A great essay about the nature of a declining institution:
Should Libraries' Target Audience Be
Cheapskates With Mass-Market Tastes?
By JOHN J. MILLER
Wall Street Journal
January 3, 2007; Page D9
"For Whom the Bell Tolls" may be one of Ernest Hemingway's best-known books, but it isn't exactly flying off the shelves in northern Virginia these days. Precisely nobody has checked out a copy from the Fairfax County Public Library system in the past two years, according to a front-page story in yesterday's Washington Post.
And now the bell may toll for Hemingway. A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren't. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded -- permanently. "We're being very ruthless," boasts library director Sam Clay.
As it happens, the ruthlessness may not ultimately extend to Hemingway's classic. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" could win a special reprieve, and, in the future, copies might remain available at certain branches. Yet lots of other volumes may not fare as well. Books by Charlotte Brontë, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have recently been pulled.
Library officials explain, not unreasonably, that their shelf space is limited and that they want to satisfy the demands of the public. Every unpopular book that's removed from circulation, after all, creates room for a new page-turner by John Grisham, David Baldacci, or James Patterson -- the authors of the three most checked-out books in Fairfax County last month.
But this raises a fundamental question: What are libraries for? Are they cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been thought and said? Or are they more like actual stores, responding to whatever fickle taste or Mitch Albom tearjerker is all the rage at this very moment?
If the answer is the latter, then why must we have government-run libraries at all? There's a fine line between an institution that aims to edify the public and one that merely uses tax dollars to subsidize the recreational habits of bookworms.
Fairfax County may think that condemning a few dusty old tomes allows it to keep up with the times. But perhaps it's inadvertently highlighting the fact that libraries themselves are becoming outmoded.
There was a time when virtually every library was a cultural repository holding priceless volumes. Imagine how much richer our historical and literary record would be if a single library full of unique volumes -- the fabled Royal Library of Alexandria, in Egypt -- had survived to the present day.
As recently as a century ago, when Andrew Carnegie was opening thousands of libraries throughout the English-speaking world, books were considerably more expensive and harder to obtain than they are right now. Carnegie always credited his success in business to the fact that he could borrow books from private libraries while he was growing up. His philanthropy meant to provide similar opportunities to later generations.
Today, however, large bookstore chains such as Barnes & Noble and Borders bombard readers with an enormous range of inexpensive choices. An even greater selection is available online: Before it started selling mouthwash and power tools, Amazon.com used to advertise itself as "the world's biggest bookstore." It still probably deserves the label, even though there are now a wide variety of competing retailers. (Full disclosure: Years ago, I was a paid reviewer for Amazon.com.)
The reality is that readers have never enjoyed a bigger market for books. Shoppers can buy everything from hot-off-the-press titles in mint condition to out-of-print rarities from secondhand dealers. They can even download audiobooks to their MP3 players and listen to them while jogging or driving to work. Companies such as Google and Microsoft are promising to make enormous amounts of out-of-copyright material available to anyone with a computer and a browser.
The bottom line is that it has never been easier or cheaper to read a book, and the costs of reading probably will do nothing but drop further.
If public libraries attempt to compete in this environment, they will increasingly be seen for what Fairfax County apparently envisions them to be: welfare programs for middle-class readers who would rather borrow Nelson DeMille's newest potboiler than spend a few dollars for it at their local Wal-Mart.
Instead of embracing this doomed model, libraries might seek to differentiate themselves among the many options readers now have, using a good dictionary as the model. Such a dictionary doesn't merely describe the words of a language -- it provides proper spelling, pronunciation and usage. New words come in and old ones go out, but a reliable lexicon becomes a foundation of linguistic stability and coherence. Likewise, libraries should seek to shore up the culture against the eroding force of trends.
The particulars of this task will fall upon the shoulders of individual librarians, who should welcome the opportunity to discriminate between the good and the bad, the timeless and the ephemeral, as librarians traditionally have done. They ought to regard themselves as not just experts in the arcane ways of the Dewey Decimal System, but as teachers, advisers and guardians of an intellectual inheritance.
The alternative is for them to morph into clerks who fill their shelves with whatever their "customers" want, much as stock boys at grocery stores do. Both libraries and the public, however, would be ill-served by such a Faustian bargain.
That's a reference, by the way, to one of literature's great antiheroes. Good luck finding Christopher Marlowe's play about him in a Fairfax County library: "Doctor Faustus" has survived for more than four centuries, but it apparently hasn't been checked out in the past 24 months.
Mr. Miller writes for National Review and is the author of "A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America" (Encounter Books).
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116778551807865463.html
Very interesting article, mate. My heart says libraries are the last
depository of the government's duty to procure the cultural
improvement of the nation. Thus, they shall remain as a symbol of
that commitment with intellectual growth and as keepers of the
most beautiful creations the human soul has produced.
Yet, the laws of the market are heavy.
Interesting, but there are two classic misconceptions in that article: the first is that librarians don't already weed titles (it happens every year, and you don't need expensive software to do it - existing in-house systems are already capable, and failing that there are date-stamp sheets), and the second is the tired old saw that librarians don't do anything other than classify and issue books. Most libraries fall under the Cultural Services remit, and for that you need municipal or county council coordination - as for the class issue, it simply depends on which libraries you're talking about. I can tell you right now that the prison library sector operates at the polar opposite of that socio-economic base.
There are many kinds of libraries and they fill many different needs. One need that I doubt will ever be filled by any booksellers, digital or otherwise, is the need for a local depository making local historical materials available. There is also a physical, social, intellectual, interactive aspect to a good library (building, collection, staff and patrons) that will never be filled by virtual libraries. A good library is as much an experience as it is a place, just as a good book is as much an experience as it is a thing.
Today's WSJ printed two letters responding to that article:
http://online.wsj.com/page/letters.html?mod=2_0048
Your Grandmother's Library Is Still There -- Just Look in the Database
In thinking about John J. Miller's article ("Should Libraries' Target Audience Be Cheapskates With Mass-Market," In the Fray, Leisure & Arts, Jan. 3), we must recognize that libraries in our society go far beyond providing recreational books for citizens. Indeed, in the last several generations America's libraries have become "information central," providing services for their communities that other service agencies are unable or unprepared to provide. The most striking example was the important work of libraries after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, in 2005.
During and after the hurricanes, the media documented many of the courageous first responders-National Guard soldiers, the Salvation Army and the American Red Cross. However, a largely unsung group of dedicated individuals also aided the evacuees: the librarians in every community where the library was not destroyed or under water. People needed information, and it was their libraries that enabled the victims to find information about how to locate relatives, for example, or where to go for assistance, or simply as a place to send e-mails to distant family to let them know that they had survived. Local public libraries, long recognized as a place of comfort and information, reinvented themselves and became first responders in their own way, doing what they do best, providing the resources that citizens required, in this case under emergency circumstances.
At the other end of the "information central" spectrum -- dealing with needed information of a different kind -- libraries are increasingly becoming a community resource for consumer health information, an important activity recently recognized by the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science when it honored libraries excelling in this effort and published its findings so that other libraries could follow their example.
Of course popular books are found in libraries and will always be found there. But those quick to criticize the "popularization" of libraries should also try to understand that it is through the use of popular, easily accessible services, such as finding that latest best seller that library users come to know libraries as a resource for many, many other services. Finding that specific book is getting easier and easier, particularly with the development of electronic tools such as those which take the user's ZIP code and directs the user to a nearby library that has the book.
Beth Fitzsimmons, Ph.D.
Chair
National Commission on Libraries and Information Science
Ann Arbor, Mich.
*********************************************
Mr. Miller opines that librarians have discovered new-fangled computer programs that tell whether or not a book has (or hasn't) circulated and are using them to create libraries that are poor competitors to Amazon and other purveyors of cheap books. He says we (for I admit, I am one) librarians throw away books by William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, etc. because they have not circulated, to make room for philistine-favorites like Grisham and Patterson.
Mr. Miller has clearly not been in a public library lately, and probably does not use the Fairfax County, Va., online catalog, because from my desk in Blue Island, Ill., I was able to ascertain that titles by all the authors he mentions are readily available in the Fairfax County system, even though such software has been available for a decade or two. Twenty years ago, the library in which I worked received a letter from the outraged staff of the English Department at the local junior college because we had thrown out some works by Fannie Hurst. (Though in our defense, it was not her famous work, "Imitation of Life," and we had retained Villette by Charlotte Bronte, though I am not sure of the fate of Agnes Grey by her sister Anne.) But here's the thing: No library has unlimited space, and we try to keep a good, current collection of books that will appeal to the broad interests of our users. If we don't have a title, we can get it for you, maybe even from the junior college library. In Fairfax County, 10 of the branches have the play "Dr. Faustus" by Marlowe; and if Mr. Miller is a card holder, all those copies will cheerfully be fetched and delivered to the branch most convenient for him, so that he and all his friends may put on a play!
Though books and literacy are still important, the public library of the 21st century has many other fish to fry, including provision of high-speed Internet access with word processing and printers that always have ink, a "community commons" where people come for programs and meetings, and providing access to all kinds of "matter" -- printed, on DVD, via the Internet -- to literally everyone in the community. We do all this in addition to our traditional and essential role as the center pole of the tent of democracy, and providing reading material that appeals to all our users, from the home-based entrepreneur to the homeless.
Patty Dwyer Wanninger
Director
Blue Island Public Library
Blue Island, Ill.
Originally posted by TheBloopconsider the source, WSJ subscribers....
Today's WSJ printed two letters responding to that article:
http://online.wsj.com/page/letters.html?mod=2_0048
Your Grandmother's Library Is Still There -- Just Look in the Database
In thinking about John J. Miller's article ("Should Libraries' Target Audience Be Cheapskates With Mass-Market," In the Fray, Leisure & Arts, Jan. 3), we must recognize ...[text shortened]... wyer Wanninger
Director
Blue Island Public Library
Blue Island, Ill.