Somehow I missed The Slow Death of the American Author last week, a touching attack by Scott Turow on everything that doesn’t turn the reading experience into a cash making enterprise for authors. The problems are legion, we’re told. Pirates downloading illegal ebooks, presumably while saying “Arghhh!”; search engines that deliberately point searchers to the illegal content they want, because that couldn’t be done by machine or anything; publishers not paying authors the same royalties on ebooks as they do on hardbacks; libraries lending ebooks without even forcing people to come into the library to download them; and scholars who want to be able to use writing for educational purposes without having to pay each time. Darn them all! It’s a sad list that compares libraries with greedy publishers or downloaders of illegal ebooks. The problem? Devaluing their copyrights, or something like that. Authors practice one of the few professions directly protected in the ...
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It’s National Library Week, which I’m naturally very excited about. Or at least I would be if the sort of library I work in was actually acknowledged in any way during the celebrations. Actually, I still probably wouldn’t be, but it’s the principle of the thing. Here’s a brief history from the NLW fact sheet: First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April. It is a time to celebrate the contributions of our nation's libraries and librarians and to promote library use and support. All types of libraries - school, public, academic and special - participate. If any academic or special libraries participate, the appropriate question is, good god why? They’re as invisible in the made up celebration as they are in ALA activities, American Libraries magazine, and anything else the ALA plasters its logo on. The sample press release even drops the ...
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There’s a new list making the library social media rounds about libraries and social media. You can always count on a list like that getting a lot of links from librarians. I’m not going to link to it because the website seems to exist only to get people to link to it, and I hate stuff like that. If you have the pulse of the library world as I and my kind readers do, you'll have seen it. If not, I'm sure you can find it. You're a librarian. Not that it's worth finding. The website claims its mission is: “List. Inform. Educate.” Because apparently there’s something informational and educational about arbitrary lists of library related things. The site, which I won’t name, claims on the about page that it “is a new, ultra hip Library Science Social Community for Librarians of all walks of life. Our site is run by data and editorial geeks with a handful of librarian’s as associates. Our aim is to showcase creative editorial around the field of Librarianship. Where did we ...
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There’s one story about librarians that you don’t see very often: the complaint that they’re being paid too much. Fortunately, we have Hawaii to thank for finally bringing us one of those stories. University of Hawaii administrators are asking the Board of Regents to approve a salary of $195,000 for the UH Manoa's next head librarian, a pay level that's being criticized as "out of line" and "appalling" by some librarians, their union and a state lawmaker who's been critical of UH spending choices. Naturally, the union is upset. Several librarians have told the associate director of the union that, "We're being denied access to our financial well being and basic resources but they offer this kind of salary to our administrator?" Apparently, “librarians are angered at the proposed high pay for the new librarian, since UH administrators have told rank-and-file librarians there's no money for librarians' merit raises or to buy new materials and supplies.” I think the ...
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A kind reader sent in this somewhat ironic article about that’s supposedly about “mission creep” in public libraries and all the undesirables the author is forced to be around while working in them. There are homeless people, rowdy people, and thieves. Not all these occur at the same library, since there seems to be some compression of anecdotes and reportage about various libraries, but the impression left is that if you wander into the average public library it “could be mistaken for a halfway house, homeless shelter, or federal penetentiary [sic].” I guess I don’t go to the right public libraries. The author concludes: Mission creep invites creeps. Library, which traces its etymology to the Latin word for book, has come to mean free DVDs, CDs, video games, and Internet. To the ne’er-do-wells roaming the stacks, library means a place to cop a free feel and grab a free laptop. When librarians go slumming for patrons, the slum’s problems become the ...
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This is the saddest library story I’ve ever read. The headline is bland: "For young readers, a chance to work off library debt." We could also call it Indentured servitude @ your library. Or just the kind of thing poor kids have to do to get along in the world. The story is all about “creative” ways that libraries have to help poor children work off piddling amounts of fines and “make them responsible people.” We open with a scene of many children reading in a branch of the Queens library. The room was filled with readers, as would be expected. But in Mark’s case, his motivation was not simply the joy of reading – it was a matter of dollars and cents. By reading, Mark was reducing the fines he had accrued for failing to return several books that he had borrowed on time. It doesn’t say how much the fines are, but they’re probably not that much. The limit before you can’t check out books is $15. That’s considerably less than a lot of people pay for a meal ...
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