School libraries and community libraries may be different, for reasons already mentioned. The Mrs. runs the library here at the county’s largest elementary school (1000+ students). She manages a database of 16,000 volumes. There is a certain degree of duplication (the Hoosier Read books are 20 books for every grade, with an after the book online test and a certificate for completion, so of course, you need multiple copies of those) but the bottom line is, yes, the young do benefit from the physical nature of books as sources of information and entertainment, as well as having to learn the Dewey Decimal system to come to understand book sorting, but which is also a very good introduction to database management as well. Plus the extra benefit of learning personal responsibility, as someone has to keep the dog from eating the book, and my wife charges for replacement. You don’t want to mess with Mrs. DHat!
I have a dead tree book on hold for me at the library. I’m there at least once a week getting reading material. Plus I work in a library (a specialized medical library). All our journal subscriptions are online. I have about 900 books, and a small ebook collection which doesn’t get used.
Books with historical significance are not retained in an library I’ve ever been a member of or (now) a client of.
Libraries that retain items of significance exist, but they are a pretty specialized kind of library. Ordinary libraries just throw stuff out.
And my library has made all the shelves short, so that I have to bend over to see anything. Better supervision, easier shelving, fewer books. Fewer books, and I can’t read the titles.
yeah la county doesn’t put paperbacks on the list more than once cause its cheaper to keep one listing and just rebuy the book …….in the kids pb section they didn’t put them in the file system at all because they wore out too fast
My experience as well. Every once in a while I’ll look for something I think a “classic” - something every library ought to have. Maybe Hardy or Shakespeare - that basic. And I’ll generally be disappointed at the meager offerings. But it can be hit or miss. They might fail to have something I’ll really respect, but then have something I consider far more obscure. What I’m seeing might, however, be an effect of the shared collections - library A might get rid of their tattered old copy of Jude the Obscure, if they know library B has a newer copy.
My daughter was over yesterday, and actually offered that she had culled 50 titles the previous day. I should have asked her some more pointed questions about the practice. Her experience is a little limited, tho, as she works in the kids’ department. She said the kids’ books really get beat up. And she’s on the lookout for subject matter books that have become obsolete. For example, she mentioned books on bullying that didn’t mention cyberbullying. She also has a (limited) budget for new acquisitions, so she can replace some titles she culls.
We have some amazing libraries in St. Louis County. My favorite has a main floor that is all adult books - fiction, non-fiction, magazines and a limited amount of computers, with the study rooms & reference - and the entire bottom floor is a kids’ area and meeting room, which is fantastic because the kids’ area includes an indoor place for the kids to play as well as a pretty extensive collection of children’s books. The meeting room is constructed of soundproofed glass, which is really cool - some parents will go to a class or meeting there and their kids can play where they can see them.
We don’t generally have a specialty/older book area, either in the county; I think the city might have a collection but most of those are stored at local universities and museums.
I don’t think our libraries rent laptops, but you can borrow some pretty decently powerful telescopes, which is super cool. We have an astronomy pad about 45 minutes outside of town, so you can borrow one during the meteor showers (or whenever) and take it out there.
YMMV.
I have gone from one of the best libraries in the world, in the 4 corners, to one of the worst, in the high plains, to a Carnegie library I haven’t had time to explore yet.
I didn’t want to read e-books all the time, but in the High Plains I had little choice because the library had so few books. I must say I was convinced by being able to get a book at 2am (insomnia has plagued me for decades) without leaving the house.
I think libraries ought to be community information centers, because I think the best way to get people to read is to make books attractive. If you are surrounded by books while you are online, you have a better chance of seeing a book that intrigues you than at a coffee shop. If a library is one-stop shopping, so to speak, it will get more use.
I’ve worked in a school library and went to a workshop on weeding books. If books don’t get checked out for 3-5 years, are damaged beyond use, or has outdated information, (I saw one book that said Navajos are the friendly indians) they need to go.
Wait, the Navajos AREN’T friendly? Is that why they never want to come to my pot luck dinners?
I was a department head at a large suburban public library for over 20 years. Librarians are experiencing an identity crisis: they are terrified of becoming irrelevant, and they desperately fear being viewed as fractious old fuddy-duddies dusting their Encyclopedia Britannicas. Libraries tend to get more funding for “out of the box” programming and services, but unfortunately few librarians actually come up with original ideas, so you see dozens of copycats of the latest fad: Maker Spaces, 3 D printers, ebooks, “Human” libraries; or circulating tools, dolls, artwork, musical instruments, laptops…pretty much anything except books. While there is certainly a need for such services, and for public tech centers, there is also a need for quiet spaces devoted to reading and literacy. “Quiet space” is actually an equity issue: kids who live in crowded urban environments don’t have study spaces at home; yet more and more libraries are eliminating their “quiet zones”.
I would love to see well funded tech centers adjacent to traditional libraries, but the tech services currently offered are generally 3rd rate; libraries simply don’t pay well enough to hire truly tech savvy people and maintain state of the art equipment. So you have all these computer classes on aging technology and with bad wifi, and you have a lot of resentful staff who are expected to maintain this stuff and teach classes on topics they dont understand well. You have clunky library ebook services that are not intuitive and are a pain in the neck to download; some of this is by design since publishers don’t really want the public to have free ebooks (why would they? Cuts into their profit margin) so they throw up all sorts of technological roadblocks, like ebooks that expire after they’ve been shared a certain number of times. Many publishers won’t even allow their books to be accessible through library ebook systems; that’s why until recently you couldn’t download Harry Potter from libraries. Not to mention the thousands and thousands of books that have never been digitized at all and are ONLY available as paper books. E-reading doesn’t promote the same level of distraction-free, deep engagement and empathy with a text that print does; ebooks do not engage small children as picture books do. Yes, teens red a lot online, but many actually prefer print books when they really want to get into a story; they need and enjoy that downtime from their devices. Much of the most exciting and innovative writing these days is in Young Adult books and most of it is being read on paper, not online.
Most libraries measure success almost uniquely based on circulation, so they have adopted a “retail” model of book collection: buy hundreds of copies of bestsellers, (no one should ever have to wait to get the latest!) and toss anything that hasn’t been checked out in the past few years. Of course best sellers are ephemeral, few people want to read the Danielle Steeles and Clive Cusslers from 5 or 10 years ago, yet you’ll see library shelves crammed with these former hits while searching in vain for many classics. Time and again I would point out to our collection manager that we were missing major works by Jean Toomer, Don DeLillio, Ishmael Reed, WEB Dubois, Iris Mudoch, bell hooks, Joan Didion, Amos Oz; that we had next to nothing on major artists, political theories, historical periods, or world cultures. The mission of a library used to be preserving the historical , literary and cultural record, and making it accessible to the general public, not simply providing what is popular at the moment. And yes you can get “all that other stuff” through inter-library loan, but you lose the thrill of spontaneous discovery. Having access to millions of books online is great if you know what you want, but does not replace the serendipity of browsing book shelves and well designed displays.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a Luddite or a literary snob and I have nothing against best-sellers or technology. But I believe libraries and the communities that fund them need to recognize what a unique and precious gift a well stocked library truly is; the ONLY public institution uniquely devoted to the power of the written word and to independent learning. And that doesn’t have to mean reading Proust, it can be popular fiction set in other countries and cultures, or self-help books in local languages, or community archives of local newspapers and associations and school yearbooks and city documents. There are libraries doing wonderful work with their immigrant communities; providing computer services, yes, but also realizing that new Americans need reading material in their own languages as well as accessible reading in English; that they need help navigating government forms and bureaucracy, and finding out about local social services.
Let’s stop being ashamed or embarrassed about “warehousing books” or “dead tree collections” shockingly anti-intellectual expressions I have heard from high ranking library officials. Books are wonderful. Books develop and nourish intellectual curiosity in ways that online learning do not. Books are tactile and beautiful and don’t require power sources or upgrades. They are always in airline mode.
So keep the best sellers, but maintain a robust collection of engaging books from every country, culture and century. Invest in public versions of the Apple store, with cutting edge equipment and dozens of well-trained helpful tech guides and teachers there to serve the public, not to sell them crap they don’t need. Keep funding librarians, those curious creatures devoted to book groups and book displays, storytelling, author events, creative writing clubs, and ferreting out jewels of information from byzantine government documents. Put a value on literacy, lifelong learning, and giving the public access to our cultural heritage.
Spoke w/ my daughter. She said their library has a considerable budget for buying dead trees, and her personal practice when culling is to replace 1 for 1. Most of her culls are of material that is either obsolete, or damaged (moldy) books. If faced with a damaged book they think essential (think Shakespeare) they may check to see if a good quality edition is available within their network before deciding to replace it.
And technology has made that way easier as well. When the card catalog was the catalog, finding a book at another library was labor intensive. Now you can search a whole lot of libraries at once and have the book sent to your library - and the cost of sending the book is usually far less than the cost of a library edition of the book.
It makes browsing in a library far less fun, but it allows the library to spend its resources where they are more used - children’s collections, videos, internet connectivity and community space.
Nor do ours.
My local library is the “kingpin” library of a five-county library system (about 700,000 population)…as others have noted about their local setups, you can get any book from any library in the system, which is great. I haven’t noticed any particular dropoff in the number of books coming into the main library; the “new bookshelves” are quite well stocked and older books are pulled and added to the regular stacks pretty regularly, so these shelves remain “new.”
I’m more of a dead-tree book person than an ebook person, but I think it’s great that libraries do both. There are two people in my life who read constantly (or so it seems)–my wife and my adult son. Both make extensive use of libraries. Son is definitely a paper book guy. Wife only reads ebooks. It’s great that library systems can accommodate both. I’ll only add that my wife has medical issues making reading regular books difficult–she can’t always hold the book for long, and her eyes allow reading for a lot longer when she can control the font size. It would be a shame, and a loss, for her, if the ebooks were not available or were deemphasized.
I realize few of you are waxing nostalgic for the good ol’ days of the Card Catalog; I’ll just say that I don’t miss those days at all, and throw in a quote from a friend of mine who was assistant director in a college library: “Card catalogs? Worst invention ever. The students see the cards as free note-taking equipment…so you never know what’s been torn out.” Give me an electronic lookup any old day.
I remember helping my cousin (a real, capital L “Librarian”) move her inventory from card catalogues to electronic systems back in the late 1980’s. As a computer geek, it appealed to me and was the greatest thing ever. The text interface to the database made looking things up easy, and it was a perfect replacement for paper card catalogues.
These days, though, the damned mouse is on the wrong side of the keyboard, and because the cable is screwed to the console, I can’t move it to the proper left-hand side of the keyboard. And why do I need a mouse? Why do I get non-book results? Why is all of this other irrelevant garbage on my screen? Why is there only a single search field? I want to search for books about Asimov, and by Asimov, but yet I get results mixed. Why does Boolean search no longer work?
The dumbed down, fancy-pants point and click systems make me yearn for the days of card catalogues again (or for Apple to design a sane system, but not the iTunes developers, maybe the FCP developers).
So funny to see the differences of opinion. I don’t have any issues with any of the things you mention, including mouse placement. I’m no expert, but my library system allows advanced searches, so searching for subject AND keyword AND author is quite possible–wonder why yours doesn’t allow that?
Anyway, under no circumstances whatever would I want to go back to the days of card catalogs!
Ah well. Each to his own, said the old lady as she kissed the cow…
Some libraries apparently cull their old books less often, even when some inconsiderate jerk has extensively written in them…