Salon.com > Libraries and librarians

Arizona’s very Arizonan armed library guard debate

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:30:00 +0000

Do libraries in Maricopa County, Ariz., need to be guarded by private security officers with guns? Yes, probably, because everyone should be armed at all times, especially when they are defending our library books or collecting late fees. Only then will we be free, and safe.

Apparently Maricopa County has guards -- private security firm employees, not county employees, with guns -- proper guns -- at most of its libraries.

"In large buildings with multiple rooms and lots of people, you need to have some feeling among the staff, as well as the public, that it's a secure place, particularly where it's used a lot by children," said library-district director Harry Courtright, who retired Friday.
[...]
In his 12 years with the district, Courtright said there have been no incidents of a guard drawing a gun.

"And they shouldn't have to, because they have the training. But that gun makes a difference to the people who are coming in the building who might want to do something that could be bad; they see an armed guard, and the reality is they back off and they don't do things - it's a preventative thing," he said.

The greatest books that never were

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:56:00 +0000

Imaginary books seem to be nearly as numerous as the real ones, and that's even when you don't count all those bestselling thrillers people believe they'll write someday if only they can find the time to write the damn thing down. Nonexistent books certainly have some devoted fans, such as the proprietor of the ever-diverting Beachcomber's Bizarre History Blog, who is making bold moves to expand the collection known as the Invisible Library.

"The Invisible Library" has, for at least a decade or so, referred to those books that exist only within works of fiction. A man named Brian Quinette founded a website by that name in the late 1990s, presenting it as a catalog of "imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished and unfound."

The original Invisible Library disappeared from the Web in the mid-2000s (though you can still find snapshots of it in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine), and since then other pseudobibliophiles have opened their own "branches," although these too have a tendency to end up abandoned. The novelists Ed Park and Levi Stahl created a catalog of imaginary titles that inspired an interactive exhibition at a London art gallery, but they have only occasionally updated it since 2008. Loss of interest is, perhaps, inevitable, since when you maintain such a list, tiresome people are constantly proclaiming their disappointed astonishment that their particular obscure favorite isn't listed.

British Library, Google, in deal to digitize books

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:06:00 +0000

Google has struck a deal with the British Library to make thousands of historic books available online.

The deal, announced Monday, will let Internet users read, search and copy 250,000 texts published between 1700 and 1870.

The deal applies to works in the library's collection that are no longer covered by copyright restrictions.

Google has similar deals with libraries around the world. Its plan to put millions of copyrighted titles online has been opposed by the publishing industry and is the subject of a legal battle in the United States.

The British Library has a collection of 14 million books and almost 1 million periodicals.

Last year it announced plans to digitize up to 40 million pages of newspapers dating back three and a half centuries.

Why libraries still matter

Thu, 12 May 2011 00:45:00 +0000

There are bigger and busier libraries in America, but none more iconic than the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, that stately, marble Beaux-Arts temple of knowledge whose entrance is flanked by two enormous stone lions. May 23 is the 100th anniversary of the edifice (which was renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in 2008, after the financier donated $100 million toward a major renovation).

The library is celebrating with a festival featuring events, an exhibition of some of its most prized items and a kind of writing project cum scavenger hunt devised by game guru Jane McGonigal, in which 500 contestants will spend the night in the building, exploring the collections on various "quests." The New York Public Library commemorated the centennial of its incorporation (in which several smaller public and private libraries were merged) back in 1995; this week's celebration is for the building, the most visible part of a much larger system.

Should we allow porn in libraries?

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:20:00 +0000

If you found this article while searching for porn that fetishizes bookish bespectacled women, you're going to be sorely disappointed. In this rare case, we're talking about porn in libraries, not librarians in porn. That's because earlier this week, the Los Angeles City Council voted against filtering out all porn on library computers. Just the day before, the Brooklyn Public Library publicly defended patrons' right to watch any legal adult content of their choosing. The first case was prompted by an incident in which kids were exposed to pornography being watched by an adult on a library computer; and the second followed a physical altercation between a man watching porn on a library computer and another man waiting to use said computer.

Camden, N.J., preparing to close all its libraries

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 22:06:00 +0000

The library board in Camden, one of the nation's poorest cities, is preparing to close all three of its branches by the end of the year, saying its funding has been slashed so drastically that it cannot afford to keep operating.

Library officials are hoping enough money surfaces to save the system, but they're preparing for a shutdown and say they're not just threatening it as a ploy.

Budget cuts across the country have caused local officials to close library branches, reduce hours and spend less money on books, computers and other materials. But officials at the American Library Association believe Camden's library system would be the first in the U.S. with multiple branches to check out entirely.

"Of all places, they're one of the places that needs free public libraries the most," said Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association.

The city consistently ranks as one of the nation's most impoverished. It's a place where most families don't own computers, where just one big bookstore serves the local colleges and where some of the public schools don't even have librarians.

Camden Free Public Library is a major hub for many residents and draws 150,000 visits a year.

The fine art of recommending books

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:01:00 +0000

So many books, so little time, as coffee mugs are always telling us, so how do you decide what to read next? Most people rely on word of mouth from trusted friends. The seldom-acknowledged advantage to this method is that you can chew your friend out if she steers you wrong, whereas your recourse with regard to the New York Times Book Review is a lot less direct.

Since the other regular feature I write for Salon is all about recommending books, people often ask me for tips. It's a ticklish question. In a review, I can expound at length, giving readers a pretty good sense of what I like so they can judge if my preferences align with their own. One-on-one, however, what really matters to me is what you like to read.

Amazon and other online merchants have harnessed mighty algorithms to run their "If you enjoyed that, you might like this..." suggestion engines, but these are still crude instruments. Practically any novel you plug into Amazon's search engines at the moment returns the robotic announcement that people who bought it also bought one of Stieg Larsson's "Girl" thrillers — because seemingly everybody in America is buying those books. It's not like you need the world's most sophisticate e-commerce servers to tell you that.

Libraries get a mall makeover

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:25:00 +0000

Like trucker hats and last week's version of the iPhone, libraries have an image problem. Wait, did you say libraries? Those places with the passed out homeless people and the twenty-year-old editions of the "World Book"? You mean, people actually still go to them? Combine the public reticence to hobnob with vagrants with the imminent obsolescence of books altogether with an economy that's forcing crippling budget cuts, and you might understand why desperate times require dire measures. Like making libraries more like Starbucks.

A Tuesday Associated Press story on the runaway success of a Dallas library located in a downtown shopping mall shows what can go right when you put libraries in the path of receptive consumers. In just two years, the NorthPark children's library has blossomed into a bustling local hub that checks out more books than branches eight times its size. And Dallas isn't the only city innovating the look of the seemingly stodgy institutions. A Wichita library rests inside a grocery store, and the Princeton library offers a bookshop, café and that most irresistible bourgeois hangout -- a greenmarket. Elsewhere, libraries "have built cafes, provided downloadable books or installed drive-through windows." After all, if it can work for McDonald's, which recently tweaked its grim interiors to add comfy chairs and a warmer color palette, imagine how helpful a revamp could be in enticing people into places that don't even have Happy Meals.

The death of the library book

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:45:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on Athena's Head, Martha's Nichols's blog on Open Salon.

I'm amazed at what I get for free in public libraries. Books, big tottering stacks of books, but there's also computer access and, in the last few years, free Wi-Fi. When my son was younger, we went to story hours and singalongs.

Libraries are one of the great loves of my life. That's why a hearing last week about the Boston Public Library's proposal to close some neighborhood branches has me on edge. And several months after the opening of the new main library in Cambridge, I find myself asking an unexpected question.

What's the purpose of libraries -- really? To be a community gathering place? To promote lifelong learning? To help users navigate the information flow? To store print documents for the historical record, as Nicholson Baker argues they should (and aren't) in "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper"?

“This Book Is Overdue!”: Hot for librarian

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:01:00 +0000

Behold the stereotypical librarian, with her cat’s-eye glasses, bun and pantyhose -- a creature whose desexualized persona and desire for us to be quiet has fueled generations of wild sexual fantasies. But there's bad news for those of you with a shushing fetish; as Marilyn Johnson explains in "This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All," the uptight librarian is a species that's rapidly approaching extinction.

A new generation of young, hip and occasionally tattooed librarians is driving them out. They call themselves guybrarians, cybrarians and "information specialists," and they blog at sites like The Free Range Librarian and The Lipstick Librarian. They can be found in droves on Second Life, but also outside the Republican National Convention, dodging tear gas canisters and tweeting the location of the police.

What Google promises us

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 22:45:00 +0000

When I read the news that Google was initiating a drive to digitize and upload to the Internet millions upon millions of books from some of the finest research libraries in the world, my first, somewhat whimsical reaction was to recall one of my favorite stories, Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel."

The Library of Babel contains everything. Not just every book that has been written, but every book that could possibly be written. Borges says it best:

"Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books."

Sex and the open stacks

Wed, 29 Aug 2001 19:09:00 +0000

Ah, the public library circa 1982. The workhorse institution of the community, a perpetually underfunded repository of stuffy reference books, underpaid librarians, used book sales, tax forms, broken microfiche readers -- and pornography.

Lurking right there in the open stacks of my suburban public library was enough smut to blow my impressionable 13-year-old mind. My life changed the day I spied Anaïs Nin's "Delta of Venus" on a shelf in the fiction section. I quizzically studied the photograph on the cover. It showed a girl in strange clothing contorted on an old armchair, her dress hiked up to her hips, revealing a stocking attached to a lacy undergarment. "Erotica" the cover said. I cracked open the book to see what was inside.

Down the rabbit hole I fell into Nin's world of courtesans, artists, showgirls, lecherous old men, voyeurs, prostitutes and cheeky schoolgirls, all cavorting in a European world of shabby gentility. I felt a twinge of excitement wash over me. I'd found a dirty book, but not like those my mother hid in the cubbyhole of her headboard, like "Forever Amber" or "Princess Daisy." My literature radar began to whir. I sensed that there was something more to this book than cheap thrills.

The Napster library

Wed, 05 Jul 2000 19:13:00 +0000

"San Francisco's public library is engaging in a six-month experiment with a subscription that allows readers to browse, search, borrow, read and return 1,500 electronic books from their home or office." -- San Francisco Chronicle, 6/26/00

It was an innocuous little notice, hidden on a back page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The city's public library has started letting its members "check out" e-books, via download from the library's Web site. "No more overdue fines!" crowed the article.

A novel experiment -- no pun intended -- and one that will probably go unnoticed by a vast number of Net users. But this simple little notice may have blasted a big, fat hole in the business model of the electronic book companies that plan to sell digital versions of bestsellers for download over the Web. If you can "borrow" an e-book for free, why would you ever bother to buy one?

Unlike your local public library, an online library of e-books doesn't require you to schlep downtown and stand in line, only to discover that the library's only copy of "Chicken Soup for the Soul" is checked out (and three months overdue). There's no scarcity, no physical location and, best of all, still no cost. And it's just as easy to go to your library's Web site and "check out" an e-book as it is to go to Amazon.com and buy the exact same e-book.

Married, with books

Fri, 24 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

"Do we really need this?" my fianci asks, holding up a pint-size copy of Wallace Stevens' "Selected Poems."

"Of course we need it," I reply.

"But we already have the 'Collected Poems' in hardback and paperback. Not to mention the New American Library edition."

"But this one's so portable," I say, searching for a reason to keep this completely superfluous book. It's New York in July, 98 degrees, 100 percent humidity, and OK, I'm a little irrational. We have to move a ton of books to Los Angeles. Not a figurative ton, but an actual one: 1,934 pounds. Our movers have just given us an obscene cost estimate that we can neither believe nor afford. I'm starting to wish I had grown up cultivating a less bulky obsession -- the flute, maybe.

We're standing in a maze of towering and precariously arranged piles of books, removed from the built-in shelves that line all four walls of all three rooms of our Brooklyn Heights apartment. How did we end up with this gross overload? I flash back to our blind date two and a half years ago. Joan, the cupid who set it up, kindled our interest with book talk. "She loves to read," she told Matthew. "He may be the best-read person I've ever met," she told me. Eight months later we merged book collections and lives into a miraculously affordable apartment that could house us and our books. A small fourth-floor walk-up? Circa 1920? No problem. We continued to ply each other with favorite novels, thick poetry collections and glamorous never-to-be-opened gifts such as "The Architecture Pack."

Dr. Laura targets the new Sodom: Libraries

Thu, 27 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Listeners who tuned in Dr. Laura Schlessinger's radio talk show on April 15 got a real earful: "The ALA" -- American Library Association -- "is boldly, brashly contributing to sexualizing our children," Schlessinger told her audience of 20 million. "And now the pedophiles know where to go." What a way to commemorate National Library Week.

Schlessinger was riled up about the association's bill of rights, specifically a clause that put the group on record against restricting kids' access to any library materials, including the Web. The library group's stand was already controversial, but Schlessinger went nuclear. She couldn't have sounded more outraged had she stumbled upon a bevy of Schlessinger impersonators flashing the pink for Hustler magazine.

"Here it is," she said. "On the ALA's home page list of recommended teen Web pages, the ALA recommends Go Ask Alice, a site discussing many graphic issues including bestiality, sadomasochism, group sex and other. In my opinion, the ALA has done something evil, which -- as you know from Mother Laura -- is something way past dumb."

21st: Are we ready for the library of the future?

Tue, 02 Dec 1997 20:00:00 +0000

Librarians today will tell you their job is not so much to be shepherds of books but to give people access to information in all forms. Since librarians, like so many people, believe that the entire universe of commerce, communication and information is moving to digital form, they are on a crusade to give people access to the Internet -- to prevent them from becoming second-class citizens in an all-digital world.

Something funny happened on the road to the digital library of the future, though. Far from becoming keepers of the keys to the Grand Database of Universal Knowledge, today's librarians are increasingly finding themselves in an unexpected, overloaded role: They have become the general public's last-resort providers of tech support.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Today's libraries offer a variety of media and sociocultural events -- they are "blended libraries," to use a term coined by Kathleen Imhoff, assistant director of the Broward County Library of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. At the newly remodeled San Francisco Public Library, the computers are prominently displayed in the center of the library building while the books are all but hidden on the periphery. Imhoff's own library has word processing and other types of software for patrons to use, Internet access, audio CDs, videotapes, concerts, lectures, books and periodicals in three forms (print, microfiche and digital).

Microsoft Philanthropy

Tue, 28 Jan 1997 15:23:00 +0000

WHICH is the most philanthropic corporation in America?

According to the newsletter Corporate Giving Watch, it's none other than Microsoft Corp. The software colossus, which devotes much of its energy trying to pauperize its competitors, seems to have a soft spot for those already poor, handing out a total of $73.2 million to charities in fiscal 1995. (The 1996 figures, in characteristic Microsoft fashion, are shipping late.) That ranks Microsoft as the top U.S. corporation in giving gifts to charity, nosing out such upstanding corporate alms-givers as Johnson & Johnson ($72.8 million), IBM ($72.2 million), Eli Lilly & Co. ($71.9 million) and Hewlett-Packard Co. ($71.2 million).

News outlets reporting the figures portrayed Microsoft as the model Corporate Citizen, a company doing well by doing good. "Microsoft shares wealth," headlined the San Francisco Examiner, in a typical treatment. Microsoft has accepted the accolades with blushing modesty. "It's been a long-standing tradition at Microsoft to be involved in philanthropy," says Microsoft spokesperson John Pinette. "That goes back to before the company was founded, when Bill [Gates'] mother was on the board of the United Way."