OK, our public library rocks.
Now, Your Humble Blogger had been accustomed to an academic superlibrary before moving to town, and before that the local public was the BPL, which is a great library and all, and was, like, the first municipally funded library, and was all cutting edge in 1848 and all. So it’s possible that the stuff I’m finding cool is common everywhere, and has been for years. But it’s new to me.
The idea of requesting a book that is out and getting on the waiting list for it, is not remotely new, although it’s cool to be able to do it with a click from the on-line catalogue. What’s particularly cool, though, is that I can request a book that is on the shelf, and they will go and get it and hold it behind the circulation desk until I get there. Well, and you may be thinking that Your Humble Blogger must be unbelievably lazy to want that service. But then you don’t realize that YHB has a Perfect Non-Reader who is not interested in hanging around with YHB during shelf-browsing, or even whilst going around grabbing books from a pocketed list. No, after amusing the Perfect Non-Reader in the magnificently well-apportioned children’s room, YHB must go directly to checkout and then out of the library with no stops, or YHB will be the center of censorious stares. Some of my Gentle Readers will know just what this is like, others can well imagine, or think they can, although it’s far worse than that. Anyway, with this service, I can browse on-line, clickety-clickety, and then a couple of days later when at the library go directly from the children’s section to the circulation desk, pick up two or three books for myself, and go ahead. Magnificent.
The second thing I think is V. Cool is the Gab Bag, a service for reading groups where you can check out multiple copies of a book for six weeks on one card. They have (if I’ve counted more or less right) something like 75 titles. You grab a handsome canvas bag with ten copies of The Professor and the Madman or eleven copies of Carter Beats the Devil and distribute them to your group, collect them at the discussion a month later, and return them. You may wish to ignore the questions and supplemental material “to stimulate thoughtful discussion”, or perhaps you’ll want to use them. Your choice. Oh, and as with individual books you can have the bag held at the desk. I haven’t used this, as I haven’t a book group, but if I did, I sure would.
Third thing: Adopt-A-book. There’s a big binder with a list of bestsellers, magazine subscriptions, CDs, DVDs, audio books, and other items. Find one you are eager for, pull the page out and bring it up to circulation along with some lovely money (bestsellers are mostly $15). The receipt for your tax-deductible donation is on the page. The library buys the book and after it goes through acquisitions, you get an email and it goes behind the circulation desk for you to pick up. You get it first. Now, I know you could just pre-order the thing through Amazon and then donate it to the library whenever you finish it. But this is cooler. And, I suppose, more tax-deductible. But mostly cooler. I would feel much more involved with the library this way, and (absurdly, I know) on occasion go past the shelf to see if my adopted book is in or if somebody has taken it home. I am also more likely to give the library fifteen bucks this way than as an outright donation. I haven’t actually adopted a book yet, but that’s in part because of the Perfect Non-Reader, who has little patience for YHB flipping through a huge binder, even while on-line at check-out.
Well, and also the library has a decent collection, a particularly good collection of children’s books and paraphernalia (oh, and you can check out toys and puzzles and puppets, and they have children’s Lit Kits with four books on a theme together with a toy or a doll or a puppet or a puzzle), and lots of comfortable chairs and meeting rooms and a theater and so on. And Eddie from Ohio plays there a couple of times a year. You know, it’s a cool place. But that’s not particularly new or impressive, it’s just the library.
So, am I hopelessly behind the times, impressed beyond reason at the commonplace? What’s cool about your local public library, Gentle Reader?
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
From what I learned in collections development at Drexel, most libraries do not accept any sort of outright book donations from patrons (or anyone), so your “you could just buy it from Amazon, read it, and donate it” model likely wouldn’t ever work. Libraries order a special library-binding edition if possible (it isn’t always, with things like bestsellers, though), but above and beyond that, less than half the cost of a library acquiring a book is the purchase price. Cataloging is time-consuming and expensive, as are a few other concerns, so receiving donations is far from free for a library. I’m guessing their Adopt-a-Book program is budgeted and funded in special ways that receiving random donations couldn’t be, and besides, this way you do even less work. And no, I never heard of such a service mentioned in my library science program, and yes, I think it sounds fabulous!
Fetching the books for you is nice, but the similar service that I use (Amazon, more expensive, but they include delivery) makes me miss the happy and peaceful browsing of the stacks. When I’ve gone to get a book myself in a library (or bookstore), I’ve almost always found other fascinating books nearby.
The gabbag program is brilliant — it not only facilitates reading groups, it greatly reduces the work for the library staff who don’t have to check out, check back in, and reshelve a whole bunch of books separately.
Adopt-a-Book sounds odd, though I’d probably use it for DVDs if it were similarly priced to a rental (or even a little higher). It does remind me that I should give some of my DVDs to the library. I know they were delighted when I gave them 100 DVD cases — I suspect they’d be just as happy if they came with DVDs inside them…
Actually, Wayman, what I learned in my library science collections development course is that many public libraries *will* accept books directly donated…IF they meet the library’s pre-existing collections policies. The large, publicly-funded academic library I work for now certainly does exactly that. Individual libraries will, of course, set up their own policies and procedures regarding donated books; it tends to be a fairly touchy subject and one that libraries will be particularly careful about.
Closely related to the WRL’s Adopt-A-Book program is the phenomenon of libraries setting up wish lists on amazon.com. This way, the library can specify (as with Adopt-A-Book) which titles they want, how many copies, etc. and folks get the convenience of online ordering from Amazon. Also, much of the cost of acquiring the book is removed for the library, since the donor and Amazon handle all the ordering, billing, invoicing, shipping, etc. The library still has to catalog it (most just copy the record from OCLC) and shelf-prep it, but it’s worked wonderfully well for libraries…when people know about the wish list.
And this is where the Power Of The Internet comes in: bloggers and others with substantial online followings can call attention to libraries’ wish lists. Most famously, Pamela Ribon (www.pamie.com) has gotten her readers to donate thousands of books to, among others, the Oakland Public Library. Many of the libraries who received books commented that nobody had ever noticed their wish lists until Pamie called attention to them.
I note that the Williamsburg Public Library has an Amazon wish list (the url is a monster, so I’ll leave finding it as an exercise for the reader), but it only has 4 items, all of which have been purchased.
all that having been said, I must sheepishly admit that it has been years since I darkened the doorstep of my local public library. But then, I’ve been working at various other libraries during that time, which more than satisfied my reading and information needs.
Love your Mad Google Skillz.
The big difference between the Amazon wishlist, other than the evils of Amazon, is that the Adopt-a-Book provides an incentive to donate a particular book that the patron wants to read soon. Still, the Amazon wish list is a cool thing, particularly if it works.
The WRL does accept book donations, but reserves the right to just sell the book rather than putting it in the catalogue. I’m guessing the books mostly just go from the donation bin to the sales bin without anybody wasting time sifting through them.
Thanks,
-V.
I really like the adopt-a-book idea.
I’ve used the “hold this book for me” technique for things that both were and weren’t in the library. One doofy thing about the Pasadena Public Library is that they aren’t set up to send you e-mail when your book comes in; they only notify you via snail-mail! That seemed like a waste to me, so I put a note in my request saying “please don’t snail-mail me, I’ll just check the web site daily to see if the book is ready yet”, and that seemed to work; but is clunky.
The WRL has not only the email system (good) but an auto-phone system for people without email. US mail is not really a good substitute.
Thanks,
-V.