The World of Libraries

There's an article over at Salon about libraries - kind of noodly but interesting enough.

I worked in Libraries in high school and again in college - it's very tiresome work but not too bad. I got in big trouble once for locking the friends of the library room up and leaving a soda inside. Yeah, I was kind of a rebel.

Friends of the library were not very friendly to those of us who worked for the library -but they did book sales and fund raisers to help the library buy new books. And they had special room in the basement of the library where they kept their junk books - and we pages would be sent down there from time to time. One time I took a soda with me and then locked the key inside. All the other keys had gone home for the night so I was boned.

Also someone donated a book on how to effectively stage and shoot soft core porn. Nice hardcover book, with, as I recall, a special page on the uses of the trampoline. That book didn't stick around for very long.

What did stick around was national geographic. Hole crap did national geographic stick around. I don't know what it is about that magazine - people feel guilty throwing it out or something. So they take it to donate to the library and it's always like "Thanks - we are working on our seventh complete set of this magazine, but we can always use an eighth."

My college experience was a bit more pedestrian - I mostly remeber the head pages not really giving a damn, which was nice since I didn't give a damn either.

Libraries are good, but I can understand why they need to change with the times.