Great Falls Public Library Director Jim Heckel never has been one to look a gift horse in the mouth. So don’t expect to hear him complain about the 458 free music CDs the library received recently. The gift is part of a $142 million settlement with the music industry in a federal class action lawsuit brought by 38 states over price fixing.
While librarians across the country are generally pleased about the largesse, many are complaining about the workload to catalog and process the discs. Some are disappointed in the selection too and contend the companies cleared out their warehouses and weren’t meeting the spirit of the settlement. Read More.
Good point
I’m still a little cheesed that we got fifty copies of some albums, but Heckel does have a good point… the albums were certainly diverse when it came to genre. We have a very international community where I am, and I think our AV librarian was less worried about the 3 or 4 duplicate titled reggae and Latin CDs so much as she was the 25 copies of Pearl Jam’s “Yield.” I guess a lot of it depends on your patronage, and of course, the record industry didn’t take that into account (nor could they, really) when distributing those CDs.
As far as “Yield” goes… it could have been worse. It could have been “Vitalogy.”