Why aren’t libraries more commercial? I find a book in the library. I REALLY like it. The library won’t sell it to me. I mean, not over the table. Of course I can “lose” it and the library takes the replacement cost, a processing fee, and a penalty (!) money and either replaces the book or doesn’t. But why don’t they straight-up sell books out of their catalog?
Or how about this: you’re 12,000th in line for Dan Brown’s new magnum o’piss (sorry). But if you pay $3 we will put you in this other line for “preferred” customers, and we will guarantee that you don’t get a dog-eared copy, to boot! Or if you prefer we will sell you a copy for 40% off the cover price.
Another annoyance, not commercial: why don’t they enter author/title info for every book? I get it that before electronic cataloguing and checkout it was labor-intensive, but these days it’s ludicrous to put JUVENILE BOARDBOOK on something which comes barcoded with ISBN and EAN, when the library is affixing not one but two identifiers (library barcode and library RFID), and full author/title/cover picture information is available online keyed by ISBN. Can’t we do better than this? I ask because somewhere in my house are two overdue JUVENILE BOARDBOOKs, one FICTION PAPERBACK, and one FICTION MYSTERY PAPERBACK, and it would be helpful when looking under couches &c to know what the silly things look like.
The last paragraph: I’m not quite sure what you mean. Author/title information *is* entered for every book in the cooperative cataloguing system they are likely to be using; you mean “why isn’t it displayed in some particular place I care about”, I presume, but I’m not sure what place you mean. I will note that the features available for ILSes (i.e. library workflow management software) vary tremendously, and the end user’s (i.e. technical services librarian’s) ability to customize output and display is highly variable. Public libraries are likely to have outmoded ILSes (funding constraints), so although there are electronic catalogs (and, more likely, discovery interface layers) that do display all sorts of stuff like that, your particular library may not own one. If you are volunteering to agitate for increased funding, or provide your own technical services with an upgrade process, your library may be interested to know that ;).
(But it is potentially a huge, huge pain in the ass to upgrade one’s catalog. I mean both in the normal software-upgrade sense (switching vendors or versions) and also in the sense of populating your catalog with better metadata — I spent a lot of my internship this summer doing that with catalog software that was too old to just pull down the records electronically/automagically, and regardless wasn’t in good enough shape metadata-wise for an automated process to work, and if you have to do this stuff by hand it is inordinately time-consuming. This isn’t a problem, I’m given to understand, with any reasonably modern ILS software, but see above about funding constraints.)
Your earlier paragraphs: Makes sense to me.
I think a lot of librarians (obviously I depart from them) have a real cultural problem with the idea of commercialism, in the same way that many people have a sense of nonprofits vs. markets/corporations, wherein nonprofits are good and public service-y and other things are kinda slimy. So, culturally, some librarians are really unwilling to look to the commercial world for ideas; they see themselves as providing a different kind of service, a less grubby one. Others, of course, are quite keenly aware that bookstores, e-commerce sites, etc., are their competition, and that adapting and borrowing quality insights from these competitors is important for survival. (The discovery interfaces I mentioned above are yoinked straight from e-commerce.)
(For a sense of what I mean by “discovery interface”, try, e.g., http://encore.unl.edu/iii/encore/search?formids=target&lang=eng&suite=def&reservedids=lang%2Csuite&submitmode=&submitname=&target=organic+chemistry . They’re layers that lie on top of people’s existing catalog software but provide extended features like cover images, faceted search limits, tag clouds, etc. Or look at http://www.worldcat.org/ , which is right now the public face for the cooperative cataloguing system that most libraries in the US use, but is going to be expanding into a sort of catalog-on-steroids system.)
EPL has been keeping pretty close to the leading edge of SIRSI software, and they just added/upgraded/extended to bibliocommons, so this will probably disappear as a problem. But for the last decade, they could not be bothered to enter author/title information for, roughly, the following categories:
mass market paperbacks in genres like mystery, romance, SF (”literature” mass market paperbacks benefited from literary privilege)
childrens’ board books
children’s paperback easy reader/early reader books
That is what I am complaining about. And it is not merely a provincial problem, as the Santa Monica Public Library had the same policy. (And the librarian actually literally _looked down her nose at me_ when I had the temerity to ask why the mass market SF paperbacks were not better categorized/organized than by ‘first letter of author last name’ — I want to know if you have Valis by PK Dick because I’m writing a PAPER on it, and if you don’t have it I have to ORDER IT, that’s why.)
They really didn’t enter it? Like, their tech services people didn’t? As opposed to they just didn’t bother to display it to you? That is really weird. I mean, again, I haven’t dealt (yet) with an ILS that is with-it enough to slurp down electronic data, but it seems to me it can’t possibly be harder to enter everything than to enter that minimal set, and it might even be easier (surely if you type in the ISBN that would be enough, and easier than typing in the five things you care about and *not* fetching the record)…Bizarre. And *especially* bizarre since cataloguers are normally obsessive completists about things like that (although the front-desk person you talked to was probably not a cataloguer).
I can’t be sure, because I only have a “civilian” level of access to their systems, but it does not appear that they electronically retain any data about these items other than their type / shelving category and barcode.
Seems to me that it would aid collection development to know which board books / romance novels are the most popular and which are the real stinkers, no?
But perhaps these things come in by the skid, in a great shrinkwrapped block of cheerful cardboard crud, and it’s all they can bear just to distribute them to the various branches for intake. (If that’s so, I want to be their purchasing agent.)
Their lack of tracking of non-literature books strikes me as very odd. My local library not only keeps track of author and title information on its various works of fiction (board books included, and if anything were to be omitted, I’d think it’d be that), but allows you to search them and request them online.
I can completely understand why libraries don’t want to maintain a stock of books for sale. But in the day of Amazon Affiliates, it does seem weird to not have some sort of automated “I’d rather buy it!” button. If they could fully automate the addition of such buttons, it would seem like a good, low-time-commitment fundraiser, as well.
I can understand a bit better why they might not want to have a “Preferred Customer” category. Government is supposed to (doesn’t always, I know, but is supposed to) treat all citizens equally, without reference to social or financial status. As long as the libraries are government-run to whatever degree, the idea of being able to buy better treatment from them is going to seem a little unsavory. OTOH, my local library shares its collection with a suburban network of libraries in many different towns/villages, and local residents are given priority over residents of other towns for receiving locally-owned copies of popular books. You can’t see this calculated online — online, it’ll still look like you’re 311th in line for 310 copies network-wide — but if you live in a town that puts more money into buying copies of popular books, you end up getting one much sooner than you’d expect. So in a sense, we’ve paid for better treatment by choosing to live in, and pay taxes in, a town that allocates more money for its library. But you could say the same of police, fire departments, and any other local government function. And somehow, I think I’ve just argued myself into being OK with the Preferred Customer category at the local library, although I can’t imagine an argument that would make me OK with that from police or fire departments. Huh.
(Also, having sold Usborne Books to my local children’s librarian, I can say with some certainty that they do not generally buy these books by the skid; while decisions may be made more or less hurriedly, depending on budgetary circumstances, they do have to say which individual books they want. And my local librarian has always been very responsive to any suggestions I’ve had, holes I’ve found in the collection (children’s books on the Renaissance, and books with pictures of healthy developing fetuses, primarily), etc.
Newt