[Publib] Re: Book selection

[ChatterboxPurple at aol.com]

Hello,
Just a quick question, Do any libraries out there use e-books?  I have  
noticed a lot of new, free, e-book sites and wondered if your library links to  
those sites from your library homepage?  If a patron comes into the library  
looking for a book, do you refer to these pages as well?
Thank you.
Deb M. Information Broker
 
In a message dated 4/25/2007 9:53:01 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
jbsphx at cox.net writes:

First of  all, my thanks to Pat McMahon of Galway for
the beautifully written account  of the odyssey of a
single copy of "The Winter of Our Discontent."  It  made
my morning and reaffirmed what it is I do.

Of course, no  similarly aged and loved book would be
found in an American library, nor  would it have ever
been allowed to set forth on such an odyssey.

It  would have seen the dumpster -- oh, in about 1973.

Pat  stated

"Book-selection is a long-term investment. And a library
is  not a bookshop, where stock is changed and turned
over on a regular  basis."

I'm afraid that in the U.S.A. there are many in our  profession
whose aim is precisely to make the library a bookshop
where  stock is changed and turned over on a regular
basis, under the rubric of  "give 'em what they want."

And so, despite abundant vacant shelf space,  perfectly
serviceable copies of important books go to the book
sale or  the dumpster because they have failed a
circs-per-year test of some  weeding-crazed administrator
with a meat-ax in his hand.

I say that  if you have space and a book circulates even only
once in years, keep  it.  You've already made an investment
in its original purchase and  processing, and that one
circulation almost undoubtedly thrilled a patron  who was
unable to find the book at the bookshop or in the collections
of  the other weeding-frenzied libraries neighboring yours.

I must note  that a staff member at Borders or Barnes & Noble
may read my remarks  and complain, insofar as his employer
has moved out of the mall, vastly  enlarged the premises, and
made it a point to carry a staggering variety of  titles.  In
this regard, the Borders or Barnes & Noble around  the
corner probably has a wider and deeper collection than I do.

It  is curious indeed that the megabookstores seem to have
a quite different  idea of what "they" want than we do.

Indeed, these megabookstores have  not forgotten that
their customer is the reader.  Libraries, on the  other hand,
almost seem to care about only one kind of reader, when
they  care about them at all, since we're too busy with
computers and running a  three-ring circus that has very
little to do with books, ideas, and  reflection.

Will Manley covers this ground far more eloquently than  I
do: "Libraries, Bookstores, and Classics," Booklist, April 1,
2007, p.  7.

In our rush to be all things to all citizens, to given them  what
they (and we) think they want, to relentlessly root out the  word
"library" from the names of our professional schools and
degrees,  and to deny our own noble past and calling, we
seem to have lost our  way.

Borders and Barnes & Noble seem to suffer from no
similar  lack of clarity about their mission.

--Joe Schallan
The Jurassic  Librarian


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