I spend two hours every Thursday volunteering at our library. It's cool. I'm practically part of the staff... at least, it feels like that... But it does feel just a bit odd sometimes when the staff comes and opens the door and lets me in an hour before opening time when there are, hello! PEOPLE waiting outside an hour ahead of time for the doors to open! (bet you didn't expect that... (btw, those people are waiting specifically to use the computer bank, believe it or not)
So anyway, I go in, and I go straight to the exclusive :D back room, where I take up the box of... computer cleaning supplies. Out of which I then remove one cloth and zero other items. With this one cloth, I then run over every part of the computer. Half an hour later, voila (or whatever) It's done! Having done this, I collect a list of books to be pulled from the shelves. This is the fun part, even though to date (I've been doing this for months) there is never a single reputable (that I know of) book on the list. The standard formula for my pull list is approximately 1) handful of romances from adult books 2) several manga comics/paranormal romances/just plain dumb books from YA 3) maybe three sci-fis if I'm lucky, I haven't got much against sci-fis 4) ocaissonal western or mystery and 5) handful of instructionals for the 10- set spiced with occaisonnal preteen fantasy. That's the demand in our library.
It gets more depressing, though. Our library is in the center of a strip mall. The comparatively miniscule space of (I've heard) 5600 square feet is supposed to serve a population of approximately 35000! Meanwhile, a town a few miles away which is steadily shrinking just got a new $6.3 million building! Outrage, is it not, that meanwhile our town is reduced to buying the rest of the bankrupt strip mall to grow. No chance of that happening, when the place is losing money like it is. medium town, tiny library. The doom of Libraocracy.
Is your town's library tiny? huge? good selection? Do you even a library?
Long live real books!
p.s. The new #2 on my list of favorite books is Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. Everything else is bumped down one spot. Goodbye Captain Nemo.
Long live real books! We've got several libraries in our area, plus a rural outreach van that goes round to the outlying villages. We're really quite lucky in that sense. My only problem with libraries is that I can't borrow more than 20 books at any one time. Not fair!
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I have to catch up with your story soon. I've just spent the last week and a half preparing for my sister's wedding. However I'm looking forwards to reading all the chapters I've missed.