Oh, I read that as complete sarcasm, Brad Collins. You are of course correct in your assessment of Carnegie; however, he took a significant portion of his capitalistic gains and put them to work building libraries to better educate the ‘poor masses’ that were less well-off than he and his ilk. I understood that to be the AL’s point – to contrast a capitalist from another century who put money into things that would benefit the community with the Tea Partiers who want no part of doing that.

“In some cases, ambiguity or a lack of information meant that degrees earned and colleges attended, if any, could not be determined. The state where this is most evident is New Hampshire. Because of its unusually large, part-time legislature, the educational attainments of an inordinate number of lawmakers are unknown.”

So, it is not necessarily near the bottom in terms of educational attainment.

But this story really, REALLY annoys me. I live in New Hampshire, in a small rural town, with a tiny, quaint little library. The library can’t afford to buy very much, and so it spends most of its collection development dollars on the items which are most popular (fiction, DVDs.) My town library and the many similar libraries in NH rely on ILL to provide access to all of the things the library can’t afford, or can’t justify buying because they’ll be used infrequently. The libraries rely on it for a lot of non-fiction and less-popular titles… you know, the stuff public libraries really should provide access to if they’re to meet their traditional role of providing education to the public.

It is wonderful to have access to a broader system of library materials. And, it’s not just people in “rural backwaters” who need this system. I live just outside of the state capitol, Concord, but if I or anyone from my town wants access to the Concord Public Library, we need to pay $100 a year. That’s not a huge amount of money to me, but it would be a real hardship for many people in the area. And, perhaps surprisingly, many poor people in the area do not have cars. They live in the so-called “urban core” of small towns – the walkable “downtown” (even if it’s just an area of a few blocks) rather than out in the more rural locations of town. For these people, or those for whom gas prices are a real problem, driving even 20 minutes to the library is a hardship or impossibility. Nevermind the fact that we’d then be paying for a service which is supposed to be free. (I’m not suggesting we should get free access to another town’s library, but rather that we need the ILL service.)

This service greatly enhances library service in most areas of NH. From what I heard at my local library, the service may be scaled back so that deliveries come every 6 weeks. Every 6 weeks!!! The van service is something which enables already stripped-down public libraries to do more with less, and now this guy wants to cripple the system further.

He fails to do his job which is to look beyond the confines of his narrow mind *ahem* experience into the larger picture. And that is that most of this state waits weeks for their ILLs because of once-per-week van delivery.

In my opinion, he is cutting one of the most beloved, efficient, and important services the state library provides. I wish they did everything as well as they do the vans!

Hopefully he isn’t one of the people who believes everything is online (or at least, on Google).