ozarque's Journal

The role of public libraries; saving the books...
The next requested topic comes from

rabidsamfan ....

"I'd be interested in discussing the role of public libraries, actually. Did anyone bring this article ['Checked Out: A Washington-area library tosses out the classics,' by John J. Miller, at http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110009472 ] to your attention? I'm a children's librarian, and a few years back my boss insisted on weeding every book in the collection that hadn't circulated in the past three years -- and this even though we were in a neighborhood where a lot of the children couldn't borrow books and used them in house. So I've got opinions about the library as 'university of the poor...' as well as 'entertainment center'. But it would be nice to see what response people think they should be able to find at the library. Old books as well as new? A professional librarian or a library employee without that kind of degree? ... Computers? Databases? DVDs? Videos? CDs? When space becomes an issue, where do the compromises come in?"

This issue (and the article) have gotten a lot of attention on the Net -- mostly shock and righteous indignation. The most common remedy suggested seems to be this one: Public library users should take upon themselves the responsibility of checking out the Indispensable Books once a year, for all age levels, so that none of those books will be removed from the shelves. (Presumably groups of library users would develop a system for dividing up this responsibility among them, something like the "telephone tree" system.) I understand the rationale behind that idea, but it brings with it a host of unanswered questions. Including, for starters, at least these four....

1. Who gets to decide which books are on the Indispensable Books list? [This is, it seems to me, the biggest question of all. I believe that many thousands of books would be taken off the shelves while the wrangle over answering this question was being endlessly debated.]

2. How is access to the final IB list provided?

3. What happens when, as fewer and fewer books qualify for removal from the shelves, the libraries start reducing the circulation frequency criterion to "checked out every six months" and then "checked out every four months" and so on?

4. A lot of the books likely to end up on the IB list are available free online, at sites like Project Gutenberg. Since not everyone can afford to be online, and the number of computers a library can make available to its users is going to be small, and it takes a very long time to read a book on a computer screen, is that fact even relevant? Does it make any difference? [This one brings a number of related questions; for example, the same question would come up for all the free books that are available to be read on PDAs.]

Over to you....