"The days of libraries saying, 'We must have that, because it's good for people,' are beyond us."

My pinko heart wanted me to be a public librarian so badly, but alas, it was not to be.

You actually learn in library school that if you become a young adult or children's librarian, you may have to deal with "babysitting issues."

This is why I could never teach K-12.

Do you sell globes of Mars?

Which is why I will never work in a public library. It's not that I hate kids...I just hate the kind of kids that end up left unsupervised in a library.

I think a public library can and should have a collection development policy that's a mix of pandering and educating. I don't think it's a science.

Much of this comes down to how cities make budgeting decisions. They want to see some concrete numbers, so library administrators tend to give them circulation statistics (at least where the collection is the issue).

I also see collection standardization increasing as a byproduct of certain integrated acquisitions/cataloging systems. (To some extent this depends on how much money an institution spends on the system they use. More money buys you more flexibility.)

It seems really unfortunate that at a time of increasing media concentration, public libraries would go for a more corporate model of collection development. The internet is obviously a huge counter-balancing force to that trend, and public libraries provide access to it--but then I think their collections may be making themselves obsolete by narrowing down precisely at a time when the internet is exposing larger and larger chunks of the world. I'm just concerned that when patrons look for books or CDs or DVDs in the library's physical collection, they aren't going to find the sort of collection that would reflect the richly global view of the world that the internet provides.

Fuck 'em. Let them go to grad. school if they want that.

(I quit the job and went full-time)

Library school = I have never been so drunk and stoned in my life

I made my first reliable w33d connection in library school.

Amen to that. We have "The Annex" for our storage purposes, but it's filling up. It's this cool old telephone company building not too far from campus. We have a fairly efficient Annex Request system running, too.

I fucking love our university one, though. The books it sells are truly dire, but that's because it keeps *everything*. The philosophy stacks are both great and obscure as all hell.

Well, the thing is that a lot of big bookshops do sell stuff like this. In the local Waterstone's there is a floor for travel books and they have an extensive selection of globes, including political, geographical and space ones. So it doesn't strike me as incredibly odd to ask this at something like Barnes & Noble. If it was asked in a library, however...

You stopped the story too soon. What did you say to the customer then?

650 0 Folk poetry, Spanish ǂz Spain ǂz Cartagena ǂx History and criticism.
650 0 Folk poetry, Spanish ǂz Spain ǂz Cartagena ǂx Criticism, Textual.
650 0 Miners ǂv Poetry.

Yeah, these people are my opposites then. I have no idea wtf I'm doing in clothing stores.

I like that you can search by SuDoc number. I honestly don't know how many people would do a search with that, but it's a nice feature to have.

Here's ours (I don't love it)

Good ol' triple III. Sometimes it goes in fits and starts but ever since the major upgrade for reserves a few years back I've not had a major problem with it.

OTM.

Nautical books! They're always blue. I was poking around in the home of a retired Yacht Club president once (courtesy of his caretaker), and his bookcase was a symphony of blue.

Years ago I worked as a housecleaner for a woman who asked me to remove all the "thin books" from her bookshelves.

I feel your pain. Anytime I have an urge to punch a computer screen, it's usually due to SIRSI (or something dumb like the dreamgirls thread).

Okay, this is my hometown library system. Actually, it is not underfunded. Fairfax Co. is one of the richest areas in the country. And Fairfax Co. has a large, well-regarded suburban system. Right now, the system has an excellent collection. There are about 20 branches, so if you ever want something that is not at your local branch, you can get it pretty quickly. I work at the library system in the next city over, and between the two systems, I rarely want for books.

I had a class with the director of this library and he is very smart and proactive and has been director for about 20 years. He is influenced by business practices, such as increasing interoperability and ease of use and seamlessness. He is influenced by the movement from bank tellers to ATMs and tried to incorporate modern practices into the library system. I think that he wants to intorduce more public meeting spaces into the libraries, which will take the place of some book storage. He thinks that this is what the public wants. Fairfax County also does very proactive environmental scans to determine what their community base is and how to serve it.

I think (I hope) that this article may have been misreported. I can't really see the wisdom in getting rid of these classics. Probably better to weed the multiple copies of the really popular books that people aren't reading two years later after the buzz has died down. I think that they will at least keep copies of the classics at certain branch libraries, if not all. Hopefully Fairfax Co. will publish a response to this article, which left a lot of things unclear.

I'm not really into ILL so much. Part of the pleasure of the library comes from browsing and finding the unexpected. I think that ILL should be a last resort, for the rare item. The library that I work at, a small city library with four branches, has a excellent collection. But sometimes I feel like I am the only person who reads certain books. I'm not sure if this is problem of marketinng, or if their is just not such a great audience of literary fiction and academic-ic nonfiction. I'm really greatful that the selectors at my library have such great taste, but I think we could go more in the other direction, and offer more popular materials. Though I hate bestsellers and their like with a passion.

I don't have to babysit at all in my children's library. We are really lucky in that we are not immediately next to a school. Another branch is next to a junior high school and apparently the students use the library after school to hang out, but not to use the resources or anything.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing this story developing. My library is rolling out the e-audio-books right now with the Overdrive system. But I'm annoyed because Mac won't play nice with libraries and it only works on PCs.

-- TOMB07

lmao, this thinking worked SOOOO well with microfilm

Obviously I check the local system (13 libraries including three university libraries) first when I want something, but if they don't have it, ILL isn't a first or last resort, it's the ONLY resort.

So do I! I feel your pain.