This story strikes me as interesting in any discussion over our educational system.
You can’t find “Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings” at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or “The Education of Henry Adams” at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson’s “Final Harvest”? Don’t look to the Kingstowne branch.
It’s not that the books are checked out. They’re just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.
The move, in Fairfax County and elsewhere, is to move seldom-read books from the shelves and replace them with the hot titles. It is, effectively, a move to run libraries from repositories of knowledge and learning into bookstores where you don’t have to pay for the books.
I’m not at all sure this is a positive development, nor is this attitude:
“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.”
Except that it is not the duty of a library fo help promote anyone’s book, nor is it especially a library system’s duty to stock “popular material”. The entire reason that public money is spent on libraries is so that they can act as repositories of information specifically for “the good of the people”. Otherwise, there’s no sense in pooling our tax resources to fund libraries. You would be far better off getting your tax money back and building your own private libraries if they are going to become glorified Barnes and Noble stores.
It used to be that you went to a library to find the literary and reference works you simply could not find elsewhere. If I wanted a copy of something written by Plutarch, I went to my library and found it. In fact, my love for astronomy and the heavens came in large part because I could to go my local library and read a dozen or more books about the stars and planets. If I can’t do that very well anymore, I have no interest in maintaining the library system. Nor would you.
About the only ones who would are the librarians themselves, since without libraries, they wouldn’t have jobs anymore.
Though I understand that Borders is always hiring.
