The article from the Utne Reader began: “Forget FEMA. Your local library may be your savior. That is, if it’s still open.”
It goes on to describe the crucial role played by librarians and libraries these days, and the trouble libraries face as fewer people patronize them and even fewer want to pay to keep them open. The article states: “As libraries take on these new roles [first responders of sorts], they seem like logical recipients of additional government funding. But as Ellen Perlman reports in Governing, “nearly half of US public libraries either lost funding or received no additional funding in 2006.”
libraries and local support
I didn’t read this article, but the other day I came across an Oregon blogger writing about the closing of 2 libraries. The bond issues hadn’t passed, but the horrifying thing to me was how many people hadn’t voted. I think one lost something like 52 to 49. Really. Were these libraries making any difference in the community? The majority of people live good lives without libraries. We think they are important, but obviously, much of the public doesn’t. And ALA just lists on leftward hoping the feds will save us.
It’s a matter of choice…
“Librarians” think libraries are more important than they really are. And rightly so, they have a vested interest to think so. It would be unusual for them to think otherwise. The public recognises that libraries are important but also that there alternative and often better and convenient sources of information. Libraries are becoming less relevant to many people, or a second choice, since they have to go through a middle-man, the “librarian”, and deal with unfriendly and archaic OPACs that a kindergarden child could have designed better. It’s like online shopping, it’s more convenient for many people to shop online than go physically to a shopping mall. There is a choice now. More and more people are not choosing to go to libraries but go elsewhere.