Since it's Halloween, I have a scary story for you.
Adolf Hitler once said: When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."
This is great. I’ve never gotten to start a blog post with a Hitler quote, and nothing says fun or over-the-top like a good Hitler quote.
Until now, I didn’t have an appropriately frightening subject, but now I do. No, it's not the school librarian who allegedly took shushing to a whole new level by choking a student. That’s right, an elementary school library is getting rid of its Dewey Classification system.
Instead of replacing it with the LC system to prepare the little kiddies for college, they’ve replaced it with a bookstore organization model, to prepare the little kiddies to shop in bookstores that probably ...
Read More >>
First They Came for the Children
Unequal Access in the Yellowhammer State
The last time I wrote about a library in Alabama, I was informed by numerous irate readers that Alabama is a wonderful state full of delightful people and that it “has made great changes since the ‘stand in the schoolhouse door.’”
Now that a federal judge has stopped part of the recent immigration law, teachers for the time being won’t have to stand in the schoolhouse door asking for birth certificates. So I guess there really have been lots of changes.
Since Alabama is such a paradise of tolerance and good will, I was very surprised to read this article: Library card requires proof of citizenship at North Shelby.
It discusses the discrepancy between the North Shelby Library’s dedication to serving all the people who live or work in North Shelby and the reality now that illegal immigrants - who apparently pick most of the crops in Alabama - are enemy number one.
Serving all the residents and workers in an area is pretty typical for public libraries, and ...
Read More >>
Librarian Unrest in the Beehive State
If you haven’t been following the soap opera that the Salt Lake City Library has become, you should, because it’s a lot of fun, at least if you don’t have to work there.
There were a flurry of news stories last week: one about how the administration was trying to keep staff from using all-staff email to criticize or question the library administration, another about how a former employee who quit because he couldn’t stand the director alleging he was offered a bribe to keep silent about library goings on, and yet another about how the Friends of the Library group that has raised over a million dollars in the past decade may quit raising money for the library because they have no faith in the director either. Plus, you can get an excellent summation right here at the library paper of record.
Obviously something wacky is going on, but from the outside it’s hard to figure out just what, though if the staff are so disgruntled that they gave a vote of no confidence ...
Read More >>
Amazon Suckers Libraries
A few weeks ago, when Amazon announced a desire to start a “Netflix for books,” I opined that public libraries were doomed. So far, they’ve still been struggling along, but I have a feeling that in the end Amazon is going to get them one way or another.
Eventually, there might be no escape from Amazon, so libraries had better start getting used to it. You might have seen this story about Amazon signing up authors to publish directly through them instead of publishers.
If Amazon can get enough name-brand authors to abandon their traditional publishers, then the future of publishing - at least the sort of popular publishing public libraries buy - will be primarily in Amazon’s greedy but skillful hands.
I could understand the temptation to publish with Amazon. They gave Penny Marshall $800,000 to publish her memoirs. I think I should mention to Amazon that I’ll happily publish the Annoyed Librarian memoirs with them for a quarter of that.
After years of ...
Read More >>
Heroic Librarians Destroy Books
For some reason this story raised a bunch of hackles last week: 6 Reasons We're In Another 'Book-Burning' Period in History. Usually the stories at Cracked.com are at least funny.
It details various reasons libraries destroy books, such as that they have no room to store them or that it’s cheaper to destroy them than give them away. One commenter said it would be fine to destroy books, but just don’t burn them! Another mentioned pulling 1970s era encyclopedias from a fire. They were outdated and useless, but they shouldn’t be burnt!
In some ways, these kind of reactions should be good for libraries. People still like books.
More than just like them, people worship books. Books themselves are fetish objects with an inherent value in themselves. Burning a book is like burning a crucifix.
Historically, I expect this is a cultural holdover from the days when books were expensive and hard to come by. Prior to the eighteenth century, books were too expensive for ...
Read More >>
Library as Place with Real Space
Once in a while a debate or discussion will pop up in library circles about the concept of library as place rather than as information provider, but I don’t see it come up in public discussions of libraries very often.
It’s an important debate, but one that usually doesn’t have immediate repercussions. It’s usually one of those philosophical debates within the community of librarians, or else part of a panicked debate on what the heck libraries are supposed to do once everything really is available so cheaply online no one will come to libraries for information anymore.
However, in Shrewsbury, Mass. the debate is alive, and practical, and going on between non-librarians. This should be a good thing. It shows people care!
I didn’t read far enough to get all the details, but it seems Shrewsbury might be eligible for some sort of state grant for library renovations in 2014. Before that happens, the town council wants a vote on a “debt exclusion ...
Read More >>
Recent Comments