The NW Indiana Times has a neat little article on libraries.
The author says since it’s National Library Week, can we all just agree to call a spade a spade and call a library a library? He’s not crazy about “media centers,” “CLIR,” “media specialists,” and all the other silly things we come up with. Imagine if we told him to bring it up with The ALA, or a SLMS, or go read the AACR, attend the next AASL conference, make sure he writes in ASCII, oh and, make sure to FTP that ISBN over to LC right after LITA this fall. It all makes sense to me, but then again, I just got back from OCLC where we talked about our OPAC and some troubles with RLIN, plus, I’m not even a member of YALSA.
“Just because the early 21st-century library encompasses new formats — audio tapes, films, microfiche, CDs, bits and bytes — in addition to paper bound into covers, that doesn’t mean we can’t still call it a library. As the scope of the library expands, so can the definition, the way “bank” and “school” have. No need to mothball a good word and clutter the language with gobbledygook for light and transient causes.”
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