bombs in bottles
Reciprocal shout out to Caffeine and Lasers for this blog post that mentions yours truly:
Another reason why libraries are great
The tl;dr is that libraries are great because they're low-stakes, compared to buying books. You don't need to spend your hard-earned cash on a book (or DVD or CD) you may or may not like; you only need to spend a little time choosing it from the shelf to peruse at your leisure.
As a librarian, I love this and would like to underscore how true it is. I'd also like to present another way libraries are low-stakes:
Librarians do not care. But, like, in the good way.
First: we don't care what you check out. Not in a personal way. We don't care that you, personally, are checking out four books on herpes or the entire "Cat Who" mystery series. We don't care that you've checked out the same DVD fifteen times.
(If we say something, it's only to make sure that *you* know you've checked out the same DVD fifteen times. We'd hate for you to get home and be disappointed.)
We care about "what gets checked out" in the big-picture sense. If we cannot keep cozy mysteries on the shelves, we're ordering more cozy mysteries! If nobody has checked out a single Harry Potter book in seven years, we may move those to make room for books people actually do check out! And so on.
When we look at that data, though, it's "big picture" data. It doesn't have names attached. Because we don't care what you, personally, decide to check out. We're just happy you did.
(We do care about that big picture data. Our funding depends on robust circulation. We care *that* you check things out - we just don't care *what* you check out.)
Directly connected to Caffeine and Lasers' excellent point: Libraries are low-stakes not only because you don't have to spend money on something you may not enjoy, but because *you don't even have to read what you check out.*
Aside from summer reading programs or book clubs, absolutely nobody will know or care if you finish a book in an evening or read two pages and decide you hate it. And summer reading programs and book clubs are opt-in!
Librarians would, of course, prefer if you found something you enjoyed reading. We want you to enjoy books (and DVDs and CDs and other things you can check out). We understand how powerful and enjoyable reading can be. We want everyone to have that experience - so much that we work for sub-living wages in increasingly-burdened public positions with ever-shrinking budgets so that everyone has access to that experience.
But if you check out "The Complete Book of Home Snail Ranching" and decide three pages in that snail ranching is not for you? We don't care. Lowest stakes commitment. Just slide that book right back in the return slot, and no one will ever know if you finished it or not. We won't even ask.
(If we do ask, tell us the truth! "This was the worst book on snail ranching I've ever read!" This information helps us recommend books to other prospective snail ranchers!)
That's because librarians care about privacy. We care about privacy A LOT.
When the PATRIOT Act passed in 2001, it contained provisions that allowed the federal government to demand access to things like people's library checkout records. This was an extraordinary expansion of government access to what used to be very personal and private information. And librarians responded immediately.
Libraries across the country started doing things like *deleting circulation records.* Many libraries tracked which books were out to whom - but the moment a book returned, all records of who had checked it out vanished. We couldn't turn that info over to law enforcement *because it did not exist.*
For most libraries that made this change, it's still the status quo today. We will absolutely defend the confidentiality of your checkout history. Chances are good, we don't even *have* your checkout history.
When I took over a defunct public school library this year, I shredded five thousand old checkout cards that contained student names. These cards came out of books that hadn't been checked out since about 2000. These "students" are in their 40s and 50s now.
Yet no one, absolutely no one, can now find out what books they checked out of their high school library. That information no longer exists. I made sure of that. Because I take patrons' privacy seriously, even when the records are 30 years old.
I don't care if some corporation or government agency may have wanted that info. I care about *you.*
Now get in here and check out some books!
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