4 ms·
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 dr
by 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 agoI wish libraries would go digital and rent out ebooks to people. They could pay authors based on reads.
- Mezzie 4y agoThey 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 agoYou 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?
- Mezzie 4y agoSounds like your town has a government/mayor that really wants to look good to their peers (other municipal/small town mayors and city council members) rather than serve their population. Those types of buildings get features in all their stupid trade magazines, etc. And then the gov officials use them to hobnob with each other. My bet on the Chinese books is that it's one of the librarians' special interests. It's not uncommon to have some % of the buying budget set aside for staff recs (that allows for some inclusion of things people may not have known they'd like), and if the system is small enough for one person to be doing all the buying, she might have overspent on her interests. The cynical answer would be that the librarian wants to have the books so she can write an article on foreign language collection development and angle for a job elsewhere: Very few small town librarians grew up in their small towns and it's a very gentrified profession. She might be angling for a position at the VPL or TPL systems.