June 07, 2003

Ou est la bibliotheque?

Budget problems are causing our state libraries' hours to be curtailed, as they apparently are all over the country. This is not a good thing. I remember riding my bicycle down Olympic Boulevard in West LA to my neighborhood branch library every Saturday morning when I was ten. It was a ritual. Why was I not mowing the yard instead of indulging myself, you ask? Ha! The front yard was all dichondra, and the back yard was the size of a postage stamp; it needed raking to pick up fig and apricot leaves more than it did mowing. Anyway, libraries have always been one of those civic institutions I admired, and it's distressing to see access being limited and acquisitions being delayed or reduced in number. I wanted to read Kevin Phillips' 2002 book Wealth and Democracy, so I reserved it (online...is that neat or what?); unfortunately it took six weeks to get what appears to be the only copy in the state into my hands. Then I hadn't quite finished it by the due date, so I tried to renew, and was told I couldn't because it was "on hold" for someone else. Hard to argue, since my hold had probably done the same thing to someone else, but it's a fine state of affairs when a system of 50 circulating libraries has only one copy of a major non-fiction title.

In the brave new world of ordering books through Amazon, anyone else still use the library?

Posted by Linkmeister at June 7, 2003 10:44 AM
Comments

Yep, I still use the library. Nearly every 1-2 weeks.

Posted by: Jen at June 7, 2003 11:48 AM

Yes, I use the library...
I had to wait two months for "Stupid White Men"..
and 3 months for "The Lovely Bones" so I bought the book myself...
Sometimes library books have foodstuffs in the pages. I once found a piece of salami on a page...I guess they used it as a bookmark...
I buy books nowadays..
p.s. Have you gotten ahold of "The Life of Pi" yet??

Posted by: toxiclabrat at June 8, 2003 08:20 AM

Er, no, Toxic, not yet. I will, though!

Posted by: Linkmeister at June 8, 2003 08:24 AM

Yes, I still use the library. So far, we haven't had any cutbacks in hours, but it may come. Our library had a huge new addition including media rooms and conference rooms built a couple of years ago. We seem to have a large Friends of the Library society around here and new acquisitions haven't slowed appeciably yet. I hope that doesn't change.

Posted by: Raye at June 8, 2003 11:38 AM

I don't use the library these days, though I've been meaning to get a library card for a long time. I have this thing about books I've read being trophies, so I want to be able to keep them. Even if they stunk.

In NYC we have, as I'm sure you've heard, a HUGE budget gap. Many services have been cut, including library hours. Bloomberg recently found $92 million that could be put into the budget, and he used part of it to bump the libraries back up to 5 days a week. Yes, that's right. NYC public libraries were open fewer than 5 days a week.

Sad, isn't it?

Posted by: Kim at June 9, 2003 06:50 AM

I used to take Lil Man to the library when he was a solo kid and we lived on that side of the highway. I'm not brave enough to take both boys in together, although Baby Boy does love him a good curious george book -- silly monkey (Baby boy, not George)! We used the video collection pretty well every week, and there's no way I could collect all the Encyclopedia Browns. There's a new branch opening near us soon, so we'll probably start going again.

The library in my hometown was air-conditioned! So my brother, sister and I would walk there every day during the summer and stay from about 10:00 until 4:30 or so. In the cool air.

I read every one of those biography series for kids, all the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys and tons of other stuff. We brought home one book, read it at night and took it back the next day. We read voraciously. My parents bought a brick with our names on it when they renovated the library, since they ascribe our "success" to spending all day there. We were just trying to stay cool!

Posted by: Skatemom at June 10, 2003 08:40 AM

Skatemom, can you say "Trixie Belden?" ;)

Posted by: Linkmeister at June 10, 2003 08:50 AM