The Good Library Blog

Now it's up to us--Americans, that is, who care about literature as well as books in general--to go to the library to get our Twain and Hardy and Tolstoy. By the way, I'm on a Trollope binge this winter. I especially recommend Can You Forgive Her?, the first volume in the Pallisers novels.

Tim...having read the said article, I sense your rage? Tis off the Richter scale....

If a librarian has a role in the world- like a doctor or a bus driver or an anthropologist or a sailor does something that entitles them to use the name- for a librarian it is to have a copy of Hemingway or Twain or Brett Easton Ellis on the shelf; not for now; not because we should all go in and read it this evening, no. They should have it against the hot summer's evening in three year's time when little Doris Dolittle suddenly decides it's the one book in the world that night she would like to read.

That's why we have public libraries-- it's why the Persians and the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians had them five thousand years ago, why the people in Moldavia and Bulgaria have libraries now and cling desperately to them. Why the Chinese are about to build 300,000 new public libraries, They are not vehicles of the market place; they are craftworks of our inheritance over which we have been placed in temporary charge.

If anybody in the world should be fighting to prevent further dwindling of the value of world literature it is public librarians. Are they? Like hell they are- they are driving the bus backwards over the cliff.

Thanks to Lisa Rein from the Washington Post

Not quite as dumb as you make out Tim. "For whom the bell tolls" and "The Mayor of Casterbridge" are both candidates for the skip because statistics show that library users have not borrowed them for two years. Nevertheless, the human guardians of the system, the librarians of Fairfax County have decided to keep them.

I don't think we can argue with the principle that libraries should be responsive to the needs of their users and we should do everything we can to establish what these needs and wants are. Market research is one tool, and so is analysis of what library users are borrowing.

But these techniques are only directional. They do not provide us with the answers to three decimal places and tell us what action to take. They require that rarest of talents - judgment in evaluating and implementating possible courses of action.

These courses of action will be determined by the our beliefs about what libraries should be, enlightened by the results of our researches.

Fairfax County librarians may not have perfect judgment, but at least they are trying to find out about their library users behaviour. If only we could say the same for the majority of library authorities in this country.

I understood "weeded from the shelf" to mean that these two were no longer on display. A book collection ( in a library or a bookstore) runs on its reputation. There are masses of readers and huge demand for both these two books (if there weren't why do Penguin and Random House compete to produce new edtions of these and hundreds of classics like them? ) If you can get a reputation for "having the book I need" or "being the most likely place to have the book I need or one that will do the job" then you will be the place that people go searching.

If these libraries have lost that reputation and people aren't using the library to borrow these books-- then the answer is to stock them and more like them-- not to weed them away.

Perhaps I misunderstood, but I just read it again, and it seems to say the same thing.

We don't need to prolong this Tim, since I know we agree - but the Washington POst says this: Classics such as Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" are among the titles that haven't been checked out in two years and could be eliminated. Librarians so far have decided to keep them. That tells me that Fairfax County librarians are exercising good judgment when research and usage statistics produce daft results. That's the only point I was making.

OK many thanks - sorry for misreading-- Tim