Homeless to Be Turned Away from Bethlehem Public Library, Insert "No Room at the Library" Joke Here

Please, sir.  I can haz Internetz?

The Bethlehem Public Library of Bethlehem, PA has had to revise their policies that allegedly targeted their transient (i.e. homeless) population. The library administration feels the transients have begun to drive away regular patron use.  Local transient advocates feel that the rules, including rules regarding sleeping, having sleeping bags, and having offensive body odor, target the transients the advocates bus to the library and drop off.

There are many ways to be banned from a library.  Simply being homeless is not one of them.  A public library is just that, public.  My heart goes out to anyone in this economy that has lost a roof over their head.  The library is a community place where many often spend all day honestly doing nothing and that is okay.  Whether or not the Bethlehem Public Library went too far and far too specific with their "policies" and should have just handled each incident as it came up is not for me to say. *cough*

The problem with this is not the homeless themselves.  I have a problem with the people that treat adults like children.  Picking anyone up and dropping them off at a public location to spend the day without supervision is the act of a negligent parent, not community outreach.  This is like dropping adults off at the playground and getting pissed when they cannot get on the swings.

The library is a community institution.  It is not a day care for anyone.  It is not a daylight motel.  If other patrons complain about another patron's smell, activities, or general behavior, the library must attend to them.  If you have taken the responsibilty of getting a person of any age from point A to B, then you should also make sure they are bathed, well rested and do not have to carry their whole lives on their backs. 

And for God sakes, if your town is named "Bethlehem," don't get into trouble that lends itself to so many easy jokes I can't pick just one.

[lehighvalleylive]

5 Reasons Libraries Should Not Use Ebooks... Yet.

The Devil?

Oh, what a lovely tea party this ebook experience is, am I right?  With prices constantly shifting, publishers competing, and the overall industry flopping over to a new way of reading, who would not get stuck in this mire?  Well, here I come to offer up a little round of thoughts I like to call "Screw'em."  Libraries are a foundation in the community.  For at least 100 years, the library has been a fixture in almost every city and town across America.  The library to the community is a point of civilization, as a bookshelf is to a home.  Think about a home without a bookshelf:  an empty dwelling with one bare, hanging light and from one corner of that dank room, small cries are heard.  You do not want to go into that house.

The library represents the willingness of a community to not only think for itself but also to grow by allowing free representation of ideas and information.  By taking away the danger aspect of "being left behind," libraries should really review the following five reasons they should not use ebooks yet:


1.  Most libraries will not have the tech support to handle every device.
Ebooks are still a relatively new field.  When the Internet gained popularity and libraries with the money began getting computers, sure there were some hang ups.  But I bet you dollars to doughnut-holes all those computers had only one operating system (Windows or Mac) that by week two most of the staff had a handle on enough to teach every yokel that came in how to get an AOL email.  There were even books to teach you, most of them pointedly describing their readers as "dummies" and "idiots."  But look at the landscape of ereaders.  Every version of every device has its own features and whats-a-doodles, and let's not even get into the formats.  To expect every patron with every device to be serviced just as they are with the library website and books is absurd because every ereader is not created equally.

Vinnie

2.  Most libraries will not have the tech to support the service.

Does your library have a website?  Good.  Does your library host your website?  Host.  It means you have a big computer that your website lives in.  Ah, you pay for that from somebody else?  Well, that's what you are going to have to do with ebooks then.  Not all but a lot of libraries do not have full time tech support and often pay proprietary companies to handle all that for them.  We handle the search coding, link it to your in-house system, bada-bing-bada-boom you got yourself a library website.  Not so with ebooks.  You will almost certainly have to pay someone else, like Overdrive, to hold on to all those little files that will be accessed by your patrons.  That leads us to the next point:

3.  The ebook industry is constantly changing.

I taught them all they know.

I know, I know, it will always be changing, publishing took decades to get to a stable place, I got a paper cut.    Yeah, I know all that.  But ebooks just became really profitable.  What Harper Collins has just taught us is that the industry wants a piece of that sweet, sweet action and they do not want folks to give it away for free. Think about it, once they sold you a pbook (paper book, trademark Banned Library productions) you could give it to a friend, throw it away, hell, use it to light a Thanksgiving parade mascot on fire, they already had your money.  But what they learned from Napster over a decade ago is that digital content can be a huge money maker as long as you tighten the reins* to the breaking point and never, never let the college kids get a hold on it.

4.  The patrons that use ereaders the most use the library the least.
Think of all your swanky non-library friends and their fancy ereaders.  Try to recall the last time you saw them in a library beyond the odd function or two.  There may be an exception that proves the rule, but not by a long shot.  People who can afford ereaders and are knowledgeable enough to use them have no use for the library once they are out of college.  They do not use library services out of spite or anything, not most of them anyway, they just have no need because their home Internet connection and ability to spend a few bucks on an instant download override a trip to the library, either for information or entertainment.

5. Skynet, man.

What?  You think I would go an entire article with legitimate points?

*Update, edit:  I updated #3 from "reigns" to "reins" so as not to confuse future readers who thought I was confusing saddle's with royalty.  This note is to put into context "Anonymous"'s comments below.  Oh, auto-correct, you are my bane. I hope that the original mistake did not distract anyone else from forming a coherent comment on a post which has the last point being a political poster with "Red Dawn" fighting "The Terminator."