Rightly or wrongly—I’d hope that Young is wrong—he may perceive most of us as believing that our tax money could be better spent in other ways.
Why support our own local “Library of Alexandria” to the extent its friends prefer? Just buy your books at Amazon, B&N or elsewhere, right? I’m 100 percent confident those are not Young’s own feelings and that he means well and loathes the hard choices that the city’s fiscal challenges have forced on him, but in my opinion this is still a poor showing for a member of the executive board of the Urban Libraries Council. And more than a few genuine library-haters do feel precisely that way, based on my own virtual encounters with them during the many years I owned and edited TeleRead, a popular site among e-book buffs (the overwhelming majority of them pro-library, thankfully). Who gives a squat about the plebes?
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
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Worse, Alexandria City Manager Rashad Young has proposed a $93,454 cut in the library personnel budget despite the harm this could do to working people reliant on libraries to advance themselves through literacy training and in countless other ways. Library officials say they will reduce the schedules of three of the city’s four branches by two hours a week. Talking Books Service hours will go from 35 to 20 a week, and the materials budget for books and other items will decline by $56,000 even though it’s already well off its peak. The decision will come in early May, so any Alexandrians reading this should speak up as soon as possible; go here and look for “FY 2014 Budget Public Input.” Meanwhile don’t forget to check out the talking points document that library supporters have prepared.
