Reading this thread relieves all my residual guilt for buying rather than borrowing. I haven’t used our local library for at least ten years.
When you can buy almost any book at Amazon for a penny plus shipping, and keep it as long as you like, it’s easy to rationalize buying.
When I lived in Seattle, my neighborhood branch was awesome. The librarians were extremely knowledgeable. They kept up, they knew what I liked, and if no one was waiting for me to return a book, they never charged me an overdue fine.
Montgomery County Public Library of Maryland uses the Sirsi Unicorn* ILS. The Sirsi software will allow users to suspend all of their holds for a given amount of time (such as during your vacation) during which time you don’t lose your place in the Hold queues, but AFAIK it doesn’t allow suspension of your individual hold on a particular book.
Seattle Public Library (assuming that’s the consortium ENugent’s library is a member of), uses the Horizon ILS (formerly owned by Dynix, now by SirsiDynix). I’m not familiar with the individual features of the Horizon system, but with the merger of Sirsi & Dynix you may see some features of Horizon programmed into Unicorn in the next few years.
*Unicorn = the dumbest name for a piece of software EVER
Some of those may come from donations. When I left Miami, I only brought one box of non-school-books to Spain: the local librarian looked like she’d won the lottery as she helped me unload the bags of books from my car (I single-handedly expanded the SciFi/Fantasy section from a single volume to over 50). My books weren’t marked in any way, so you wouldn’t know they hadn’t been bought by the library.
In Philly, there is a public library behind the building where I was based. They had the biggest selection of fantasy, scifi and mystery books of all the libraries I’ve seen. I would take the books out 5 at a time and return them as I finished them; loan time was one week and yes, I go through 5 books in that time. Once I went in to ask how much would the fines be for a late-return. I’m not sure how much of this is linked to the fact that most of the readers for that library came from my company (this definitely accounts for the unusual selection), but they said it would be a flat fine if I let them know as soon as I knew I’d be late. Since I was leaving on a 4-week trip the next day, I left with an armload of books… and the fine already paid. $3 for the “rental” of each book vs. the full price of new ones, yay!
The same speed-reading ability got me banned from my local library in Spain when I was in my teens. The librarian refused to believe that I was reading, even after my friends vouched that “I’d always been like that”.
The majority of books at my local library are between 1-5 years old. It takes them forever to get anything new, and every year they have a Book Fair and sell anything that hasn’t been checked out in the last year.
Forget about finding anything by classic authors.
You poor, poor creature. You have my deepest sympathy. My town has a great library and one of my favorite times of year is the spring Library Book Sale. I’ve found loads of out-of-print goodies I’ve been searching for, as well as expanding my collection of the classics.
But we don’t have a single decent bookstore. The only two in town are a Christian bookstore and one which sells used Harlequin romance novels. It’s hell. I don’t borrow from the library, because the bastards want the books back, so I’ve been single-handedly keeping Amazon.com in business.
My library gets the new stuff almost instantly, has a large selection and a fast website, has no problem with interlibrary loans, and no fines for late books. Plus a fabulous book sale twice a year.
OK, I just went to my local library again. Ahh, the dissapointment. True, they didn’t have my first three choices, but I eventually found something. Oh, and I have to correct a comment from before. The stacks actually take up less than half of the library floor space, I hadn’t noticed the computers in the back. Also, they still organize the whole thing by author’s last name! The only sections are fiction and nonfiction. This, of course, means you can’t just go into the stacks and browse for something to catch your interest in the genre you want. I use to love doing that when I was growing up. Sheesh, the last place I saw that organized their books that way was the library in my elementary school.
I’m moving from Clarendon to Bethesda, and I’m unpleasantly surprised at how much smaller a selection of books there seems to be in the Montgomery County system as opposed to Arlington County. At the very least, the Arlington Central Library in Ballston has (I’d say) at least ten times the number of books as the Mongtomery County branch in Bethesda, and from what I remember of the only other Montgomery County library I’ve visited (in Silver Spring), that one sucked as well.
Um…this is raising my blood pressure from a distance. Not only will you not be held responsible, Angua my dear, but in any just world you will be commended for beating them to death with your choice of a library book.
Specially the last one about being a nice girl. Last person who made a comment to me like that was an Indian guy at a gas station, who, upon seeing me buy smokes (for a coworker) said, “Good Indian girls don’t smoke.” I should have shoved the smokes up his ass sideways, or better yet, thrown a Playboy on the counter too. :rolleyes:
Hijack, but relatedly, I am sick of the supermarket checkers or baggers saying shit about what I buy. Yes, I buy a lot of water at once so I don’t have to go back often; must you say “Someone’s thirsty!” every time?!?
Yes, I live alone and manage my portion sizes by purchasing Stouffer’s entrees, and I stock up when they are on sale. Must you comment ironically on how “nutritious” they must be?!?
Jackasses. The same people who didn’t teach you how to bag must not have taught you manners either.