4 ms·

> You can argue that people can go to the library, Where I grew up, my town library did not have any tech or programming books. Forget new jornal issues or cut

by rg111 4y ago

> You can argue that people can go to the library, Where I grew up, my town library did not have any tech or programming books. Forget new jornal issues or cutting edge science books. "Just go to the library" is such a first-world-and-megacity thing to say.

Mezzie 4y ago
Even in the first world in a giant city it can be crap advice. I wrote a paper in library school about how the Vancouver Public Library failed to offer anything of substance to intermediate language learners (with a focus on Mandarin materials because of the high Mandarin speaking population) - if you're a person learning Mandarin to communicate with immigrant populations there, you skip from basic travel phrasebooks to videos/movies in Mandarin for Chinese audiences. Public libraries aren't great at serving the long tail or more advanced interests for various reasons. And academic institutions usually have rules preventing use of their materials by people not affiliated with the school.
- kennend3 4y ago
  As a fellow Canadian i can tell you another story about our broken library system. It NEEDS to be consolidated. I live in ($smalltown$) just outside Toronto. The border between my smalltown ands the other small towns that surround me are unclear at best. Oddly enough, each smalltown has its own library system, its own staff and each for the most part has a terrible book collection. I rarely go to the library for the town i actually live in because it is a forgotten wasteland. The library from the other town is just a few blocks away and they have done an excellent job keeping their library current and active. In my town it would basically be you, the librarians and a few insects in the building, next town over is full on a regular basis. They also have programs and stay current, my town is dead and boring. Why are we paying for libraries like this? All that duplicate staff and their associated pensions and benefits could and should have went to books, services for the public, etc. I asked my town mayor once why the library building is so nice (granite flooring, floor to ceiling windows, it really is an attractive building inside and out) but yet the book collection is terrible. The mayor at the time told me the library is a showpiece to attract new residents??? I guess they assume new residents don't actually step inside and discover the book collection is terrible? Public libraries are a valuable asset, but need to be managed properly as well.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    I'm actually not Canadian, I just did my MLIS there. ;) It is odd that your small towns don't have some kind of consortium agreement. There are benefits and drawbacks to having separate versus consolidated systems. Consolidated systems would, as you note, be more efficient in terms of staff costs and probably allow for materials to travel more easily. On the other hand, a consolidated system can end up only really serving the richest or largest community, rendering the rest of the population as afterthoughts. Like from an ROI perspective, it makes sense public libraries are terrible at serving the long tail/the part of the population who want to educate themselves to a high level. Patrons are more interested in popular fiction and children's books, so that's the most bang for the buck. But ugh on the building rationale. Without knowing what the building was like before, I can't comment too much (e.g. if there was mold/water damage/etc.) but that does seem like an odd use of funds.
    - vendiddy 4y ago
      I wish libraries would go digital and rent out ebooks to people. They could pay authors based on reads.
      - Mezzie 4y ago
        They want to. The publishers won't sell to them/place ridiculous limitations on them. They're why a library has only so many 'copies' of a digital book to lend at once, why libraries won't have popular books as ebooks, etc.
      - notpushkin 4y ago
        You might find Archive.org’s Open Library project interesting then: https://openlibrary.org/ https://openlibrary.org/
    - kennend3 4y ago
      > But ugh on the building rationale. Without knowing what the building was like before, I can't comment too much (e.g. if there was mold/water damage/etc.) but that does seem like an odd use of funds. There was no library there before it was built.. Right next to city hall at a cost of millions of dollars. Sure, cities need to build and grow but this was a terrible use of money and a decade later it is still an albatross.. +1 for your comment on children books, this is why we went and it was incredibly valuable to us. Given most of us are technical, we all know libraries are not a good resource for current technology books and this is not my issue. My concern is a city with a very tiny Chinese population has a large collection of Chinese books.. something is wrong. PS - my ex was Chinese and loved it because she could go there and the books she wanted were always available, there are so few people in this city who can read them.. Obviously whomever is responsible for buying books invested heavily in foreign language books for some reason?
mxschumacher 4y ago
i sometimes go to my local library (in a big European city). The computer science section has a lot of "for Dummies" books or titles that are very specific to a certain language version or framework (java 6, Symfony 3). Most of those can go straight to the trash. The many timeless books that exist are far and few between.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by rg111 4y ago

Mezzie 4y ago

Even in the first world in a giant city it can be crap advice. I wrote a paper in library school about how the Vancouver Public Library failed to offer anything of substance to intermediate language learners (with a focus on Mandarin materials because of the high Mandarin speaking population) - if you're a person learning Mandarin to communicate with immigrant populations there, you skip from basic travel phrasebooks to videos/movies in Mandarin for Chinese audiences. Public libraries aren't great at serving the long tail or more advanced interests for various reasons. And academic institutions usually have rules preventing use of their materials by people not affiliated with the school.

kennend3 4y ago
As a fellow Canadian i can tell you another story about our broken library system. It NEEDS to be consolidated. I live in ($smalltown$) just outside Toronto. The border between my smalltown ands the other small towns that surround me are unclear at best. Oddly enough, each smalltown has its own library system, its own staff and each for the most part has a terrible book collection. I rarely go to the library for the town i actually live in because it is a forgotten wasteland. The library from the other town is just a few blocks away and they have done an excellent job keeping their library current and active. In my town it would basically be you, the librarians and a few insects in the building, next town over is full on a regular basis. They also have programs and stay current, my town is dead and boring. Why are we paying for libraries like this? All that duplicate staff and their associated pensions and benefits could and should have went to books, services for the public, etc. I asked my town mayor once why the library building is so nice (granite flooring, floor to ceiling windows, it really is an attractive building inside and out) but yet the book collection is terrible. The mayor at the time told me the library is a showpiece to attract new residents??? I guess they assume new residents don't actually step inside and discover the book collection is terrible? Public libraries are a valuable asset, but need to be managed properly as well.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  I'm actually not Canadian, I just did my MLIS there. ;) It is odd that your small towns don't have some kind of consortium agreement. There are benefits and drawbacks to having separate versus consolidated systems. Consolidated systems would, as you note, be more efficient in terms of staff costs and probably allow for materials to travel more easily. On the other hand, a consolidated system can end up only really serving the richest or largest community, rendering the rest of the population as afterthoughts. Like from an ROI perspective, it makes sense public libraries are terrible at serving the long tail/the part of the population who want to educate themselves to a high level. Patrons are more interested in popular fiction and children's books, so that's the most bang for the buck. But ugh on the building rationale. Without knowing what the building was like before, I can't comment too much (e.g. if there was mold/water damage/etc.) but that does seem like an odd use of funds.
  - vendiddy 4y ago
    I wish libraries would go digital and rent out ebooks to people. They could pay authors based on reads.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      They want to. The publishers won't sell to them/place ridiculous limitations on them. They're why a library has only so many 'copies' of a digital book to lend at once, why libraries won't have popular books as ebooks, etc.
    - notpushkin 4y ago
      You might find Archive.org’s Open Library project interesting then: https://openlibrary.org/ https://openlibrary.org/
  - kennend3 4y ago
    > But ugh on the building rationale. Without knowing what the building was like before, I can't comment too much (e.g. if there was mold/water damage/etc.) but that does seem like an odd use of funds. There was no library there before it was built.. Right next to city hall at a cost of millions of dollars. Sure, cities need to build and grow but this was a terrible use of money and a decade later it is still an albatross.. +1 for your comment on children books, this is why we went and it was incredibly valuable to us. Given most of us are technical, we all know libraries are not a good resource for current technology books and this is not my issue. My concern is a city with a very tiny Chinese population has a large collection of Chinese books.. something is wrong. PS - my ex was Chinese and loved it because she could go there and the books she wanted were always available, there are so few people in this city who can read them.. Obviously whomever is responsible for buying books invested heavily in foreign language books for some reason?

mxschumacher 4y ago

i sometimes go to my local library (in a big European city). The computer science section has a lot of "for Dummies" books or titles that are very specific to a certain language version or framework (java 6, Symfony 3). Most of those can go straight to the trash. The many timeless books that exist are far and few between.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]