About

Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

Monthly Archives

Join Og's Mailing List

OgBlog.net

HAPPY 2007—A NEW YEAR, A NEW SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE!

Your public library could soon become the equivalent of any old franchised bookstore, except it will be tax-supported!

Maybe this doesn’t bother you…...but if libraries are simply a place where you can borrow Oprah’s latest recommendation, and get your DVD movies for free, rather than pay for them at Blockbuster, where will a student “accidentally” find Hemingway, or get hooked by Poe?

As far as I can see, if essentially the public library is moving toward a model in which they’ll just doing what the market does, only with a subsidy from the taxpayers, then they ought to be cut loose to make it (or not) on their own.

Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system’s return on its investment by each foot of space on the library shelves—and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz.

So books that people actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading are gone—even if they are classics….librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes….

“I think the days of libraries saying, ‘We must have that, because it’s good for people,’ are beyond us,” said Leslie Burger, president of the American Library Association and director of Princeton Public Library. “There is a sense in many public libraries that popular materials are what most of our communities desire. Everybody’s got a favorite book they’re trying to promote.”

There are no national standards on weeding public library collections.

As Fairfax bets its future on a retail model, some librarians say that the public library may be straying too far from its traditional role as an archive of literature and history.

Arlington County’s library director, Diane Kresh, said she’s “paying a lot of attention to what our customers want.” But if they aren’t checking out Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” she’s not only keeping it, she’s promoting it through a new program that gives forgotten classics prominent display.

“Part of my philosophy is that you collect for the ages,” Kresh said. “The library has a responsibility to provide a core collection for the cultural education of its community.” She comes to this view from a career at the Library of Congress, where she was chief of public service collections for 30 years.

READ THE WHOLE (DEPRESSING) THING

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/02 at 12:02 PM

Comments and reactions