I take my car in to the local service station to have the oil changed; I use a coupon that gets me the oil service, and a new oil filter and a tire rotation, all for under $15. The down-side is that the mechanic tries to sell me lots of other expensive services by frightening me with some safety-related issue about my car's condition:
"These brakes need replacing, sir. I don't think it's legal to use baseball cards as brake pads."
"Screw you," I say. "Carl Yastrzemski hasn't let me down, yet."
But I say it from the other side of the yellow line. The shop has yellow safety lines painted on the concrete floor to designate where the customer can be safely away from the tools that can rend off appendages or demolish bones.
Now the oil-change kid might make half my salary, but that doesn't give me the right to violate his workspace. In that situation, he's the professional, and I respect this and let him do his job.
So why don't these other assholes let us do ours? Here's a review of The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel which includes another accusation that librarians are unfit to preserve books.
Nowadays, of course, the idea of the library is under attack, and many librarians seem the last people who should be left alone with a book and a waste-paper basket.I don't know about university librarians, but public librarians are a direct extension of the public: if you don't value a book enough to borrow it once a year, then how can you expect me to protect it? After all, Suzanne Somers continues to publish beauty books, and I need to make room.
So yes, we preserve books, the best we can, with the limited space we're given. The above article mentions "[t]he children's library at the concentration camp at Birkenau consisted of eight books, but 'sometimes rose to nine or 10.'" But it doesn't say that they had 100 books. They kept as many books as they could store safely. One book too many, and they would be discovered. The author doesn't reject the titles held or post an indictment of the collection policies; he's not going to criticize them for risking their lives to read a copy of Heidi, by Johanna Spyri. But each volume we preserve or discard falls under the finest scrutiny.
Modern librarians are told to pack two pounds of olives in a one pound bag. We do the best we can. If we have old volumes on the shelves, you complain; if we discard dusty books, you cry out for our heads.
With everything on the Internet, why can't these amateur preservationists do their jobs and cease criticizing? All you need to do is check WorldCat for your pet titles to see where they live, then contact someone at that library with your concerns. Here, look, I'll get you started:
"The book, ________________, is a rare treasure, please do not discard it."
And as soon as we all have our books RFID-tagged, we can enter those concerns in the record so we don't accidentally toss out your cherished books (or that we do, depending on how much of an ass you've been to us in the past).
Soon, through digitization and POD, librarians may shed this reputation as book harpies, since everything will be available to everyone... for another ten years, until the technology degrades and the data can't be read, by any machine, anywhere.
Of course, there are titles this librarian would never discard: Classic Greek Boner Plays including Lysistrata, The Collected Love is... , and anything by Erma Bombeck.
And you can be sure that we will have a print copy of Kevin Trudeau's More Bullshit I'm Allowed to Sell You on our shelves because, dammit, you saw it advertised on television and we can't get that baby back on the floor fast enough.
