My Beef with the Bibliotech "Library"...

My problem with Bibliotech, "The nation's first bookless library," is quite simply two-fold.  The tagline is a complete misnomer.

It isn't completely "bookless," but it sounds "cooler" and "hipper" to say that it's the first [insert adjective] library in the nation.  It does have books, just not in paper format, or do we not count e-books as books anymore?  Instead of paper and pulp, the words are in 0's and 1's.  "Bookless" makes it sound edgy, like it's really a more pioneering endeavor.  A library with no books means we put the cool back in the library.  What can be more attention-grabbing than a headline with a contradiction.

While it may be funded from the library portion of the budget, let's keep it real, it is a tech-lab.  Other libraries already have tech-labs; some with video equipment and some with maker-bots.  I doubt that they make their staff wear polo uniforms.  They wanted to recreate an Apple store, so they did.  Do you know the last thing I think of when I walk by an Apple store, the library.  Why do so many libraries want to be an Apple store??  Again with the wanting to appear hip and relevant, how about you just focus on being a library.  I must admit, this rant might be influenced by my intense dislike of Apple in general.

If this is the future of public libraries than this is just sad because if I wanted to wear matching polo's to work, I would work for an electronic store and have a job title with "Geek" or the ego-inflating "Genius" in it.  To all you public libraries that what to one-up Bibliotech to get some media attention, here's the next future evolution of the public library.  Build a room with tables, chairs, electrical outlets (throw in some USB charging ports to let the public know that you're really with it), and wi-fi.  That's all you'll need and you can bill yourself as the first ever 'bookless, staff-free library.'

We could argue the semantics of the word "library" for days on end and we could argue the merits of it evolving with constantly changing technology and patron needs.  It reminds me of one MLIS class where the professor started the lecture by posing the question, "What is information?  Is [insert noun] information?"  This led to the majority of class going back and forth about what they thought information was while the professor just sat behind the desk without saying a word and watched us argue.  I could only assume that the professor thought that after an hour and a half  spent arguing would lead us to walk out of the room reaching the zenith of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: Self-actualization.  But it only left me frustrated because I walked out realizing I just wasted my time and gas driving to campus to listen to my classmates argue for over an hour without any input or guidance from the professor.  Wow, I really went off on a tangent there.



TL;DR: Bibliotech is not bookless: the books are digital, Bibliotech is not a library: it's a tech-lab.  This is NOT the future of public libraries.  I don't want to wear polo uniforms to the library, although it would lead to less ironing...

::last minute edit::
I don't have anything against libraries creating and offering tech labs or maker spaces or creator crevices, whatever.  I do not like the misinformation that this is the future of the public library, that the next evolutionary step in public libraries is simply a room filled with just computers is depressing and this is coming from a self-proclaimed non-reader.

Rage of Thrones: I Read the Effing Book, GET A LIBRARY CARD!

Oh yeah, NSFW head's up for language and a naked male-Daenerys, besides, what are you doing watching YouTube videos at work for anyways???

T-Minus 5 days.  It's pretty good timing too, what with 'The Walking Dead' season 3 ending this Sunday as well.  As far as 'The Walking Dead' goes, I cannot say for certain that the comic books are better than the TV show, I think I prefer the show much better.  All I have to say, is that the Governor better die some horrific death or I'm going to be pissed until the start of season 4.

Damn you Oreo Library Commercial!

✓ - visit from the fire department
✓ - patron fight/beef
✓ - calling the police from the info desk
✓- visit from the cops

So my favorite library commercial has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You can say it started last week when a brat pulled the fire alarm.  Yes, I am completely justified in using that word because if you are old enough to walk and talk, you should know not to pull fire alarms.  While we were waiting outside for the firetrucks, my coworker pointed out that it probably turned in to positive reinforcement for them: Pull a fire alarm, get to see a firetruck (or two in our case).  As one patron pointed out, "at least you can count this as your fire drill."

Then this week, a patron came up to the info desk where my supervisor and I were spending the last 30 minutes before close.  He told us that earlier a patron sitting next to him at one of the internet stations threatened him after he asked the guy to take his cell phone conversation else where.  It must not have been that threatening if he waited until he finished typing up his document and printing it to tell us to call the police.

My supervisor called the non-emergency line and passed the phone to the guy.  While he was talking to the dispatcher, the accused came up to the desk to tell us his side of the story, he pretty much said the other guy started cussing him out the instant he answered his phone.  I honestly do not remember hearing a loud phone conversation when I was on the desk and it was a typical slow and quiet night.  But whatever, the accused said that he would wait in the lobby for the police to come.

I was worried that we would have to stay after closing to deal with this patron beef but the police were pretty damn quick and they came in force.  It appears that it was also a slow night for them as well, since 4 decided to stop by the library.  The accuser told them that the guy flashed a knife at him, they searched the guy and looked for it in the lobby and bathroom but there was no knife to be found.  The next morning I also did a search of my own, there's only so many places you can hide a knife in our small library.  The police couldn't really do anything, so they just took everyone's contact information and told everyone to play nice and left.  As one of them walked by the information desk, he said, "Uh-oh drama in the [little rich town] library."  All I could reply with was, "I know right" and roll my eyes.  This was probably only the second time the police have been called to the library.  The only other time was during the last weekend for absentee voting, the lines were really long and voters' tempers were really short.

When all 4 officers were walking out, it was like the commercial was being reenacted in front of me, one of them brought up the commercial and he whispered to his colleagues:  "You guys have to stop fighting, we're the cops!"

Oreo Library Commercial... Best Super Bowl Commercial Ever??

So this was my first time watching the Super Bowl with my library people, this was also their first time watching a game this season...  Needless to say, there were a lot of side conversations like, "Why did that guy run into that group of people, why didn't he just run around them?" "Why didn't he catch the ball it was thrown in his direction?"  Thankfully, I wasn't extremely invested in the game, alcohol does that, so it turned out to be a good time.

But the instant this commercial came on, the whole room was quiet.  It was instantly agreed upon that this was the best commercial of the night.

My Super Bowl Supplies

No one cared about '50 Shades of Grey' until the media told people to.

Damn Sheeple!  Think for yourselves... Don't fall for the hype.

First off, the marketing team behind the 50 Shades books are pure geniuses.  They turned a trio of books filled with utter nonsense, into one of the most talked about  and read books in recent history.  If I was a billionaire, I would hire those people to run a nationwide campaign on using "Please and Thank You."  When I refer to the media, I am not talking about any reliable news networks, I am talking about those morning talk shows with those gabby hosts.

The only thing worse than the attention saying how "great" these books were, was the attention received from stupid libraries that said they wouldn't carry the book.  For all my hatred for these books, I do believe that libraries should add them.  You'd think the ALA would have a firm stance on libraries that declined to stock these books, since they love them some Banned Book ish.  But no, they pretty much turned all soft and said, libraries can do whatever they want, stop asking for our opinion.

For those claiming that 50 Shades are out-right "erotica" are highly confused.  The sex scenes, if you choose to call them that, seemed to have been written by Steve Carrell's character in 'The 40 Year Old Virgin': (obligatory NSFW dislaimer)





"I dated this girl... for a while, and she was really a nasty freak.
She just loved to get down with sex all the time.
She was like, any time of day, she was like: "Yeah, let's go. I'm so nasty."
And I'd be nailing her. She'd be like: "Oh, you're nailing me. Cool."
She loved to dirty-talk. Totally into it.
She'd be like: "Yeah, let's screw, let's... I wanna f**k."
God, it was so dirty.  She'd be like, "Me so horny, me love you long time."
You know, when you, like, you grab a woman's breast
and it's... And you feel it and...
it feels like a bag of sand when you're touching it."



Oh yeah, that's so urro-teak...  This is a disservice to those who actually write erotica.

I don't want to cause public panic or outbreaks of people shouting in the streets, "But what about the children!?!???"  But what if I told you that right now, there are millions of these poorly written smut-books sitting on the shelves in every library right now??

Okay, these are probably better written than '50 Shades'

Libraries chose to fall back on their trusty "Collection Development Plans" when it came to denying shelf-space to this trio of trash.  It's probably been a long ass time since they actually looked at them.  Libraries seem to be too busy trying to reinvent themselves as the "cool and hip" place to be, instead of working on their core principles.  Of course the media picked it up and that just further pushed the hive-mind agenda, the same rules apply to trolls, don't feed them.  Just let them starve from all the attention they aren't getting and we can all move on.  The libraries ended up caving in and bought the books anyway... pathetic.

Libraries are Obsolete: an Oxford-Style Debate

It's an entertaining video, albeit long: 1 and a half hours. 


Here's a summation/ TL:DR : Libraries are Obsolete
Proponents: Technology
Opponents: Digital Divide.

The Lip-Syncing Librarian: "Out of the Game"

Supply and Demand of Librarians/MLIS Degrees...

During my last semester of my MLIS coursework, I came across this report from SLA/IMLS on "The Future of Librarians in the Future."  Okay, so I know that this presentation is dated 2009, but if my running 3 year memory serves me correctly it was not a good time for libraries.

An archived search for "libraries" on Google News during 2009 brings up these results:
Libraries Fighting Proposed Budget Cuts
Strickland puts libraries on the chopping block
City budget plan: 30 layoffs, 1-week closure for libraries
Bad year for Pittsburgh's libraries with cuts and closings
Do I really have to add more links?

The Greying of the Profession is a conspiracy which I will always rant about no matter what.  I find it completely reckless that ALA and Library Schools continue to put out propaganda that "everything is just fine in the library world."  People will argue for both sides, but let's keep it real, those that believe that library schools should continue to pump out MLIS degrees at an alarming rate are delusional.  Now on to the lovely figures and graphs!

Wait a minute, I thought librarians were retiring??
Demand y u no go up?!

The purpose of this particular report was to study the demand and supply of the career, the future prospect of the career.

Supposedly, this slide shows the demand for librarians each year across all libraries.  I really find it hard to believe that these numbers could be this high: public libraries needed/hired 2,759 librarians last year???

Imagine how much greater the demand would be if they
took into account all the MLIS holders who also bag groceries!

Four slides from the previous one, we are met with this one graphing the demand for librarians, but not just any demand --- Effective Demand, sounds sexy, no?  I was forced to take economics class in undergrad and no where do I remember learning about effective demand, do you know why?  Because it is not Econ 101 material, which is exactly why librarians should not try using it to rationalize this "great need for more librarians."
Here is Wikipedia's page on Effective Demand.  Put simply, it's the total demand for goods and services at a given time and price.  Apparently, MLIS holders must be so cheap to explain that enormous demand; they can be placed in any job: baristas, waiters/waitresses, fast-food joints, receipt checkers at Wal-Mart.

Demand goes down = demand goes up WTF

Here are the two demand slides overlaid.  Sorry for my poor photo-manipulating skills, the image is not to scale perfectly, but it seems good enough to me so it will have to be for you.  I had to re-size the canvas area numerous times during my attempts to scale each slide to one another.

This would leave one to believe that librarians are more in demand than the [insert current hot book title]The Hunger Games trilogy.  I do not think using 'Effective Demand' is helpful or really truthful in this particular situation, I believe it was purposefully used to inflate and exaggerate these numbers and further push the conspiracy.
To get these figures, they must have started with a ZERO as the initial supply of librarians.
"4,500 Graduates Going Into Library Jobs," yeah right, they left out the slide titled: "Graduates Going Into Non-Library Jobs Because There ARE NO LIBRARY JOBS."

Librarians and stats do not mix,
unless they involve door counts or circs.

How the bloody hell does one see a 200-300% increase needed in the immediate future?  I have no clue how these people came up with these crazy numbers (drugs, alcohol, used an abacus).  If everyone was to follow this guidance you would end up with a glut of MLIS holders, worse than what we currently have. Really IMLS, really???  200+% more librarians needed???
Do you know the last time anyone projected a 200% demand/need in anything was right before the dot com bubble burst.  How are your Pets.com stocks doing now?
 
Luckily, we have more reliable sources for forecasting librarian demand.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' page for Librarians.  They project an addition of 12,500 jobs between 2008 and 2018, just 8%.

I'm sure the people who completed this yet another horrendous example of librarian research just wanted to be on the safe side:
Librarian 1:"BLS says an 8% increase in positions between 08 and 18..."
Librarian 2:"Hmmmm, a 350% increase in MLIS holders ought to fix that!"
Librarian 3: "Genius!"

Here's what their slides were missing:

FTFY

Troy and Abed in the Morning: Librarians the Keepers of Knowledge...

After class ends on Thursday evenings, I find myself rushing out of class and speed-walking to my car in order to make it home before 8 pm.  NBC's Thursday night line up is the reason I look forward to each week... seriously.

How can you go wrong with 'The Community' 'Parks and Recreation' 'The Office' and '30 Rock' one after another, a glorious feast of comedy.

Here is Troy and Abed on librarians from an episode of 'The Community' a couple weeks back:

Troy: "Why does being a librarian make her even hotter?"

Abed: "They're keepers of knowledge.  

She holds the answers to all of our questions like will you marry me and why are there still libraries?"

Troy: "I want to be a book. 

She can pick me up flip though my pages, make sure no one drew wieners in me."

BOOKS!