this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
80 points (92.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43852 readers
771 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The local library is lucky if there's enough money to pay the light and internet.
Oof, sorry to hear that! ๐ญ
Fruit of stupidity. The town once had two libraries, overflowing with really old books. From what I've heard I'd risk many would be more than a century old or even older.
Then this hotshot librarian came to direct the librarian. Being an "author" he expunged the library of anything he deemed unworthy to be read or occupying shelf space, with a rage boner, as the two library buildings were condensed into one, with less than one tenth of the available area for book storage and display.
What was once a treasure chest for readers became a poor excuse for a reading room for newspapers.
I once tried to suggest moving towards ebooks, considering almost every person carries a decent ereader in their pocket nowadays and it was almost like uttering heresy.
So...
I work in a library, and I'm sad to say this sort of thing has been going around for a while... Our board (a bunch of ghoulish rich retired business men) wants us to call people "customers" instead of "patrons", and is looking for ways to charge them money.
It won't happen here, as the library is funded by the city, but I have lived where one of the biggest libraries in the country sits and you could take a book for free and read it in three or five days (can't recall the exact time) or choose to pay a few cents to request the book for a little longer, never exceeding two weeks.
That money was enough to get new works, replace overused copies, etc.
A library for profit already exists: we call it a book store.