Some...okay well, part of one....of my works has been published recently on a website that, as I understand it, intends to become a magazine. I was the first person that the editor contacted which made me feel special up until I started reading all the other works that he was starting to compile and well...now I feel kinda sad and lonely and vastly under-talented in comparison with the others...
The site is called Site Unseen and it's unique, certainly. More than anything I've started looking into the blog that the editor has included and I'm learning things from it. But this morning my hackles rose just a little when I read yet another article about an encroaching storm known as paperless technology.
http://unseenfiction.com/2013/01/18/bookless-library-a-reality/#respond
The above link will take you to the specific article. I encourage you to read it first before getting to my commentary below. And from the above page you can of course explore the other authors that have been featured on the site and hey...! If it makes it to the stands, buy the magazine!
Here is the response that I started typing in the 'Leave A Comment' section, before I realized that my comment was more than three paragraphs.
First I am a librarian. We see a standard collection of people day in and day out.
When I look at that photo of the prospective lay out for a 'bookless library' I cringe. What I see, in between the pretty pixels of that image, is a collection of the worst of what we get in the library every day. And I do stress that this is the 'worst', and not necessarily, the 'only' patronage we get.
The first thing I see is a row of teenagers navigating around any excuse for security on the computers and finding illegal download sites for games, music and pornography, and anything else they can take advantage of thanks to the free Internet that most modern libraries now provide.
Off in another corner, where they are alone only by virtue of no one else daring to be near them is the massive swelling, seething beast known as the homeless and chronically unbathed.
Children, men, women, teenagers, older persons. All of them with their own weird, and sometimes lethal, quirks, all of them with their own foul and oft 'turpentine' strength stench, spending four to eight hours of their day watching YouTube videos, posting funny stories on Facebook and updating their blogs. And none of them, and I say this from experience, not one of them actually using the Internet to search for a job.
Yes there are those that come in and use the computers briefly to print, because they haven't got printing capability at home. There are some regulars that use the computers for writing projects, research, or some of the many historical or educational resources that they have free memberships to thanks to their library patronage.
But the the main, and ultimate, attraction of computers in a library today is free Internet.
We only have eight computers. We're a small town library. Imagine how much worse it gets in bigger towns, cities! Megacities!
I never do see the homeless people in the stacks. Rarely do they actually take a book off the shelf and open it up. The chairs we have stationed around are rarely ever used because there is nothing effortlessly entertaining sitting in front of them. If they are used it is by the homeless so that they can catch a quick nap.
The only person who does move from the computers to the stacks and back again is so blind that he has to hold the book less than a few inches away from his nose in order to read.
No human being could stand to be that close, and the computer screen is wiped down every day thanks to our certainty that he is the main source of colds and flues in our place.
Maybe I sound a little harsh but when your everyday health expectation lies in the hands of people who can't be bothered to bathe, blow their nose, or cover their mouth, and especially when you know that people who never set foot in the library when they are healthy, are guaranteed to come out to grab materials if they know they will be home sick for several days, you quickly lose appreciation for them.
So now they want to put these disease ridden, smelly, loud, rude, self-entitled and self-centered people into a tiny building with row after row of super close stools with nothing but germ-collecting surfaces between them!? And they say this is our bright and shiny future!?
We're not even touching on the population that is sixty and over. Many of whom don't have an e-mail address because they are so afraid that if they turn on their computer it will immediately be attacked by viruses and identity thieves and they won't be able to protect themselves from the big scary Internet!
Most of this age group will come in hoping to pay a bill online armed with nothing but their bank debit card and a stack of scrap paper, with wavering scribbles covering them. These 'notes' that they've taken are ultimately useless because the person who helped them the first time, usually a grand child, didn't bother to explain what they were doing, or teach their grand parent how to do it themselves. They just did it.
I have met fifty year olds that don't know what a mouse is for, forty year olds that don't know how to 'hunt and type'. Thirty year olds that can't spell 'Google'. Twenty-somethings that have to ask for my help because they can't find their e-mail. I.E. "I typed yahoo into the thing and I got here!"
Here turns out to be a Google search for the word 'yahooooo'.
And these are not people that I would have placed in the learning disabled category. These are people that work for a living in a small but real world where computers just don't exist beyond a cash register and a hand scanner.
Granted I live in farming country, but even I am shocked at how technology has disappeared for some Americans.
So, bookless libraries. Please...give me a break. Those aren't libraries, those are Internet cafes. Only the sign says 'no food and drink', instead of 'come in and have a coffee'.
By the way, whatever the sign says, they will still bring in picnic lunches.
