PS: 117,000 books!
Aside from having thousands of copies of Harry Potter and no exhibitionists in the stacks, this is getting to be a decent sized community library!
posted by Tim at 12:53 AM
posted by Tim at 12:53 AM
20 Comments:
Congrats! Though I don't quite get the exhibitionists comment.
Is it just me or aren't the stacks of public libraries the most common place for exhibitionists to, um, exhibit? Maybe it's just a Boston thing.
(grin) Must be. I live in a small Nebraska town. You don't... well, see things like that around here, for want of better words.
I'm still having way too much fun, and I'm still on the first house.
Oh, no, I know what you mean. Oddly enough, the ones I've encountered in Seattle tend to be middle-aged and diaper-clad, so I couldn't figure out why you would *want* them in the stacks. Are Boston exhibitionists more fun?
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Hm. I was puzzling at the exhibitionist thing, too. Small town, here, though...
Decent-sized? My whole local library system only has 188,000 or so...
Heck, I'm barely getting started entering mine still. That's not counting the 30 or so boxes that are still waiting on shelf space.
I think I want zette's house(s). I'd love to have that kind of space for books.
Shawna -- it's not enough. And I get the feeling even if we bought the third house in a row it would not be enough.
The collection really isn't that large, but I think books expand when they see empty shelves because suddenly every shelf in both houses is full, and I still have about 30 boxes of my own still to go.
Just to be clear, I don't regard exhibitionists in libraries as a good thing. But then I don't regard 1,000 copies of Harry Potter from a library as a good thing either. Not that Harry Potter isn't good, but libraries shouldn't concentrate on making highly-accessible things even more accessible.
Take my public library, in Portland, ME. Founded after the Civil War the Library seems to have completely chucked anything more than ten years old and buys mostly ephemeral easily-found stuff. My favorite is lavish selection of this year's travel guides, where you can get a crisp 2005 Fodors travel guide to Italy so you don't need to shell out $30 on top of $3,000. But, in a city with an exploding Somali population I can't find a single book in Somali and only a few aged phrase books for people who want to learn the language. Don't get me started.
If Zette's house isn't big enough, I think I just want to live in Powell's books. Yes, they do seem to multiply when you leave them alone, don't they? Heck, I have 14 boxes of just crochet pattern books/booklets etc. And then if I find a ton of kids books I want and we don't have at a nickel each... well, I'm going to come home with a bunch. Just my kids have more books then any other 10 kids we know. Must be doing something right, though. Two that love to read, one learning, and one anxious to be big enough.
And you're right on the accessible thing. I love the route our local system has gone. Several are interconnected, and can quickly and easily share books even though they're not really branches of the same library. But even better, there are two much larger systems nearby... chances are, I can get my hands on whatever I want to read, even if I have to wait a couple weeks... and my library can hang onto it's older books.
As for the exhibitionists, I think our library's law enforcement neighbors probably makes them wary... they prefer the 24-hour restaurant at the other end of town.
Now it's after midnight and I'm STILL here. Not sure where the time went, but I have to go to bed. Now.
I think too many libararies lost their focus somewhere along the line and thought they had to be in competition with book stores. It's unfortunate. I have a much larger section of history than the local library.
Ours caters more to children than to adults (despite my husband's time on the library committee, trying to change that attitude), and that gets annoying too. It's as though they just don't believe adults read -- or even that they should.
Oh, yeah, why I was over here in the first place. Was going to tell you, I like the books added in the last hour thing. Makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something. :)
I sympathize with librarything's comment on the state and policy of public libraries. The same mood seems to grip Israeli public librarians; anything old and rarely-circulated gets chucked out to the "please adopt me" box outside the library, and the unwanted items in that box are regularly moved out to complete oblivion in a dumpster.
The only hope I see for old texts is mass digitization. I wish governments or large NGOs would realize that and undertake such projects.
When I was in grade 10 my high school library was throwing out trestle tables full of books. I saw one there called "Catch-22", and recognising the title as belonging to a fairly well-known book (which at that time I hadn't read) I asked the librarian why they were being thrown away. She told me that they just didn't have room for anything which wasn't being borrowed frequently enough.
I still think, as I did then, that a better approach may have been to actually promote well-known but under-read books, rather than to aim to have shelves full of books with an acceptable turnover rate.
Anyway, I took that book home with me and read it, and I think my life was at least subtly altered for the better as a consequence. It's just a pity about the kids at that school after me who probably never had the chance.
You do have at leasst two copies of a book by Harry Potter here, you realise; rather a good one, in fact, about the Anglican church and the death penalty.
Tall people hang around the library stacks. Because the good books are always on the top..... :*)
Part of the problem with public library collections, I fear, has to do with the economy and with illiteracy rates. Libraries make it possible for people who can't afford to buy books to read them anyways -- I don't hear that discussed very often**, but I think it's a big factor, especially for families with young children.
And in regards to illiteracy or low literacy, there's a huge drive to make reading as appealing as possible, both to children and to parents who might read to their children. And one easy way of doing that is providing ample copies of the titles that get the most buzz.
I don't know how big a factor the ideas of taste and good/okay/mediocre books are in people who don't self-identify themselves as voracious readers. It would be interesting to know.
**And with good reason, as I think library usage would change dramatically if library-usage was seen as charity, rather than as a universal public privilege.
Autocomplete feature seems to be messed up, when I type in "fict", it shows the other tags all jumbled together like "fictionwar", "fictionscifi", etc. Relatedly, it's only showing tags at the begining (scifi is never my first tag so "sci" doesn't autocomplete). Same behavior in IE and Firefox. Hope that all makes sense.
PS You rock.
I'm curious to know how many people complaining here about the weeding policies of libraries have ever worked in one. As a librarian I know what it's like to work with sorely limited space and sorely limited budgets, and how you have to serve your patrons - most of whom are young children and the elderly. Adults aged 20-55 are in the minority, particularly if they don't have children, and many of those only come in for the videos and dvds. (At my small suburban library, anyway.)
Regarding weeding (as we call discarding books): If I'm running out of shelf space and need to acquire new books I'm going to have to take away some of the older ones. If they haven't left the shelf in years they become candidates for weeding. Of course, I keep in mind what items are "classics" or rare and I keep some of them because we should have them on the shelves if someone comes looking.
The old newspapers someone saw tossed might be "irreplaceable" but more than likely if they were tossing them they are digitzed or on microfilm or fiche - not the same as having the original but more stable and takes up far less space. While I appreciate the historical value of the original newspapers, libraries must be run like businesses - we only have so much money and so much space and have to budget both as best we can.
Cut us some slack, please. And if your local library doesn't have items in the collection that you think are important, have a polite conversation with the librarians there. (And please don't mistake the clerks for librarians while you do it, ok?)
Thanks for listening. We librarians really do want to do our best for the communities we serve. We do a heck of a lot with very little.
Nancy, many thanks in explaining the criteria used when libraries "weed" their books. Certainly I had only the haziest sense of how these decisions are made.
And by the way: you and everyone in your profession ROCK! I have a life-long and heartfelt gratitude to all librarians for the essential, if largely unsung, work they do for the rest of us. They are truly the custodians of learning... and given how many of them have to struggle with ever-decreasing budgets these days, what they accomplish is near-miraculous!
Could be cool if you tell us how big libraries are around the world.
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