Mad crushing

I am completely crushing on the public library.

Three-ish weeks ago, I started my new job as a Circulation Clerk at Fayetteville Free Library, one of the awesomest public libraries around. It's been fantastic so far. Made me realize that I've finally found "my people" and that this is definitely what I could enjoy doing for the rest of my life.

Fabulous exterior of the former Stickley Furniture Factory
turned Fayetteville Free Library

I think the biggest perk (besides getting to work with awesome people & doing something I enjoy) is how it facilitates my reading addiction by parading a steady stream of new titles in front of my eyeballs. While checking in books, I'm discretely making a pile for myself of those that catch my fancy (such as the tantalizing volume below), so I can check them out (on the library card I now wear conveniently around my neck), and bring them home.

Example of eye candy with a wicked cover

Now that the semester's over, I've already (guilt-free) thrown myself through half a dozen new teen reads, and books I'd been wanting to start, but never come across in the used book stores or book sales I frequent. I had a "What-have-i-been-doing-all-these-years?!?!" moment the first night I brought a bag of books home from work. Not that I don't LOVE buying books to have them for myself, or lend/give away to friends. It's just that so often I buy books I've never read and they turn out to be just OK, or I never even get to them. I've probably read 2/3 of my fairly large collection, but that may be too high an estimate. I'm a fast reader; I just usually buy them faster than I can read them, so there's a backlog.

The current pile (well, actually,
I've finished two of these since Friday morning)

This is what is so magical about the public library system. I have fifteen books and four movies checked out to me right now.  I spent a giddy half hour the other day transferring books from my Amazon wish list onto my holds queue with onlib (I currently have 17 holds in process). Cancel the Netflix subscription! Save up your spending money, Sarah! Let's reap a tangible benefit from those taxes!!! It's amazing! Internet access. Books. Magazines. Newspapers. Audiobooks. FOR FREE!!!

It's incredible to see what a well-funded, well-loved, and well-supported public library can accomplish. Especially with great staff who intentionally recruit from SU's LIS program as a means to inject fresh ideas. I think it will be a hard act to follow, but am ready to learn as much as I possibly can in the time I'm given there.

I'm still forging ahead with my school media plans, in part because I think it will make me more marketable to be a certified teacher. But I could be just as happy as a child/youth services public librarian.

In a side note, I'd been contemplating doing book reviews on the blog, but dunno if I have the patience for taking the time to write them. It might be nice to keep a reading list here, though. Sort of like a mood bar: Status: Just finished Fire by Kristin Cashore. LOVED IT!!! Reminded me of The Green Rider Series by Kristin Britain<3 the fourth volume of which I've had on pre-order for months now. Hurry up, February 2011!

The brutality of space, part I

It's been an uphill battle convincing my big-picture, perfectionistic mind that each post here does not have to be a Grand Unified Theory of every thread currently running tangled and amok through my brain. We've reached a compromise: this is going to be part one of a series (if by series you were thinking non-linear, wibbly wobbley, series-y weries-y thing) orbiting around paper vs. e-books, library architecture, and off-site storage.

The awesome Dr. Ken Lavender shows off a medieval 

medical book outlining the many uses of unicorn horns.

Our 511 Intro to Librarianship & Info Science class (for which I am writing this blog) visited the special collections at Bird Library several weeks ago and saw quite a few fabulous old books/manuscripts/ cuneiform tablets/papyri, etc. 

(Can I just interject that I HATE the word "tome"? I feel like it's a thesaurus-y word that not-so-great authors turn to when they're describing a book and want to spice things up, and dust off their tenth grade vocabulary skills. Congratulations. Petty, I know, but that's what pet peeves are.)

Here are some of the pics I took during our visit. (Let me just add, BTW, that I was SHOCKED by the fact that no one wore gloves while handling these. Isn't that, like, Document Preservation 101, Lesson 1: "Your hands have oils on them! Look, don't touch!"?).  

Italian betrothal book (1500's?) with still-vibrant colors made from 

crushed lapis lazuli and other gemstones. 

Loved the illustrations in this bitchin' Italian devotional 

(14th century, I think?)

We discussed how old manuscripts are valued, not merely for the information they contain, nor simply for the novelty of their age, but also because of what we can learn from examining their physical construction and condition. The Right Reverend Dr. R. David Lankes told us the fascinating story of a researcher sniffing for the scent of vinegar on medieval letters to track the spread of bubonic plague in Europe. Since no merchant was keen to scare away trade by admitting an outbreak in their village, they'd write normal, "Everything's great over here!" letters, but would dunk them in vinegar to disinfect prior to sending. Not exactly the sort of thing you can capture in a scanned and digitized copy. 

But let me get to my first thought in the debate about digitization, off-site storage, and the glory of physical copies of books: Generally speaking, those special collections-y books are not cheap pulp generated quickly and en masse to be consumed and fall apart shortly thereafter like a mass market paperback of the latest true crime novel, or trashy romance. Many of them are treasures that took incredible amounts of time, and work to create, or are truly one-of-a-kind documents that give us insight into history.

Like this book, which belonged to Queen Elizabeth I 

Writing in the flyleaf of QEI's book. We aren't sure whose 

handwriting it is. The Queen herself? An advisor? 

I feel like digitization opponents often react as though someone is suggesting that we scan old, historical texts to Google Books, and then have an ol' fashioned book-burning party afterwards. Or that some black-suited “They” will come and forcibly snatch the sentimental, leather-bound Jane Eyre Grandma gave them, stomp on it, and shove an e-reader into their hands instead. Maybe that's a straw man, but neither really seems probable. People aren’t going to stop liking books, just because it’s possible to get the information they’ve contained up until now elsewhere. If I know anything about American, individualist, consumerist culture, it's that we are insane hoarders (often of completely worthless items, and I wouldn't consider books useless--especially considering the junk people are piling to the rafters these days).

This debate is complicated for plenty of reasons. It’s about history, and emotion, and all kinds of intangible things. It’s about physical, and electronic space; paper (an increasingly less-renewable resource); access to information (who has it? to what extent? is it equally available to all, regardless of race, gender, citizenship, socio-economic status, etc?). So there are personal, architectural, environmental, and social implications in this not-so-black-and-white discussion.

As a future school librarian and huge literacy proponent, access is the most important element of this debate for me. How much more knowledge could be created, for example, if ancient manuscripts that have been gathering dust locked in archives for decades awaiting scholarly attention, were scanned and made available to scholars around the world? 

My husband is currently working on his PhD at the University of Chicago studying Near Eastern Language and Civilization. When he began his program this fall, he got to take a behind-the-scenes tour of The Oriental Institute there (one of my new favorite places). He texted me the following pic of a classmate standing next to a mummy laying on a piece of styrofoam on a storage shelf in the basement. Apparently (like many museums of its kind), the OI is so full of archeological finds dug up and dusted off by students over the past hundred years that there's quite a backlog. So far back, that there are wooden crates shipped from digs in the 1930's that still remain unopened. What you see in the exhibits upstairs is barely even the tip of the iceberg.  The average person doesn’t have access to that material (also standard for museums for some obvious reasons). 

What's the Dewey Decimal classification # for mummies?

I could, at this point, bring this post back around to special collections at Bird Library, to ask how many students even know what is up there, let alone have access to it? And to ponder the significance or insignificance of that. Or discuss the balance between preserving something for its own sake, or preserving it for use/analysis. Conservation and preservation are fascinating, but I'm not going to explore them right now.

Rather, I'm going to proceed (quite logically, as you'll see) to the apocalyptic film The Day After Tomorrow. I'm sure you're following my train of thought. Just think: mummies-->some examples of which were Incan-->a pre-European American people group like the Maya-->who were generators of the “2012” prophecy-->regarding the apocalypse-->about which the film The Day After Tomorrow also revolves. Six steps!

Still with me? Good. In fact, if you've stuck with me this far, here's your opportunity to be rewarded. The first person to email me and say, "I read your f@#%ing long blog post" will get a $5 Starbucks gift card. For reals.

Tobogganing in the NY Public Library brought to you

 by 20th Century Fox

Anyway, in the movie, a group of students have taken shelter in the New York Public Library while a massive, catastrophic shift in climate is causing the city to flood and then freeze rapidly. Huddled together in a reading room with a giant fireplace, they engage in a heated debate (yup, pun intended) with a librarian regarding the ethics of burning books to keep warm (inexplicably, no one suggests burning the heavy wooden furniture surrounding them, but I digress). This leads to the following conversation between two characters walking through the stacks to gather fuel for the fire:

Jeremy: Friedrich Nietzsche? We cannot burn Friedrich Nietzsche! He was the most important thinker of the 19th century!

Elsa: Oh, please! Nietzsche was a chauvinist pig who was in love with his sister.

Jeremy: He was not a chauvinist pig!

Elsa: But he was in love with his sister.

Brian: Uh, excuse me, you guys? Yeah. There's a whole section on tax law down here that we can burn.

Brian, THANK YOU. I would like to pronounce you winner of The Voice of Reason Award. Books are not sacred by nature of their codex format. What are sacred are the ideas they carry, and the freedom of expression they represent; how they help us turn information into knowledge, and ignorance into understanding and empathy. Those words aren't bound by pulped paper (well, they sort of are, but let me wax metaphorical here), and can be transmitted plenty of other ways. For some eye-opening information on the lifespan of different media, see Alison's awesome post on Permanence.  

I'm not trying to say that this debate doesn't matter, or that it has an easy solution, so we should stop worrying about it. It's just that there's a whole lot of "tax law" (along with a bazillion different editions of Nietzsche's work) that has been and continues to be cranked out for public consumption that simply isn't archival material worth preserving for several hundred years, nor should we feel obligated to worship it as such.  Not that I'm a proponent of book burning, or think it's wise for librarians to be the sole arbiters of what is worthwhile. I just don't think we're doing posterity some major disservice by deciding to digitally reformat, or stop printing so many of them (or "re-home" or"humanely destroy" those that are no longer being circulated). 

If I've learned anything from #daveheart this semester, it's that librarians are not booksellers, nor are our livelihoods inextricably linked to the continued perpetuation of the "book" paradigm as we have known it thus far. We're here to provide information access to the public, in whatever format allows for the most access for the greatest number. The future of libraries appears to depend much more on whether they can evolve to meet the needs and expressed desires of the communities they serve. Whether, like Eli Neiburger of the Ann Arbor District Library, you think libraries should get back to facilitating the creation, storage, and preservation of community-generated content as a way to survive; or whether you think our only hope is in becoming full-on community centers, complete with yoga classes and circulating pets, it isn't an either/or. Each library and community will determine the both/and of the situation based on what they feel they want and need. If done well, THAT is what will continue making libraries and librarians relevant and vital to our communities into the future.

"that's what children's librarians do"

Children's librarian dresses up as Cinderella after his kids read over 4,000 books this summer


"People keep telling me I’m really brave, but I just think, 'that’s what children’s librarians do.'"


Awesome story from ilovelibraries.org! You rock, Daniel Meyers! You immediately got me wondering what I could dress up as or do that  would make my future students feel motivated enough to read their eye sockets out. I'm not about to shave my head, and it's unfortunate that our society is still homophobic enough that it's bizarre and novel for men to dress like women, but not vice versa. But I totally think that doing something self-deprecating or zany to fuel reading and involvement is absolutely right up my alley.

Any ideas from my fellow school media or children's librarians?

This is fabulous!

Ithaca Book Sale T-Rex Wannabes, and a species that truly IS endangered

Back off, lady! The Peter Dickinson book is MINE!

OK, so I'm super far behind on posting. I really apologize. I have a more academic post that I'm in the process of writing, but this post will bleed into it.

Some of you may know that I'm obsessed with book sales--well, with books in general-- and with the fabulous Ithaca book sale  (Friends of the Tompkins County Public Library Book Sale) in particular.
One of the reasons this sale is so spectacular is that they have a warehouse full of a quarter of a million good books for super low prices. The sale happens in both fall and spring (with the fall sale being the more highly attended), and lasts for three weekends each time. This past weekend was the second fall weekend, and next weekend will be the wrap-up.

The line at around 7:55 AM, T-minus 5 minutes to
opening day. You can't see it in this photo, but the
line stretches beyond the brick building to the right,
and wraps halfway around the next block.

On opening day of the sale, there tends to be a fairly long line of folks wanting to get first shot at the best books. You can lay your hands on some amazing finds for a flat price ($4.50 for hardcovers and trade paperbacks, $3.50 for children's hardcovers, $2.50 for mass market paperbacks, and $1 for all children's paperbacks--the prices go down each day), so it draws a huge number of booksellers keen to get pricey textbooks on the cheap to resell (we call them "scalpers"), or collectors out to find something rare and incredible, or people who just can't afford Barnes & Noble or Borders anymore. Needless to say, things can get a little nutty on opening day. Sleep-deprivation + adrenalin + book sale=temporary insanity. I liken it to a shark rolling its eyes back into its head as it goes in for the feeding frenzy.

Names are actually scratched out in blue where folks failed
to be in line for the first check!

Fortunately, The Friends of the Tompkins County Public Library group that runs the sale knows what the hell they're doing, and there are very strict rules laid down regarding standing in line prior to opening day. You sign in as soon as you get there, and have to remain in line (no sleeping in your car!) until the sale opens at eight (small bathroom breaks are allowed).
They conduct random line checks during the night, and if they call your name and you're not there, so help me, your name gets scratched the hell out! They're not messing around!

The rainy view from Kate's VW on the way out of Syracuse at midnight.

In order to make the top 200 and be part of the first group to go in, I usually like to leave Syracuse by 4 AM at the latest, get there by 5:30, to end up somewhere between 150th-180th in line. Last May, my BFF Kate, our friend Yael, and I decided that (since Kate was moving to Colorado, and it would be her last book sale for the foreseeable future) we should go ALL OUT. We left Syracuse at midnight, determined to see how close to the front of the line we could get. It was Kate's birthday, by the way, and we'd just had a party at her house a few hours before. But Kate has priorities and knows that the Ithaca Book Sale waits for no woman, birthday or no. What a team player!

I am SOOO jacked to be signing in on the first page!

The rain had started earlier that the evening, and didn't let up on the drive down. It was actually Yael's maiden voyage on the Ithaca Book Sale Express, so we regaled her with war stories and taught her some basic bend/reach exercises for snagging those hard-to-reach volumes, along with a few vital block moves for elbowing out a competitor with their eyes on the same book. We also gave her a copy of the sale map, and recommended an ideal route through the sale based on the books she was after.

We made it to Ithaca around 1:15 AM. This is me signing in at the #33 slot, with a crazed look in my eye, and already slightly drenched just from having walked the short distance from the parking lot.

OK, maybe a little TOO excited.

OK, just had to share this gem from Wikipedia's post on "Sign of the horns" in reference to my gesture on the left: "Whatever the derivation may be, the sign eventually came to signify, variously, that the one gesturing is rocking him or herself, is encouraging the recipient of the gesture to rock, and/or that he/she emphatically appreciates the rocking that has already commenced." 


Rock on. And, yes, I did just cite Wikipedia.


Anyway, usually, there's a large group of legit booksellers and the aforementioned "scalpers" camped out in full battle rattle along the first block of the sale. They stay overnight and are therefore in prime position to be the first to hit the big money spots (certain textbook sections, for example). These folks generally set up normal-looking camping gear to wait out the night (see those behind me in the rocked out picture).

Who is Cadaver Man?

We noticed a strange addition to the line last spring, though. "Cadaver Man" had us all stumped. He looked like a morgue delivery with a plastic sheet over himself, but no visible toe tag. I wondered if the  "Wink's Body Shop" banner on the fence near him might indicate that he was a kind of prop/advertisement, but he eventually emerged from his chrysalis as a middle-aged man! Go figure! He at least probably stayed drier than we did that night, though.

We stationed ourselves at the tail end of the line, and huddled together on lawn chairs under one giant golf umbrella, which didn't do much of anything, considering we all three had our backs pressed against it, drawing the water straight through the material. It was pouring in good earnest now, and we basically got soaked. Did I mention there was a thunderstorm going on? Of course, because of said thunderstorm, we remained the last people in line until folks started showing up somewhat later than normal, about four hours after we'd arrived. We technically could have left Syracuse several hours later than we did, and gotten the same spot in line, but then I wouldn't be telling you this awesome story about how badass I am, now would I?

Once 6 o'clock rolls around, you're in the gravy, as that's when the Ithaca Bakery (conveniently located just around the corner) opens its doors, providing caffeine, delicious pastries/breakfast sandwiches, and a clean, dry restroom. At last, you can begin to recover some semblance of your humanity, just in time to throw it aside in the scuffle that is the first rush into the sale.

Running on adrenalin and at least four shots of espresso from Ithaca Bakery. I look like a stoned homeless person, but Kate manages to look adorable in pearl earrings and Chanel glasses. Wait, is her hair curled?!?!

Don't get me wrong: the sale is incredibly well-organized, and most people are polite. I probably am just playing this up because (like Kristen Wiig with a surprise party) I get so frickin' excited!!

Photo courtesy of NBC/SNL

So excited, in fact, that this fall, I infected two new people with the Ithaca Book Sale Bug: my fellow LIS student Alison, and her partner, Nick, who was visiting from Philly. They were game for leaving the 'cuse around 4 AM the first day, and we packed big sleeping bags (much more comfortable than lawn chairs, but only really do-able sans rain), and set off. We all found some stuff we liked, had a great time, and ate fabulous Ithaca Bakery baked goods afterwards (their cheesecake brownie is one of The Best Things On This Green Earth).

This is me, Alison & Nick camped out waiting for the sale to begin!

Maybe by now, you sort of have an idea how excited I get about this sale. Don't judge me too harshly on this, but this fall I switched out of one class and into another in large part because the first class required an on-campus residency that conflicted with the first weekend of the Ithaca Book Sale. There were other reasons, of course. I didn't feel knowledgeable enough yet about how school media centers even operated to create the sort of lesson plans y'all were working on in 663, so it made more sense for me to take 661, but that's beside the point.

What's the purpose of this overly-long blog post, you may ask? Good question.

I guess this was my thinking: Perhaps I might be considered a dinosaur for still enjoying paper books, but it doesn't appear as though those of us so inclined are going away any time soon. If droves of us will line up in the rain and cold for hours just in HOPES of getting our mitts on some special copies, I don't think that sentiment is headed for extinction any time soon.

There IS, however, one endangered species that plays a vital part of this ecosystem about whose survival I AM DEEPLY concerned. And that is my book shelves. I'd wager it's fair to say that my current collection is about the size of my small, hometown library's children's collection, or at least would be sufficient to fill a well-stocked book mobile. My greedy, unchecked consumption has used up the available space, and now I'm colonizing other areas (the sideboard in the dining room, the ottoman in the living room, etc.) for "shelf space".




These pics are of my main shelves, although I have another full of vintage kids books that needs weeding, and at least a few books in every room, in case a natural disaster or accident should leave me stranded:). This, of course, doesn't include my husband's bookshelves. I've sort of taken over the living room. Already, I'm stacking books two deep on these shelves. What to do? It doesn't help that I brought home a new bag of books from Powell's in Chicago again this weekend, to mingle with the two overloaded bags from Ithaca, and a previous bag from Powell's from a few weeks ago.





So if anyone feels led to help support an endangered species breeding program with a donation of any spare shelving, I'd love to hear from you.

And I know I could probably fit all of these on a Kindle/Nook/Sony eReader. But how would I then decorate my house?!* And who would line up and sleep in the rain overnight in order to, what, download a file? Nope. While I may opt for an e-reader at some point in the future, for now, I'm just gonna keep building my book sanctuary:)

*In the words of Anna Quindlen in her 8/7/91 NY Times article "Enough Bookshelves": "I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves." 

Are we ready for Library Wars?

Anger as a Private Company Takes Over Libraries

By DAVID STREITFELD

NY Times on library privatization

Whoa. Hold on a sec. What?! I guess I should have seen it coming. I mean, obviously the "invisible hand of the market" has done SO well these past few years at ensuring that the public is served and protected, why not put it to work "fixing up" the rest of our civil society? Hmmm... I wonder why I feel such vehement distrust of a company offering to take over public libraries in "ailing communities”? Notice: the article DIDN'T say ailing LIBRARIES, just ailing COMMUNITIES, so who really knows what their criteria were. 

Presumably, the local government was hit hard by the recession, so they're looking to cut costs wherever possible. We're told that Library Systems & Services LLC (LSSI) is under a $4 million contract to take control of three still healthy libraries, but we are NOT told how much money the municipality was already spending on these libraries, so it's impossible to determine if this is truly cost-saving. Of course, the assumption is that governmental organizations are not only completely incapable of overseeing their own operations, but that they have no incentive to run them efficiently (because what other motivation could there possibly BE apart from profit?!). 

There's also the underlying, un-examined assumption that libraries are SIMPLY places to house books and provide internet access, so removing the qualified, and educated professionals that operate them, and who've been trained to provide information services, and replacing them with un-skilled, non-Union, temp-style workers threatened with layoffs if they fail to perform has NO NEGATIVE IMPACT on the quality of service. There's no discussion here (except in the massive and awesome collection of reader comments, which I highly recommend reading) of the incredible value of librarians teaching information literacy, or helping people navigate new technologies, or find the answers to pressing questions.

Image courtesy of J. Emilio Flores for the NY Times

Jane Hanson, the privatization opponent pictured in the NY Times article, is obviously doing an incredibly important thing by speaking out to protect the library, and I wholeheartedly applaud her efforts, so this next comment is in no way a reflection on her personally. But you've gotta love how the anti-privatization figure they pictured was the stereotypical librarian: a sour-faced, pearl-wearing elderly woman. I can only guess that this assists them in making their case that libraries are run by inefficient, elderly, and perhaps unnecessary people who do as little as possible, and are just waiting to collect their "sweet" pensions. Obviously, such people should be gotten out of the way to better serve the citizenry with a more "efficient" and "profitable" style. 

But the question is: how do you measure a library's efficiency and profitability? It seems to me that there are so many important functions and intangible benefits libraries perform and provide that are not really measurable, and these may not necessarily fall under the rubric of "profitability" or "efficiency."  Of course, library scientists have for some time been working to figure out a valuing system for libraries, but a bit more on that later.

One such intangible benefit is the democratizing power of public libraries. Here, people who can’t afford an internet connection of their own, can reap the same benefit from the Information Age as anyone else FOR FREE. During an economic downturn in particular, patrons can and do use the public library to apply for jobs online, take classes to build their resume, or bring their kids to access books and learn how to use information (folks barely making ends meet can't afford to just hop over to Barnes & Noble to drop a chunk of change each time Jr. finishes a paperback). 

Image courtesy of Ecolocalizer

The limited amount of privatization pushes I've studied (which mostly involved municipal water supplies in S. America and India) did everything to line the pockets of whatever company was taking control (along with the politicians who'd paved the way for them), while making the resource more expensive for the average person, as well as cutting skilled local labor--the same sort of "stream-lining" promised by LSSI. When the private companies found they could no longer make a profit, they left for greener (read: cheaper) pastures elsewhere. This often left the community with a still-broken system that was potentially even more expensive to maintain as a result of "innovations" attempted by the corporation which had had no real long-term commitment, or vested interest in serving the community. 

What happens when LSSI decides it has wrung the last ounce of profit out of the library system, can no longer promise rising returns to its shareholders, and so cuts its losses and exits the scene? By then, the municipality will, most likely, have already re-allocated library funds elsewhere, and may find themselves unable to continue library services to its citizens.

The bottom line is that companies serve their bottom line (shareholders), NOT the public. You could argue that since taxpayer money is funding their operation, the public would (at least in part) constitute their shareholders, but such accountability has certainly not been demonstrated anywhere recently by other private contractors paid with taxpayer dollars. I mean, can you name a time when Black Water or Haliburton gave a damn what the American taxpayer thought? They've touted "corporate personhood" as a means of validating their often sociopathic pursuit of profit at the expense of the public interest. So I think it's a perfect time to call their bluff and say that we're therefore unable to entrust them with running vital public institutions like the public library system.

Image courtesy of Water is Life

In my honest opinion (and I know I'm not a lone voice here), there are certain institutions too important to be left to the whims of market forces and profit. It's probably just the "crazy Socialist" in me talking, but some social services are absolutely necessary for the health of the community, and the nature of these vital services are often such that it may not be possible to run them in a "profitable" manner and still serve a democratic populace in a moral way (those "Socialist" fire-fighting, law enforcement, and water/sewer services, for example). I would argue strongly that health care and libraries are to be grouped among those sacred cows, and we've already seen how broken our capital-centric health care system has become.

This is the reason we pay TAXES: to support and subsidize necessary public services that private companies can't be trusted to operate in the best interests of the population. 

Why? Because we're a democracy, and therefore we value the delivering of essential services to all citizens in an equitable manner, regardless of socioeconomic status. We're also NOT using an accounting system that conveniently externalizes the human cost of lost employment and decreased access by, or service to the public in order to show a short-term "profit" on our balance sheet.

I think it's important to ask at this juncture, whether privatization pushes might somehow (at least in part) be a kind of logical conclusion some might reach based on the use of Return On Investment (ROI) analysis of libraries intended to demonstrate their value to the community. I know only a small amount about ROI, and think it's vital to put some sort of legible dollar sign on all that the library accomplishes in a community to underline its importance. I'm all for putting the services libraries and librarians provide into terms politicians and taxpayers can understand, but I think we should consider whether by monetizing invaluable services, we might set ourselves up for economic evaluation, and possibly the determination that we're not "cost-effective." 

Beyond purely economic criticism, the idea of a private company having control over the information available to the public smacks of censorship and bias (and you can’t tell me that it wouldn’t happen when “all operations — including hiring staff and buying books — [will be] ceded to L.S.S.I..”). Who's to say that the company won’t receive money from an outside source (um, say, a big oil company, or a particular political party) which pushes them to surreptitiously remove all negative press regarding said company or party, along with any information contrary to their beliefs, from the library shelves? Or perhaps invest more heavily in purchasing resources that paint their actions and views in a rosier light?

Photo courtesy of Anglo Enterprises & Vineyard Film Limited
1966 production of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Retrieved from Wolf in Sheep's Clothing blog

It's possible that I'm (slightly) overreacting, and if anyone has stories of privatization working in the long-term for the good of a community, this would be a great place to open up discussion. I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts. But to me, privatizing public information access, is a slippery slope to censorship and just one more sledgehammer blow driving the existing wedge between upper and lower classes in this country a little deeper.

WAIT! I have an idea: how about we replace all the CEOs of major banks, investment firms, mortgage lenders, etc.,  with much lower-paid, less-experienced temps. They have already proven quite dramatically that they are both HIGHLY inefficient and unprofitable to our economy, as well as being inimical to the health of our nation. Hooray for outsourcing! Sound good to anyone else?