actually, I still have memories of hitting the bookmobile when I was four and five years old, before the permanent county library opened when I was six). Even in high school, I still used public libraries regularly. In college, however, I got accustomed to academic libraries, and the type of material I was most often seeking wasn’t to be had in public libraries. After I dropped out of grad school, I just never really got back into the habit, and when I did get a card it took me only one use to check out a couple of things I never got round to returning, racking up impossibly high fines. The hours when the branches were open outside of my work hours were limited, and it generally just wasn’t worth the hassle. For the next decade or so, I just bought something if i wanted to read it.
After I got married, however, my wife attempted to curb my spending on books. We bought a house, and shortly afterward registered for cards at our county library, which it turns out is pretty good, as these things go. There’s still lots of things I want to read that they don’t have, but I have been able to get probably half of the titles I’ve gone looking for. I also didn’t realize, in my hiatus from libraries, how much video and music stuff they’d added and were now circulating, as opposed to making available only in the library. I became quite fond of certain types of books on tape when I found myself with a daily commute totalling nearly two hours. And the children’s books, CDs, movies, and DVDs have been a godsend since our kids were born. I still buy a fair amount of stuff, but I read more than I would if I were still dependent on buying things in order to read them.
We have it pretty good, I’ll grant. Our county library system serves about 650,000 people now, and has been reasonably well-funded by the county. With size comes a lot of amenities (online catalog/account access from the Internet, self-service checkout and pickup of reserve items, etc.) and a certain breadth to the collections, as well as convenience: the local system branches are all open 9 am to 9 pm Mon-Thur, 9 am to 6 pm on Friday and Saturday, and 1 pm to 6 pm on Sunday.
Now that I’m working again, I may only go in to the library once every ten days or so, but when I was out of work for nine months, it was nice to have someplace outside the house to go and be able to browse the shelves and hang out for a while. My wife and kids still go a couple of times a week.
Our family’s become such devoted library users, in fact, that we not only use our own county library, but also pay $45/year for a card for the neighboring county’s system. Partly, that’s because there are three branches of that system closer to our house than the nearest branch of our home county system, and partly it’s because they circulate movie videos and DVDs (our home system circulates only kids videos and a lot of documentary, how-to, and similar material). I figure we’ve more than paid for the $45 just in money we’ve saved by borrowing there instead of renting from Blockbuster, not to mention the money saved in late fees. Plus, I’ve found that by having access to the second system, my chances of being able to borrow something I want to read are even better, saving me even more when I don’t have to go buy it.
One of the things that made it much easier for me to deal with libraries was online access to catalogs and account information. If I want to renew something at 2 am, I just connect to the library site and do it, instead of having to remember to phone during business hours, or go in to the branch.
I’m extremely fortunate because, due to reciprocal agreements among area library systems, I get to use use both Fairfax County and the City of Alexandria library systems. Alexandria carries DVDs, but Fairfax County does not, although I buy the DVDs I want or get them through Netflix. IMO, the mission of libraries is to serve as information repositories, not video game purveyers.
Books have gotten outrageously expensive, and I’d rather borrow the library’s copy of the newest Grisham or Chrichton instead of ponying up the money to buy a hardcover I’ll only read once (and not even that in the instance of Prey–Hoo boy, did that reek!). When I go to the library, I grab a bunch of titles that look interesting as a selection to browse through at home.
Morever, because I’m responsble, I turn books in on time, thus avoiding the accrual of library fines.