The Demise of the Public Library
latitude.blogs.nytimes.com
latitude.blogs.nytimes.com
I've got a Kindle. I use it as a place for storing personal documents, pretty much exclusively. Almost everything I read is not an e-book in any format. Almost everything on my bookshelves is not available as an e-book in any format.
The long tail of books are not e-books and probably won't be for a long time. The point of libraries is exactly to ensure there isn't an information divide in society. Science, philosophy, literature, history, languages: these shouldn't be the preserve of people who can afford to buy the books or attend college or jump through the hoops needed to access research libraries.
And it's all very well telling people to go use the Internet. What are they gonna do, look it up on Wikipedia? Fine, and where are the people who write Wikipedia going to get access to the books to write the Wikipedia articles? And what happens when they get to the end of the Wikipedia article and want to read more? It's the same with adult education: the government tell us that we need to become "lifelong learners" to survive in the current economy. How exactly are we to do that when adult education courses are closing and libraries are closing?
A working programmer friend of mine wanted to do A-level in mathematics. He could only find one place in London that offers an adults course. To get into universities, students are more and more expected to have read outside their curriculum. Getting rid of libraries makes it so only the rich kids can get access to the books. And the only answer we can give them: go buy a Kindle.
If education is the road to a better life, we sure as hell need to make sure the road is kept in good repair.
What you're saying is true, of course. But that over looks a great deal of value that libraries provide -- it's more than just bound paper on shelves.
Decisions about library policy are done on the basis of the community stuff, how it'll affect parents with kids who use the library for story time, and the views of readers get neglected.
I went to my local library today, and they've removed yet more non-fiction shelving to move the registrar of births, marriages and deaths into the library. The library seems willing to accomodate just about anything... except books, which seem to be the primary function. The library in the next town over has a monthly "meet animals" day, where someone brings in a ferret or a snake or something and kids get to see and pet an animal. Which is fine, and I haven't got a problem with that. The fact that every time I go in there, they have less books makes me all the less likely to want to scream and shout when the barbarians in pinstripes come to tear the place down and "streamline operations" and so on.
Because of all the feel-good community stuff libraries have to do in order to remain "relevant", the actual point of the library gets slowly undermined and weakened. I don't blame the libraries: they are only doing what they need to do to survive. I blame the politicians and the public for undervaluing libraries.
I want to point out that the actual point of a library is to do all of the things you mention. A community's library isn't just a repository of books, it's an integral public meeting space that facilitates access to information and helps with the needs of its community. Running programs for kids (in addition to ones for teens, adults, the poor, etc.) and providing access to civic information are all fair game for a public library. Libraries balance the needs of their communities, and in your community it sounds like there is a big demand for services other than books.
I completely agree that libraries have evolved into this role in the US (though my experience in Europe is drastically different). I'm just wondering if there's any sort of organized policy behind the "Library as community center" phenomenon.
And even on the digital front, I fear that people are reading more blogs and tweets and fewer books. Even Kindles won't matter to people whose reading attention span is limited to a couple sentences at a time... :-(
(This, though, is a bit of speculation and anecdotal conjecture on my part. I would be interested in hearing if others have observed the same or not.)
A library exists because of the belief that literacy, knowledge, research, ideas and creativity are good things. That some people don't see them as good things doesn't mean they are right.
Pound for pound, inch for inch, and dollar for dollar, the computers are better than the books.
I work in Adult Education in the UK, and I also teach in a local Further Education College. You won't find an AS/A2 level course in Maths or any of the Sciences easily now. Its because of 'data driven management', which brings this post back on topic for this forum...
The short version: AS/A2 Maths and Science subjects are specialised and difficult. Evening class students have work and family commitments. They start a course with great enthusiasm, then, usually just after the New Year, reality kicks in with the cold weather and the difficulty of finding time to study. People drop out of the course. Those who have the time and self-organisation to make it to the exams usually pass, although grades are not astounding.
Data: when you attend a course in a Skills Funding Agency funded programme, your attendance is monitored and used to compile something called an ISR. Your attendance and the outcome of your exams are on the database.
Success: The percentage of the students who started left at the end is called 'retention'. The percentage of students who took the exam who pass is called 'achievement'. Success = retention * achievement.
"Raising Standards": Success rates are compared with national benchmarks. Courses with pass rates that are more than 5% below benchmark are 'poor quality'. Single course percentages are aggregated (in wonderful ways) to give success figures for departments. Departments have success targets. Easiest way to improve your success? Dump the low performing courses. They happen to be the harder subjects.
There is a small industry in specialised data mining and tracking software that will process the database and 'pull out' the success statistics. Most of the applications look like they are written in VB or something similar, but some have Web interfaces. Middle managers in colleges in the UK spend an awful lot of time going through the database reports.
So now you know! Next time a politician speaks about 'raising standards in education' be aware that the only way you get fast change in the pass rates is by simply removing the lower scores by closing the courses.
Having fewer libraries, even if bigger, doesn't match the value of a neighborhood library.
The only point in having libraries, not warehouses, is that people can visit them.
Keep in mind the value for a particular local library may not fall along your particular interests. Libraries serve the community as a whole, and there are many diverse needs for a typical community that a library has to serve.
Not everyone has e-readers or can afford to purchase a large number of books--our library definitely fills a need in the local community. Plus knowledgable staff can recommend good books and assist students with their research (the inter-library loan system which includes local Universities is especially helpful in this case).
While I can drive to the library, I do see a large number of folks arriving via foot and/or public transportation. I cannot imagine the impact to those communities which are losing their local libraries. Perhaps Brent is particularly affluent, but I suspect that the council is being misguided by their consultants or simply doesn't care about those members of the community who will be impacted most by these library closures.
But libraries do need to evolve. They need to have digital offerings. I'd like to see them set aside room for hacker spaces as well as user group meeting rooms.
The more community engagement for the libraries services the harder it will be for politicians to cut their budgets.
Not sure why that's a down vote. I just don't see the correlation.
A quiet place to study and think is crucially important
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_library_usage
Maybe they can hold on as free Internet cafes, since that seems to be how many people actually use them today. All that would be missing would be the availability of free or subsidized tea, drip coffee, and maybe some sort of nutritious but inexpensive to prepare hot soup.
The real thing to watch is the countercyclical nature of public libraries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_library_usage#Econom... in that article). As the economy worsens, public library use increases. Not just for reading material, but for the public services the libraries provide: free law clinics, resume-writing help, etc.
I'm not sure what your local public library is like, but in our small town library is busy all the time. People are borrowing paper books, using the Internet-connected computers, and getting help from librarians. Doomed? Only if we let them; only if we think it's okay to reinstate barriers around lifelong learning.
I haven't borrowed a book from a library myself in at least 5 years. I purchase a lot of books (paper books) -- mostly from Amazon but occasionally from brick and mortar bookstores -- but like to make notes and write questions in the margins or on Post-its and tend to keep them for later reference.
A community center that also has a library component, maybe.
I remember the Nook had a very weird feature where if you were inside the store you could free-read any book you wanted electronically, maybe a repurposed library could have the same licensing arrangement with content from the likes of Google books.
I would argue for a cloud model to libraries - as centralised a super-library as possible to house the electronic literature and then a series of "thin" libraries that have terminals to access that media.
This article offers personal anecdotes against a corpus of literature on falling library user bases, etc. A NYT author can do better than inducing the state of British libraries from a personal example.
Right, so close the libraries and make sure e-books are free for everyone like library books used to be.
I've only tried it once to test it out and it appeared to work fine (I don't have a Kindle, I suspect I would use it more if I did).
I will echo that most OverDrive collections are nowhere near large enough for most people to care just yet. But that has been rapidly changing with so many compatible eReaders on the market. Libraries are just now bulking up on digital licenses to meet the surging demand. I would not be surprised if there are already libraries with more digital copies of a popular novel than paper copies.
[1] http://overdrive.com/news/OverDrive-and-Amazon-launch-Kindle...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...
Some libraries already work this way, with a central organization paying for access to many research databases that can be accessed by patrons. Physical collections also work this way in some places, where shelving for physical items has been reduced in individual branches but made up for by a system where a book can be requested and delivered to your local branch at no charge.
The main issue here is that there is a ton of knowledge that isn't digital and not everyone has the capability to access digital materials or to "take" digital materials home for a time.
Turn libraries across the country (world?) into collaborative meeting/working/co-working space.
I'd be prepared to fight for the idea of libraries, but the reality? Not so much. Cut the funding, close them all, spend the rest of the money on FE colleges (community colleges).
Make sure that money is ring fenced carefully. See my post above in this thread.
It then argues that libraries serve their purpose as public e-cafes
With vinyl records, and cassettes, and compact discs, we listened to music on speaker systems and on headphones. Take away the physical media and replace it with files on a computer, and we're still listening to music on speaker systems and on headphones.
But books? We never consumed books through something analogous to television sets or speakers. We held the actual book in our hands, and read the printed pages with our eyes. Replacing physical books with digital books is, in my opinion, a significantly bigger switch than moving from compact discs to MP3s or from DVDs to MP4s. The entire experience has changed, not just how the content is stored.
My mum is a member of a library, and they have ebook which she can download and read on her laptop. However, she can't read it on the Kindle, as they are distributed as DRM protected ePub's.
To put it on her Kindle she would have to remove the DRM and convert to mobi... But she doesn't need, or even want, the DRM removed.
Also, second-hand books. I could very easily get hold of a Dan Drown's The Lost Symbol for £0.50 in a charity shop/second hand book store. But it costs £4.96 to get the Kindle edition. There's also no way to trade/sell/give Kindle books to other people.
Removing DRM but then deleting within loan period- or pirating and donating £0.50 to charity - for ebooks seems morally equivalent to me. But it's illegal/break of copyright.
Personally, I think it's not really the demise of the Public Library but more the demise of our society due to the lack of proper priorities.