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I’ve done it again.  Delayed my Fusenews too long and now this post is going to overflow with too much good stuff.  Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

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Me stuff for the start. And in fact, there just so much Me Stuff today that I’m just going to cram it all into this little paragraph here and be done with it. To begin, for the very first time my book Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Chidren’s Literature (co-written with Jules Danielson and Peter Sieruta) was cited in an article. Notably, a piece in The Atlantic entitled Frog and Toad and the Self.  Woot!  In other news I’m judging a brand new picture book award. It’s the Hallmark Great Stories Award. Did you or someone you know produce a picture book in 2016 on the topic of “togetherness and community”? Well $10,000 smackers could be yours. In terms of seeing me talk, I’m reading my picture book (and more) at the Printer’s Row Lit Fest on June 11th.  If you’re in the Chicago area and ever wanted to see me in blue furry leg warmers, now your chance has come here.  Finally, during Book Expo I managed to coerce Hyperion Books into handing me three of their most delicious authors (Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, and Eoin Colfer) so that I could feed them to WGN Radio.  You can hear our talk here, if you like.  And check out how cute we all are:

Colfer, for what it is worth, is exceedingly comfortable.  I highly recommend that should you see him you just glom onto him for long periods of time.  Like a sticky burr.  He also apparently has an Artemis Fowl movie in the works (for real this time!) and you’ll never guess who the director might be.

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This is interesting. Not too long ago children’s book author C. Alex London wrote a piece for BuzzFeed called Why I Came Out As a Gay Children’s Book Author.  It got a lot of attention and praise.  Then, earlier this month, Pseudonymous Bosch wrote a kind of companion piece in the New York Times Book Review. Also Known As tackles not just his reasons for a nom de plume (skillfully avoiding any and all mentions of Lemony Snicket, I could not help but notice) but also how this relates to his life as a gay children’s book author.

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Hey, full credit to The New Yorker  for this great recentish piece on weeding a collection and the glory that is Awful Library Books.  My sole regret is that I never let them know when I weeded this guy:

The copyright page said 1994, but I think we know better.  Thanks to Don Citarella for the link.

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Cool. The publisher Lee & Low has just released the winner of the New Visions Writing Contest, now in its third year.  Congrats to Supriya Kelkar for her win!

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New Podcast Alert: With podcasting being so popular these days, I do regret that my sole foray into the form has pretty much disappeared from the face of the globe. Fortunately there are talented folks to listen to instead, including the folks at Loud in the Library. Teacher librarians Chris Patrick and Tracy Chrenka from Grand Rapids, MI (homestate pride!) get the big names, from picture books illustrators to YA writers. Listen up!

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New Blog Alert: The press release from SLJ sounded simple. “SLJ is pleased to welcome The Classroom Bookshelf to our blog network. In its sixth year, the Bookshelf features a weekly post about a recently published children’s book, including a lesson plan and related resources.” Then I made a mistake. I decided to look at the site. Jaw hit floor at a fast and furious rate leaving a dent in the linoleum. Contributors Randy Heller, Mary Ann Cappiello, Grace Enriquez, Katie Cunningham, and Erika Thulin Dawes (all professors at Lesley University’s outstanding school of ed.), I salute you. If I ever stop writing my own reviews, you’ll know why.

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This:

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This one’s just for the New Yorkers. I’m sure you already saw this New Yorker paean to the Mid-Manhattan library, but just in case you didn’t it’s here, “unruly pleasures” and all.

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For whatever reason, PW Children’s Bookshelf always goes to my “Promotions” folder on Gmail, so I assume they already mentioned this article. Just in case they didn’t, though, I sort of love that The Atlantic (second time mentioned today!) wrote an ode to Sideways Stories from Wayside School. Thanks to Kate for the link.

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Now some Bookshare info.  The idea of providing free ebooks for kids with print disabilities is a good one.  And, as it happens, not a new one.  Bookshare, an online accessible library, just added its 400,000th title to its collection and boy are they proud.  Free for all U.S. students with qualifying print disabilities and U.S. schools, they’ve a blog you might want to read, and they service kids with blindness, low vision, dyslexia, and physical disabilities.

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Daily Image:

You probably heard that Neil Patrick Harris will be playing Count Olaf in the upcoming Netflix series of A Series of Unfortunate Events.  Now we have photographic proof.

I wonder if Brett Helquist ever marvels at how much power his art has had over these various cinematic incarnations.  The lack of socks is a particularly accurate touch.

 

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Collections are big and ungainly things. No matter how hard you try, they grow like topsy. But like any weedy thing, too much growth sucks up space, oxygen and *things* start taking over. Soon the weedy things completely obscure the healthy things and before you know it, kids and families start wandering aimlessly through the growth praying to the gods and goddesses to get them out of there.

Ah, it is clearly August in libraryland. A time when the minds of youth librarians turn to tending those shelves and making some progress through the weeds. There I found myself today working with a colleague and talking about what, for me, is an absolute favorite library activity - deselection!

Maybe I like it because weeding as an activity is a microcosm of management - a hundred tiny decisions that need to be made with confidence. Some are quick; some are slower and some can't be made at just that moment and the book needs to be re-shelved to see how it fares for a little more time.  Perhaps a bit more face-out display time for this one or handselling to kids might jumpstart it. There is an element of careful consideration and finesse that I enjoy as well.

Today we were in chapter books discussing the kind of criteria that we need to think about to make good weeding decisions.  Condition is always easy (Eeeee-yooooo = toss!). Of course, if it's popular, then we need to re-order. 

How is the circulation on the item?  With a three week check-out period, an item could have 17 circs per year in a perfect world of everyone keeping books exactly three weeks and no overdues. But more realistically, we expect most chapter books to have an annual turnover average of 4-6 circs. Way over that number and we may buy an additional copy. Way under...oh-oh, not making the shelf-rent and we'll have to evict you.

What is this book really?  Has it stood the test of time and emerged as a keeper?  Has the story, the writing, the plot and the language endured and found a home with the readers in our community.  We have many books that are between 4-5 years old that have not crossed over that divide.  Reviewed well but never truly a fit; sadly un-checked out; written by authors once - or never- popular, these books need thought but often must leave the island as well.

Books that are pedestrain in content (think the equivalent of series nonfiction - churned out; undistinguished; full of bad cover art and clearly aimed at a school audience that needs to "keep to a reading level") are an easy fling.  Books once popular but fading in appreciation (oh Beverly Cleary, this is killing me), get to stay but only in a guilty way.  As a resource library, we can always make the argument that our collection needs to be deep after all.

And finally, how does the book fit into the overall collection. Is it just one of eleventy-zillion fantasies and a poor circ'er? Good-bye. Is it our only book written from the viewpoint of a camel (let me check the circ on that and get back to you) with fairly wretched original reviews?  Buy-bye. Do we only have the third book in the series and the rest are out of print? Sayonara.

Though the reader in me calls out to keep them all, the realist knows that we have reached a capacity that calls for one book weeded for every one cataloged. So it comforts me to think of these books going to our Friends who will sell them and give us the money to fund our programs and initiatives.

And don't our shelves look dandy and the beep of increased circs for the remaining books sound nice?

Image: 'La caverne aux livres' http://www.flickr.com/photos/24183489@N00/395079578

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In order to get a few days off mid-week to do some research, I did some shift trading and found myself working three weekends in a row.  And as I worked, I realized how much I like those weekend shifts. Why?

*Each weekend day is a four hour shift - two people split the duties: one goes 9-1 on Saturdays; the other works 1-5 on Saturday and Sunday. These are short, quick shifts that are easily worked and still leave plenty of time for weekend fun.

*It's all desk, all the time. I gear up for having a good day with patrons and for the most part I do. I get into my Wakanheza place and launch my service self from there. Even if I have to get tough, I have a smile and joke in reserve.

*Because of the pretty high usage and good pace, I only plan service to the public and not projects while working. So with my goal to serve the patrons, I ineveitably accomplish my work. If I do manage to get through emails or finish a report or design a handout because it's slow, that's a bonus - but not an expected result.

*As a manager, these are great days to work - lots of hands-on, sleeves-up reference and reader's advisory but no calls to negotiate, mediate, problem solve for staffers within the department or around the library - we are all too busy giving primary on-desk service (or having great days off!). This unadulterated face time with kids and families is golden.

*Weekends are great times to be up and about from the desk - straightening shelves and displaying books; spot weeding collections; chatting with kids and adults using the room; helping with catalog searches.  There are fewer phone calls so being tied to the desk isn't necessary and the pace is definitely one that keeps me moving.

*I get to check in throughout the shift on Twitter with the #saturdaylibrarian and #sundaylibrarian hashtags that connect me with colleagues from all types of libraries. Sometimes we comment on our days; sometimes we help each other with reference queries and sometimes we count down the time and patron quirks.

I don't think I'm Pollyanna-ish or see the weekend world through rose-colored glasses or live the lemons/lemonade paradigm. I just genuinely like those Saturday/Sunday shifts. It could be I'm just weird. Anybody else weird like me?

Image: 'It's here!'  http://www.flickr.com/photos/94812957@N00/341430448

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If the name Munro Leaf rings a bell to you, it's probably thanks to that charming classic he penned and Robert Lawson illustrated: The Story of Ferdinand, about a bull who would rather sit and smell the flowers than fight in the ring. Apparently the book, first published in 1936, was banned in several countries for its pacifist, apparently lefty ways. Although it won no awards that I know of, it's inspired political change and works of art and remains a favorite more than 70 years later.

So, in a weeding discovery even more amazing than Isaac Asimov's little-known fascination with vitamins, I was shocked and awed to find this lesser known but still... um... great?... book not only written, but also illustrated, by Munro Leaf: Safety Can Be Fun, first published by Lippincott in 1936. This revised and expanded edition (in its sixth printing!) was published in 1961.

Were you wondering how safety could, possibly, be fun? Let me entice you with a few samples. From the introduction:

And now, a few of my favorite Nit-Wits. I dare you not to fall in love.

Amazing what a little spot color can do.

That's right. "When it eats and drinks the pills, powders, lighter fluid, soaps and medicine it has piled up for a party—it is going to be badly poisoned. Too bad!"

No, your eyes do not deceive you. "Then it played with knives, razors, scissors and an axe until it had cut off the end of its necktie, chopped its shoe and taken a nick out of its ear. So they had to tie its hands up."

And, yes, then there's the baby holding a stick of dynamite and pointing a rifle at its face. "So it will be a race to see which blows him out first."

So it goes, for 63 pages!

Okay. Let's just pause a minute and remember that this is the guy who wrote that sweet little story about a flower-sniffing bull calf—a story that has stood the test of time.

Something tells me that today's parents, even (and perhaps especially) those reading Ferdinand to their little tykes, are not going to dig Safety Can Be Fun.

Munro Leaf had a whole series of "Can Be Fun" books on everything from manners to grammar to geography. He also wrote a book called How to Behave and Why which, unfortunately, my library does not own. I'm not sure whether all these books took the "Nit-Wit" angle or not.

I've been feeling torn about whether to keep the book in our collection. It's such a perverse little gem. But you can see from the images that it's in pretty grody condition. And then there's the whole babies-eating-poison-and-holding-guns things. Oh, how times change. It may be time to say goodbye.

But you know that "Lippincott Life Binding" advertised on the cover? It's no lie. These pages may be yellowed, torn, and covered with gook, but they're firmly attached to the spine!

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A blog borne of frustration, but amusing to read: Awful Library Books.

Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner are public librarians in Michigan and cannot understand why librarians won’t weed the junk from circulating collections. The authors sincerely hope that public librarians will embrace maintaining a quality collection and share similar examples of awful library books.

[thanks eli!]

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Yesterday some pals and I were discussing the marvelousness of How Did We Find Out About Vitamins? and started to get into some of the other dubious treasures I've found while weeding. So, without further ado, here are a few more tales (and photos!) from the weed patch.

Kids still dream of being firefighters, police officers, teachers, doctors, astronauts... while other careers just don't have the same cachet.

I love the enormous smiles that textile worker, carpenter, and secretary are wearing. You almost believe they're enjoying their work. (Actually, the carpenter does look like she's having fun! And props to Children's Press for going against gender stereotypes and showing us a female carpenter.)

Dated books in our collection? I have no idea what you're talking about.

My next thought was obviously what about East German food and drink? Gruel, my friend S. said with certainty. Definitely gruel.

Speaking of dated, I bet you can't guess what decade this little beauty—which will teach you how to make a peasant dress, draw-string blouse, and dashiki—was published in.

Oh, wait, you guessed the sweet seventies? You're absolutely right. My bad.

Sometimes the datedness is cringe-worthy.

Food the Indians "gave" us. Indian corn and other "gifts." Because the Indians were so happy to see "us" (for of course we readers are ethnically European), they showered "us" with gifts and then disappeared off the face of the earth, don't you know.

This one, on the other hand, makes me laugh. The headband! The puffy vest! The creased-brim trucker hat! The roller skates! Yes, dear readers, the year is 1983.

This is actually a gem of a book. Aimed at latch key kids, it's a treasure trove of information for anyone living independently. Time management? Blackouts and lockouts? Plumbing emergencies? First aid? Cooking? Laundry? Unfortunately, it is still quite dated (I don’t know about you, but my local grocery store doesn’t let me charge things to my family’s monthly account) and will probably have to go.

Sometimes you’ve got a book chock-full of fun and fascinating information, but there’s something about the title that’s just…how should I put this…a little off-putting.

Sure, I think it’s fun and exciting and eco-friendly to grow yams and alfalfa at home using compost scraps. But something about that word “garbage” conjures up images of dirty diapers, moldy pork chops, and rotten milk, and I lose my appetite. (That said, I’m keeping a copy of this book, in the hopes that someone will be able to see beyond the title.)

Then there are times when, no matter how enticing you try to make the subject matter sound, the reader just ain't gonna buy it.

Yes, I know the earliest known writing was done on clay tablets. That’s wonderful. Humans have lived in clay houses, eaten from clay vessels, made beautiful art from clay—wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. But I’m sorry, this book looks dry as dust.

In closing, I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Listening?

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I've been weeding the 600s (Applied Science), and as always it's interesting to see what has circulated and what hasn't. In this section, most of the non-circs are older books (1970s and 80s) that have faded covers and the crusty patina of many children's dirty hands. Most of these books are "report books", written for the educational market but without long-lasting literary or illustrative value, so it's pretty easy to decide that, yes, we can get rid of this, that, and the other thing.

One of the most interesting things to me has been seeing "report books" written by authors who have since become better known for their trade work. (Peter at Collecting Children's Books wrote a terrific post about just this phenomenon; did you know Maurice Sendak's first gig was illustrating a book called Atomics for the Millions?) Sometimes it goes the other way; a well-known picture book author does a spin-off cookbook, for example.

And then there are the things I can't explain.

Why did the author of the classic and hugely popular science fiction Foundation Trilogy write a book called How Did We Find Out About Vitamins? Was Asimov that hard-up for cash, or were vitamins a personal passion of his? Or was this book actually written by a different guy named Isaac Asimov—a guy who wasn't living (at least reasonably) large off royalty checks and public appearances?

Regardless, could that book possibly have a more awkward title than How Did We Find Out About Vitamins?

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When I wrote my post about book spine design last month, I thought I was doing nothing more than griping to the ether. Then yesterday I received a comment from the marketing manager of Center Point Large Print, a small publisher based in Thorndike, Maine (that town should ring a bell for anyone who works with large type books). He said that as of this fall, they’ll be leaving the bottoms of their books’ spines blank to leave room for library cataloging information! How about that? Special thanks to my friend Dan for spreading the word to all those ALA memebers, transforming my rant into an instrument of actual change.

Continuing the theme of book design, editor Alvina Ling posted some interesting thoughts about the challenge of designing books to please everyone, over at Blue Rose Girls. All the book jackets she shows in her post are, of course, highly attractive. But don’t you wonder how some of the covers out there slip through?

As anyone who’s worked in a library knows, weeding the collection (or pruning, withdrawal, deselection, [your euphemism here]) is a bittersweet fact of life. With limited shelf and storage space, we simply cannot keep every book we buy indefinitely. Books that are out-of-date or in poor condition are the first to go. But if the shelves are still too crowded, the less popular books have to go, too. That’s the bitter part: saying goodbye to books that are in good condition and got good reviews (presumably, or we wouldn’t have bought them to begin with) but have sat unmoving on the shelf for years at a time. The sweet part, of course, is having room for new good books.

One of my colleagues is weeding our junior high fiction section right now. The impact of a book’s cover is never more glaring than when you see dozens of noncirculating books all together on a cart. The vast majority of these books have covers that are dark, drab, low-contrast, and/or generally unattractive (blah landscapes, ugly people, too old-fashioned, etc.). They are books that you know even if they were the most amazing stories in the world, you’d never get a kid to crack them without the smoothest hand-selling job in history.

Unappealing covers are enough to strike fear into the hearts of any author who wants people to, you know, actually pick up their books. But it gets worse. Over at the Longstockings blog, Coe Booth has posted about not one, but two, instances of author friends’ books being blocked by a major bookselling chain because of their covers. Apparently, this isn’t an uncommon phenomenon. Yikes! (Of course, I am madly curious what it was about the covers that made them contentious…)

Coincidentally, my husband is currently enjoying Chip Kidd’s not-quite-coffee-table book Chip Kidd: Work 1986–2006. Book One (Rizzoli, 2005), and I’ve been reading over his shoulder a bit. Chip Kidd, as well as being a novelist in his own right, has designed hundreds of book covers, including the iconic cover of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. (Ironically, Kidd's book was bound as a strange hardcover/paperback hybrid. Repeated—i.e., library—use has cause the wide, flimsy pages to tear away from the binding. Clever-looking design, but low on usability and durability.)

Finally, interested in book design of yore? How about books that were basically Ping Pong paddles covered with ox horn? I loved Collecting Children’s Books’ post about horn books and battledores, these centuries-old tools for teaching children to read. Peter’s got some great photos and trivia there. For example, did you know that “xylophone,” that classic X-word of alphabet books, wasn’t coined until 1866? (And forget about X-rays, of course!) Follow the link to learn what authors did for letter X before that, and more...

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So, I managed to discard 40 or so books from the HF section of my library. I'm happy. I wish I could've done more though since now we have inventory so I still have to count them all anyway. Weeding is a very slow process, a lot slower than I had expected. Part of the reason is my inability to just run reports (e.g. I can't just get a list of all books pre-1990 in my areas) because that all has to be done through the consortia and costs lots of money. Instead, I have to tediously go through and create my own list. Anyway, I'll keep working on it. I did end up keeping about a dozen of the old books because they really do seem to be 'classics'.

I've also been weeding at home. I'm moving in, well not quite sure, but sometime before the end of the month. I started packing my books last night. I managed to weed out a collection of 11 fiction paperbacks that I brought into work as donations for our small fiction collection. There's also about 12 nonfiction books or hardcover fiction that I don't want; I'll probably see if a used bookstore wants them, if not, off to Goodwill they go. I'm really quite proud that I managed to find 20 books I'm willing to part with. Most of them I hadn't read (like 3 Atwood novels). I also have a pile of maybes. One of my coworkers/friends is probably coming by Sunday to help me go through my mess, so she'll probably get me to get rid of some more books. See, I'm moving from a basement apt into a house with friends; I'll have 1 bedroom for all my stuff, hence the need to cutback on my stuff.

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Now that the website is done (well for a bit, I have to re-do it eventually), I have to find other stuff to work on. So, I'm following after my favourite co-worker (*wink* you know who you are), and starting to look at my collections. I have collections!! Yay! Something to call my very own. Oh sorry, it's just cool to be working in a library.
Okay, so here's the deal: I'm sorta clueless about my subject areas (business, marketing, advertising, public relations, human resources, law and security, computer programming, journalism, broadcasting, and a few others).
From my coworkers and all the librarians out there on the web, I'm getting a sense of what I should be doing and how, but I still can't find a good place for "core lists". I'm not happy to just check whether the other colleges also have the book because that could mean A) they all have it so I should have it too! or B) They all have it so I can ILL on the off-chance a student will want it. Before I keep rambling, I'm just gonna leave it at that and see what y'all think. What tools and resources do you use most? Right now my focus is on deselection aka weeding since I've come across books from the 70s and 80s, like this accounting one, and I'm not sure if there's something special about them or if they're just there.

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They weeded the library science section at my local library. I took home a few books from the FREE cart and also snappd this picture.

books, reading, weeding

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Simon Chamberlain’s VALIS blog points to a bunch of responses to the Wall Street Journal piece about what they see as aggressive weeding. He gives two nods to MetaFilter, one for the discussion about the WSJ thread [which I participated in] and one for a related thread in Ask MetaFilter asking when libraries started being so … noisy. One of my favorite things about these discussions is the interactions between librarians and non-librarians in a non-library setting. The other thing I like is that thanks to MetaFilter’s use of the XFN protocol I can link to every library worker I notice in these threads as a “colleague” and then keep track of their posts and comments. Look at all those librarians talking to each other, and to their once and future patrons.

askme, mefi, metafilter, noise, weeding, wsj

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Weeding any library collection (including the one in my home) is a professional duty but emotionally challenging. Nonfiction in a school library is fairly easy. Is it out of date? Are the pictures in dreary black and white? Is the typeface and reading level friendly to young readers? Is there something better out there that can replace it?

Fiction and picture books are a my biggest challenge. Once you disgard the damaged and dingy, it gets rough. My personal prejudices come into play. I remember I kept a novel that had few circulations because it was wonderfully illustrated by Edward Gorey. I also confess I left a badly-needs-weeding picture book collection to my successor at the elementary school. I just ran out of time. She is a brilliant librarian and has made the tough calls.

One funny note, on a recent visit back there for book fair, I was cruising the shelves and noticed the Gorey book still on the shelves. I mentioned it to the library aide who commented that the librarian WAS going to weed it but it had illustrations by Edward Gorey and she couldn't bear to chuck it at this point. Ha, the torch is passed!

The Washington Post reports that budget cuts, space demands and popular reads are squeezing classics by Hemingway and Brontë off the shelves in the Fairfax library system. Libraries, trying to offer what their users want, are using a retail model to weed their collections and a book must now have 20 circulations in order to remain on the shelf. Each branch looks at their own users.

Public libraries traditionally are also "archives of literature and history." Aggressive weeding threatens this role as Eugene O'Neill's plays are binned in favor of James Patterson.

John Miller at the Wall Street Journal ponders if public libraries themselves are outmoded. Google is planning/hoping to digitize a world of print, Amazon, WalMart and Barnes and Noble offer discounts on the latest reads.

Instead of embracing this doomed model, libraries might seek to differentiate themselves among the many options readers now have, using a good dictionary as the model. Such a dictionary doesn't merely describe the words of a language -- it provides proper spelling, pronunciation and usage. New words come in and old ones go out, but a reliable lexicon becomes a foundation of linguistic stability and coherence. Likewise, libraries should seek to shore up the culture against the eroding force of trends.

The particulars of this task will fall upon the shoulders of individual librarians, who should welcome the opportunity to discriminate between the good and the bad, the timeless and the ephemeral, as librarians traditionally have done. They ought to regard themselves as not just experts in the arcane ways of the Dewey Decimal System, but as teachers, advisers and guardians of an intellectual inheritance.

The alternative is for them to morph into clerks who fill their shelves with whatever their "customers" want, much as stock boys at grocery stores do. Both libraries and the public, however, would be ill-served by such a Faustian bargain.

That's a reference, by the way, to one of literature's great antiheroes. Good luck finding Christopher Marlowe's play about him in a Fairfax County library: "Doctor Faustus" has survived for more than four centuries, but it apparently hasn't been checked out in the past 24 months.

I've never worked in a public library but I make heavy use of our county library system. Entling no. 2 thinks she wants to do grad school in library science after she graduates so it is
interesting to consider the future of libraries, especially when your own kid is hoping to step into the profession.

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The New Year started with a bang with two very different types of stories about libraries:

The Washington Post article, Hello, Grisham -- So Long, Hemingway? With Shelf Space Prized, Fairfax Libraries Cull Collections about a library system weeding classics. My favorite quote: "More computers and growing demand in branches for meeting space, story hours and other gatherings have left less room for books."

The New York Times article, Lock the Library! Rowdy Students are Taking Over! about a library in Maplewood, NJ, that is shutting down during afternoon hours because the disturbances going on during that time period. My favorite passage: "Librarians and other experts say the growing conflicts are the result of an increase in the number of latchkey children, a decrease in civility among young people and a dearth of “third places” — neither home nor school — where kids can be kids."

There's been a lot being said in blogs and over coffee about these two articles, but together, they raise an important question: What is the primary function of a library in a community?

Let's avoid armchair quarterbacking (Fairfax should display classics! Don't lock out the teens, have programs!) and take what is being said at face value.

In Fairfax, it's about changing to be, well, a community center: meeting space. story hours. other gatherings. Giving people only what they want; with no questions about what people need, or whether a library is different from Barnes and Noble.

In Maplewood, it's saying, no, we are not and should not be the community center; we're a library, and if the town wants a community center for teens, build one.

And, surprisingly enough to those who know I delight in pop culture being in libraries, I'm finding myself siding with Maplewood. I think libraries are part of the community, absolutely; but our primary role is library.

We should welcome teens with programs and teen advisory groups; with friendly staff, comfortable surroundings, and with reasonable rules that are the same for everyone.

We should partner with local agencies and community centers.

But if what Maplewood needs is a community center for teens, they should build one and staff one, rather than having people say "oh, the library can do it."

Part of the reason I say this is cost; we have limited budgets. Hiring additional staff means money that cannot be spent elsewhere on electronic databases, updating websites, staff for other library needs, or professional development.

Another reason I say this is training and education. Librarians are librarians. If a library has a primary purpose of community center, shouldn't it be hiring people with degrees in recreational management instead of people with degrees in library science? And once we stop needing people with MLIS's to serve our primary purpose, how can we call ourselves libraries and librarians?

Space is another concern. Most libraries have not been built to serve as a community center and don't have that space. If a library shifts to a community center model what about those who valued the library model and library resources? Where will they go?

A library can be and should be an important part of town it is in. But it cannot be and should not be all things to all people. Libraries can and should (and do!) partner with other members of the community; that's the way to make sure your town has what it needs.

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