[Publib] Re: HAPLR and the LJ Index

[Pat McMahon]

Dear Colleagues,

Sitting at my laptop checking my email and, as always, hoping to find some interesting ideas on PUBLIB, I noticed Thomas J. Hennen Jr's message on Public Library Ratings and developing scores for libraries.


I have nearby on my desk a copy of "Poems Retrieved" by Frank O'Hara. It has just arrived in our library thanks to a library book supplier in North Carolina who has made it so much easier for someone on this side of the Atlantic to source material from American publishers. I am interested in Frank O'Hara because of his Irish ancestry and the acquisition of "Poems Retrieved" allows us to have almost everything written by O'Hara.

I happen to have open his poem entitled "War." And I am so taken by the line in which he "recoils at the competitive vulgarity of targets."

It is interesting that the HAPLR ratings seem to have been going for 10 years. This is about the same time period that the free market ideas (from which ideas about ratings and scores are borrowed) reached their period of almost total dominance, before the current crash.

As the journalist Alexander Cockburn point out, "by its nature capitalism is war." Cockburn in his recent article in The Nation writes about the "savage reversals for capitalism and the gaping wounds in its pretensions." There are echoes in O'Hara'a "War" poem, written in 1952, of much of this.

Some times I feel that poets and novelists have more to tell us about life  than all the economists and sociologists and historians combined.


And the most important thing about a library, is not whether it is top or bottom of some ratings or league table, for there will always be someone at the top and bottom of such tables, the most important thing about a library is that it exists. And that librarins will, with loving care, assemble a collection of great poetry and fiction , and work hard to bring it to the attention of all the people who live in the vicinity of their libraries.

Every good wish,
Patrick McMahon,
County Librarian,
Galway,
Ireland.

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