Comments on: The End of a School Librarian

By: 6hr5f

6hr5f — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:03:18 +0000

As for school librarians, they are mostly hacks who could not cut it as teachers, and were sent to library school because they could not be fired because of tenure laws.

By: Techserving You

Techserving You — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:44:16 +0000

Post Post Modern, you seem to be misunderstanding my point. I do NOT generally advocate the bookstore model and I agree that it simply wouldn’t work for a library where the goal is to find knowledge not find a shiny new object to buy. I have NOT been making such changes in my library and by the way, I am not a 20-something and I have had a series of excellent library and vendor jobs and have never had a difficult time finding a job, so you’re not going to be keeping me out of a job…. but anyway, my point was that most high school libraries are very small. People are not using them for serious research. When I was in high school, in an honors/AP curriculum, we used the reference section for some research, and otherwise used a local (million+ volume) college library. Reference works are designed for ease of searching and if you’re talking about a small library, browsing the shelf in the reference section for the topic you need is easy. The rest of the books in most high school libraries are not there for serious or even less-than-serious research. The bookstore model would actually work pretty well simply because of the size of most high school libraries and the types of use they get. And I agree that Dewey and LC are easy to learn. But, on such a small scale, they might not be needed. I think people are just crying out without even really thinking. Again, in high schools, most teaching is done from text books and by the classroom teachers. I got an excellent education but for the most part I used my high school library as a place to spend study hall or find a fiction book. I got 99th percentile SAT scores and was accepted to a college that accepts under 20% of applicants. It was the teachers than made my education, NOT the librarian. (By the way my high school didn’t have an MLIS librarian anyway.) Had my high school library been changed in the way that this school is proposing, I don’t think my education would have been any different.

By: whatever

whatever — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:47:29 +0000

Our local Barnes and Noble recently removed the comfy chairs and there’s never been any free coffee.

I suppose letting people sit in your bookstore all day turned out to be not such a good idea to make money.

By: Dances With Books

Dances With Books — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:40:35 +0000

And now we know why other nations in the world continue to do better than the U.S. when it comes to education. At a time when we need more educational resources, that school chooses to go the cheap, entertaining route. This is a disturbing trend, but it seems these days communities seem more bent on turning libraries into arcades/internet cafes. We may as well provide the viewing booths while we are at it. Maybe valet parking too?

By: whiteshirt

whiteshirt — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:52:43 +0000

Of course, the background was that Prop. 13. School library reference sets in our district stopped the year the propositon pased; the district was suffering white flight; one school was closed completely, as being too segregated, overcrowding teh others even more; it was in the end a majority-minority disctrict close to one of the major points of entry for illegal immigrants.

No joy there. There was never going to be money for that kind of school…

And ’92 was the beginning of that other great privatization of recent decades, the common wealth, government records and services, being digitized and accessible only by computer.

And computers, even more necessary now, are still expensive if you’re on the minumum wage.

By: whiteshirt

whiteshirt — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:21:57 +0000

when I worked at a 35,000-volume High School library in SoCal in the ’80s and early ’90s, the school district had already cut the number of librarians from 4 to 1. The year after I relocated, which was itself the year after the librarian retired and was not replaced (leaving the clerks in charge, all responsibility and no power), the clerks’ jobs were themselves cut from 40 hours/week, 12 months/year to 30 hours/week, 9 months/year, meaning that things like inventory could no longer be done; the 3rd football coach in a row had been promoted to Vice Principal and put in charge. None of them had been entirely sympathetic. The last man looked terrified and fled when he saw the actual books.

I heard over the grapevine that several years after my departure, books were not being reshelved and that the instruction manuals the librarian and I had updated had been thrown out.

Which all leads me to wonder what had happened at Franklin before the library there came its present pass.

At my school there were always attempted incursions and conversions; whatever anyone wanted was what teh library was supposed to become: a special ed center, a detention room (in effect). Only the librarian’s great skill as a bbureaucrat staved off the decay. We had, of course, no local budget, being saved several times by the Feds.

If you have no reliable staff it is impossible to run a library; a library is a highly organized space. If you have no reliable staff you cannot even train student assistants, and if those assistants are not being drilled with principles of order such as the alphabet and basic arithmetic, they cannot work in a library.

The hours question, to me was the most useful measure of what was happening to education at that moment. If the library is the gateway to democracy, then having your job – to run and educated students in the use of a library – cut to the point where it can no longer support you, is instructive.

It’s not often you get to actually watch democracy being relocated upward, out of the working class.

By: Ex-librarian

Ex-librarian — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:30:40 +0000

I too find it disturbing to say the least. As an ex-librarian (got fired for NOT turning my library into the “in demand” book store like atmosphere he wanted, his programs and suggestions sucked. He knew what he was doing because he had an MBA), I find that more and more, the public wants the “library” to be like their favorite bookstore. Give them coffee, free donuts and unlimited time on the computers and they will be happy. No one is there to learn or do research, especially not the young people. Most of the youth that do come in only want to get on the computer and play games or socialize. Librarians and the library itself has lost it’s value to the communities. Wonder where they will all go when the school libraries and public libraries are both closed? I don’t think that B&N or any other bookstore will care whether or not they learn anything as long as they buy something. I’m afraid that my grand children will not know what my career was for at all. Oh, and who says that the librarian at Franklin was female? Couldn’t they have been male?

By: librarijen

librarijen — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 05:11:38 +0000

Re: some earlier comments – I wouldn’t be so quick to blame this librarian for her library’s fate. I don’t know the particulars, but in my own case, I never had the resources – human, financial or technological – to make my library the well-oiled, user-friendly machine I wanted it to be.

In my experience, and I speak as one whose old library is being given the bookstore treatment, when the powers that be – whether they are school principals or in my case, senior executives in a Fortune 500 firm – decide that the library in its current iteration is useless and would serve its clientele better if it were more like a B&N – nothing you learned in any marketing class is going to help you. Hell, in my case, the executives weren’t even interested in hearing from the patrons themselves, and their goal was to make the library “customer focused”. Figure me that one.

It is a waste of time and energy to try to fight that kind of irrationality. Appealing to intelligence and reason is futile when you’re dealing with idiots. I tried, but got nothing but grief, so I left. Better to step aside, get out of there, and watch it fail from a distance. Only when their redesigned library-not-library falls flat on its face and hits them in the wallet or the test scores or whatever metrics they use to measure success, will they see the light. It’s the only language they understand.

By: Awesomeness

Awesomeness — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:47:04 +0000

5 Steps to Personal Awesomeness: Why You’re The Greatest and Everyone Needs to Know It.

By: Post Postmodern Librarian

Post Postmodern Librarian — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:11:01 +0000

Dr. Pepper I agree with you and I know somewhere in there I am at fault but I have not found a solution. Tossing the Pandora’s box of the Internet is not a solution indeed it might be part of the solution. There is just not a drive for the education. I have seen the teaching students Evensong are talking about, It scares me too. The whole system not just libraries are broken. I would gladly call myself information commons if it ment people were getting information and not on Social Networks. That brings me to the issue of social info or crowd sourcing. Deep down I feel this is the issue its just not being done right. Maybe we should teach crowd sourcing literacy instead of information literacy. or put into information literacy. I dont think we can get rid of it. Sorry just ramblings that have been in my head