It happened again in high school. :P

You are obviously posting just to provoke since your retorts are so clearly wrong, but just in case you’re serious:

-librarianship, teaching and nursing are unquestionably fields dominated by women on this planet, that is earth by the way, and have always been undervalued, as you so astutely opine in your well thought out post.

-and do you really believe that the most low paid and less educated bodies you propose to put in libraries to serve the public will provide the best service? The more the cheaper the merrier? How about we don’t pay folks at all, get a whole bunch of volunteers (who of course don’t have to support families or pay rent or anything like that) and expect them to know the answers to the most challenging reference questions? But I guess in your world people don’t ask difficult questions that require intelligence and education to answer. Oh my, those arrogant educated folks just have to go and stop sucking at the public teat.

Sad.

There was a library system that was turned over to private management, with several conditions like the number of magazine subscriptions to keep. And so the profit-driven private-sector firm (and therefore by definition, depending on who you ask, is invariably more efficient than any government institution) canceled the expensive (and most useful) subscriptions and replaced them with free advertising-driven subscriptions, regardless of probable use to patrons.

Maybe a different contract, or an independent budget for acquisitions, or something could have corrected that. But it’s a cautionary tale. Certainly management shouldn’t have to make the choice of the public good or personal enrichment.

Even if the people making major decisions in a library don’t have an MLS or MLIS, they still need to be educated, intelligent people. They need to be people who have somehow acquired expertise in organization systems, collection and retrieval, information behavior, design and evaluation, and preferably, a variety of leadership and technology skills. These skills are not needed by people who checkout your books, but they are needed by people who direct and control a large library.

I’m not a big fan of credentials myself, because I believe that people should have the opportunity to learn things on their own and demonstrate their competence in an authentic setting, but there is value in knowledge and skill and innate intelligence.

Thanks for your column, I look forward to reading your next posting.

The quote is DEAD ON CORRECT, imo. We keep stats we keep to ensure that we have jobs. Almost everything is done at some level to show how important and needed we are as opposed to providing the best service to the public.

Now, onto the other argument. Are libraries a social service for the poor? Is that what our goal is? Is that what we do? Is it to provide entertainment and (some) education for the poor at the expense of the rest? When did this become a pillar of library philosophy? When did people get the right to the internet? When did people get the right to watch Cars and Saw for free?

I know it’s not “free”- but it’s much closer to free for those that use it than it is to costing something. I’ve recently figured out (as I’ve posted on my blog) that a small minority of the population drives the library’s existence. This is paid for from the time and income of those who never use us at all. Is that fair? Is that right? What justification is there for libraries to be publicly funded in light of this?

I just think if we’re truly a public service- some type of entitlement- the arguement should be made and we should be staffed, funded, and directed accordingly.

1. Our society has lost interest in having professional people working for them. They do not want to pay what it takes to have good teachers, good nurses, good librarians, good state workers. They believe they are not getting their monies worth.
2. The majority of these jobs listed above are held by women. Coincidence?
3. When you do not protect workers rights, you allow management of ANY organization – public or private – to make hiring decisions based on financial reasons alone.
4. Will the public recognize what they have lost when they have non-professionals in these fields? No – instead the libraries will simply have fewer patrons. This will convince the local governments that they were right to cut funding. Additional jobs and funding will be cut or libraries will be eliminated.
5. I am a librarian and I work my butt off! Not only that, but I spend my own money for story time craft supplies and missing series books the library cannot afford to purchase.
6. The people who will be hurt by not having professional librarians will be the poor, the unemployed, the under-educated – the societal “throw-aways”. There are many people in government today who do not believe these people are valuable enough in our society to give them what they need to be fully functioning citizens.
7. The jobs being attacked today are those female-dominated fields that provide the nurturing and caring our world needs. They help those who cannot help themselves. They provide to society what people need to feel alive. Cuts to teachers, nurses, librarians, etc. will reduce what makes it a joy to go to school, an intellectual pleasure to use the library, and the relief that can be provided by when someone is ill – knowing the person assisting you is a well-trained professional who is passionate about what they do and is dedicating themselves, not to their paycheck, but to their profession.

IS THIS THE SOCIETY YOU WANT FOR YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN??