Given the breakdown of belief in public goods we see erupting around the country, it seems possible the public libraries will face severe funding crises in the next decade or two, possibly so severe that they will become less public if they manage to survive. Would this necessarily be a bad thing? In some places, they have already become slightly less public. Several systems are outsourcing their operations to LSSI, which now runs about 65 public libraries in the country. While there’s always an uproar from librarians about LSSI, community reaction seems to be mixed. Regardless, the libraries run by LSSI are still publicly funded, if not publicly operated. Outsourcing is only a viable option if there’s still a belief that the service being outsourced is a public good. Cities outsource garbage collection, because garbage collection is a public good, or at least the lack of it is a VERY obvious public bad. But what of public libraries? Their disappearance would immediately ...
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Last week a couple of commenters wondered what I thought of this blog post about retooling public libraries as “techshops,” places with tools and equipment to make stuff. There’s a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is, I find the post bizarre. It’s not that I find the idea that libraries could house techshops, because I don’t. Given the diverse nature of what’s offered in public libraries, I see no reasonable objection to the suggestion that they house tools and equipment if they could afford them. The Library as Techshop could offer a community a greater and more lasting benefit than The Library as Blockbuster, especially given the fate of bricks and mortar Blockbuster stores. So the bizarreness isn’t so much the techshop suggestion as the rationale behind it. The author, a tech writer and editor who writes about DIY projects, doesn’t use public libraries. He opines, and I tend to agree, that a lot of people don’t use libraries the way they once ...
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There hasn't been a lot exciting going on in the library world the last week or so. Honestly, if the Statistical Abstract of the United States is the hot news, you know it’sb een a slow week. Of course we did have the announcement recently that the New York Times was going to put up a paywall for heavy users to access more than twenty full articles a month. The pricing scheme is ridiculously complicated, including charging separately for an iPad and iPhone app, but apparently desperate times call for confused measures. Given that there are several thousand other news sites around the world, I think I can survive without the Times at all. When they tried that Times Select thing a few years ago, I just stopped reading the Times completely. It turned out that monkey was pretty easy to get off my back. However, this disappointing news was balanced by the recent announcement that the ACRL journal College & Research Libraries is going open access. Woo hoo! Now all those poor ...
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Library listservs were a-buzzing last week with news of the possible 2012 demise of the Statistical Abstract of the United States. Even the ALA Councilors are fretting and wondering what action to take. Presumably, the Council will pass a resolution calling for the continuation of the Statistical Abstract, which will then assure its death. And after all, it could be much worse. Some fools have been predicting the end of the world in 2012, either because of an interpretation of a Mayan calendar they’ve never seen or because of a really bad John Cusack movie they have seen. It turns out the Mayan calendar didn’t predict the end of the world, just the end of Stat Abs. Among librarians, though, this is akin to the end of the world, because for them Stat Abs is better than flat abs, which is why librarians don’t tend to look like pop stars and film actors. Unlike some of the brouhaha that erupts in libraryland, I feel some of the pain here, if only for nostalgia’s sake. ...
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A few months ago, someone wrote an opinion article for LJ about “big tent” librarianship, arguing that “all librarians are intrinsically connected in their personal motivations for entering the profession” and “are connected by core beliefs across the different library types." It was written “to combat the illusion of separation that currently exists within the field.” I read it at the time, and thought, eh, okay, interesting idea. It’s not terribly new, and is pretty much what the ALA has preached for decades with its bills of rights and mission statements and other documents that supposedly cover all libraries. The ALA implies that librarians all have something in common, though the existence of the SLA, MLA, and AALL should tell us something. The same author, a real go-getter it seems, has also be active in the campaign against HarperCollins and the creation of the Ebook reader’s bill of rights. All well and good. The library needs more public intellectuals ...
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Last week someone commented that I hadn't written nice things about libraries in a while. Someone else sent me a passage from an LIS book in which the author quoted the AL  and claimed various blog posts showed contempt for libraries. (Oddly enough, the author failed to include it in his list of references or index. Very professional!) That attack is a typical example of the lack of a critical culture in librarianship. We have a childish culture of fake niceness, where if we have nothing positive to say we should just be quiet. There are  some librarians who think that acting bitchy implies that they are critical, but their criticism is always reserved for others: vendors, publishers, the government, the AL, and just about anything but libraries, because apparently libraries are perfect. That's why all the librarians in the country love their jobs so much. But enough ruminations on crazy librarians. I’ll save that for my memoirs. Instead, I'll play nice today. I want to ...
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