My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol.3, #50, June 22, 1998

BORDERS SKIRMISH

There's been a bit of a flap in the library community about a couple of articles that appeared in our own trade magazines, suggesting that we should make our libraries look and act more like Borders and the other big chain bookstores. The authors argued that people saw libraries as stodgy, uninviting and hard to use, that they found what they wanted more easily in bookstores with their racks of books arranged by subject area, and that they preferred browsing through the books at their leisure while sitting in a cheerful, brightly lit cafe, sipping cappucino and nibbling pastries.

That being the case, the authors asked, why were we spending so much money on expensive staff to catalog our collections and do reference work, when we could just arrange our stuff in big block areas (Sports, Science, Travel), and hire minimum wage clerks to point people to the resources? Were we not spending an awful lot of money on services that no longer matched what people wanted in a library?

Not surprisingly, these articles provoked mild-mannered librarians into sputtering outrage. Some of us pointed out that we'd love to see Borders saying, oh, yes, please do just take the books home and bring them back in three weeks, won't you?

Others mentioned that Borders can only help you if what you want is in print. Now, most of the books and magazines and newspapers that have ever existed are NOT in print anymore. While a bookstore reflects the present moment, a library reflects all of human history. It's not surprising that when the heroes of Heinlein's Job repeatedly find themselves set down in an alternate reality version of their planet, with no idea of the history, manners and customs of the society they have been dumped into without notice, they immediately look for a library so they can skim through books and magazines and newspapers, and learn enough to blend in.

One of the articles mentioned college students who preferred to do their research at Borders' rather than at their own university libraries. I don't believe those students could possibly have gotten decent grades, because the chains don't offer collections of the scholarly journals professors expect students to use (in many bookstores, they won't even find current issues). Nor do bookstores offer online databases that index those journals and provide full texts of articles. As far as I know, they don't offer free internet access; if there are some that do, I would guess that they do not attempt to identify and link in high quality web resources for students, as school and college libraries do.

Certainly the bookstores can't do much in the way of answering people's questions, because their shelf space is limited to things they can sell quickly. They have atlases and dictionaries and GRE preparation books, but they don't, and can't, have a full reference collection with the new 30 volume encyclopedia of art, the 120 volume set of Contemporary Authors, the 18 volume biographical dictionary, a full backfile and regular updates of Moody's or Valueline, an extensive genealogy collection, a complete set of Facts on File, etc.

Even if the answers to customers' questions were sitting on one of their shelves somewhere, the clerks would have a hard time finding them, because there is no detailed subject catalog of their inventory. And in any case, clerks are not trained to understand how information is organized, what tools are available for tracking it down, and how to manipulate which databases to find it. That's because they ARE clerks, not librarians. We are experienced professional finders who are convinced that the information our users want exists. And we won't give up until we find it.

I have also noticed that the big chain bookstores rarely seem to have children in them. Yes, they sell children's literature, though their collections tend to be limited to brand-name authors' books and series books. You can find any volume of the Babysitters Club books there, but you'd have a harder time tracking down one of Gordon Korman's best books like Don't Care High, even though teens routinely place his books on their lists of favorite reading.

This may be because the chain stores have no equivalent of children's librarians, who dedicate their lives to the proposition that children are real people, with needs that can be met in books. The Borders' and Barnes and Nobles do not have staff members who read to children in regular story hours, or put on Halloween parties for them, or sponsor reading clubs and other events for them. They do not have people who spend time listening to children and talking with them about books.

For all this, though, it is nonetheless true that the big chain bookstores, and even online stores like Amazon, are competing models of how to do business. The people who go to these bookstores are either current library users, potential library users, or former library users. If we do not try to understand what these bookstores offer customers that libraries do not, we may put the existence of libraries at risk.

Certainly many libraries are dreary, poorly lit, shabby buildings that are no fun to visit. Some libraries make it unnecessarily difficult for users to find things, especially if books are scattered across separate departmental libraries that are halfway across campus and closed on weekends. There are also libraries that are unpleasantly rigid and rule-bound, where books seem to be valued more than the people who want to use them. Such libraries could learn a good deal from the chains.

Even those of us who think we are doing a first class job could also learn from them. But librarians are inside the situation. We can only guess about what our present and former users think. That's why I'd like to hear from all of you. Tell me, did you grow up in libraries? What do you like or dislike about them? What do you like or dislike about bookstores? If you were on the board of directors of your local library, how would you change it? In short, what would your ideal library be like? Tell me what you think, and I'll report back in a future column.

And maybe I'll write an article for one of our librarians' magazines. Your answers might just be a timely revelation to us.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.