Rumors of the library's demise have been greatly exaggerated | Hacker News Reader

Rumors of the library's demise have been greatly exaggerated

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15 pointsjoewooglin12 comments

If anything, libraries will stick around as public places where people can sit freely and do something in silence. In the US, especially in suburbia, it's almost impossible to find a space where you can sit and do whatever you please without having to buy something or feel guilty for taking up a table. (Yes parks, but in many places that's only feasible for half the year.)

Libraries are one of the last places where you can just sit and work or study or read in a public space, and whenever I go to my local ones the tables are always filled with people of all ages doing just that.

Libraries are also becoming places where the community can gather. In my hometown the reduction in actual book circulation has meant an increase in available, reservable communal spaces for local clubs, teams, and other organizations.

This is most certainly a Good Thing(tm), so long as the funding holds. Finding space for non-commercial, non-revenue activities is hard in many places.

Seconded. My wife takes our twin two year olds to the library twice a week for library story time and to play with the gigantic Thomas the Tank Engine. Both my wife and my kids like seeing their friends (and nobody has to get snacks or clean up their house for an afternoon playdate).

Sad thing in the town I live in, the downtown library has become a magnate for local homeless to bath and sleep during the day, making a number of families and other patrons uncomfortable. The downtown library gets the bulk of the funding at the expense of some of the outer branches.

I wonder how this whole thing is playing out across other parts of the US.

There's homeless in almost all of the suburban libraries I've been to in my area too, but at least in that area they're usually reading or chatting quietly instead of sleeping or bathing.

Personally I don't mind as long as they're not obviously using libraries as a home. Libraries are precisely there for people to sit in, even if the people are a little smelly.

I grew up in Orlando. The homeless in the library is not a new phenomenon and I am reminded of a funny story..

It was the late 80's, flannel shirts were not uncommon male attire and I was cultivating the "Jim Morrison: the LA woman years" look as I walked out of the Orange County Public Library's downtown branch and climbed into my dented turd brown '74 Mercury Comet with four doors and carcinomic vinyl top and headed home. One block later, I notice one of Orlando's finest cruisers behind me me. I drove slow in those days not that the Comet's little straight six and three on the tree offered any other option besides not running at all.

Left turn at the Junior High. It's pacing me - past the light at Central, under the East-West, across Anderson and just over the rise he hits his lights. I pull to the curb and stop. I look in my mirror. Holy Shit! He's got his gun drawn and is yelling at me to show my hands. They're up. I'm to reach out and use the outside latch. The door is open and he's yelling at me to get out. I can't. He's yelling, I'm yelling that my seat belt is buckled.

I have to put my hand out of sight while we are yelling. I get out. I lay on the street. Spread eagle. The gun is against my occipital lobe while I'm cuffed. The lieutenant arrives. They've run my plate. He's got my license. My car and I live four doors down from Glenda. They thought my car was stolen from Michigan. Despite the Orange County tag. Glenda is a city commissioner. Later she becomes mayor and then Secretary of State. I ain't going to jail. They don't even search the car. Turns out it's all just a misunderstanding.

This was before the militarization of the police. Before Giuliani's broken window policies. Back before the prison economy really took off. Even before Rush Limbaugh made popular jokes about the homeless and dumpsters to set the stage for conservative meanness.

I hope the homeless using the library is playing out differently from my low expectations. But I doubt it.

A magnate is a person that can afford to buy a GREAT house with 3 bathrooms whereas a magnet attracts ferromagnetic elements (iron, nickel, cobalt, some rare earth metals).

Magnate is from the Latin magnas for 'great man'. Magnate goes all the way back to PIE and can be traced to the Sanskrit for "great".

Magnet shares the same origins as magnesium. They derive from (Med. Latin) magnetum. Origin is in the Greek for the native Magnetes (Thessalonian) people.

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In the UK more people take books out of the library than buy new books.

(http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/leading-artic...)

> While 200 million books are sold every year, more than 310 million are borrowed.

There are some things we can download from our local library without travelling there.

http://www.dclibrary.org/downloads

And, with a library card, we can download 3 songs a week.

Last summer I was searching for a quiet place to work outside the house, and was really racking my brain. I finally thought hey, library! But wait, do they still have those things? Of course they do, so I thought great, that place will be like a morgue. Wow, it was hopping with young, old, everything in between, on a summer weekday. In fact it was so distracting that I had to leave and hit up a starbucks for some relative quiet.

Just think how much useful it would be to spend the money we waste on libraries on schools instead. My local libraries multi-million dollar extension is a hard pill to swallow when I see teachers cut, after school programs cut etc etc. Sure, libraries are great when we have an economic surplus, but right now I see them as a huge waste of money. The homeless use them for the bathrooms, and parents use them for free after school child care. In my library the only things in use are the chairs and computers. The books just get in the way. They are outdated and a luxury we can no longer afford.

where are you (roughly) if you don't mind me asking? Libraries seem like a local thing, and I wonder how much use of them varies from state to state & across the urban - rural spectrum.

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