Library Nazis
Recently I attended an open house meeting at the Camano Library where the staff of the Sno-Isle Library system asked for feedback on plans to expand hours without staff in hopes of providing access to folks who work or might have other reasons finding it difficult to use the biblioteca during its regular hours. This system, they explained, has been in use in Scandinavia and Europe as well as a few locales in the United States with few problems. Sounded like a humane gesture by our library to me, open the place up for more patrons, what’s the problem?
Whoa, I guess I’ve been living on the South End too long, not getting out often enough to realize folks are angry as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore. Now, I understand this attitude when it comes to politics, plenty to fire up the blood pressure to boil, but this was a group of librarians. Shhh, not really rabble rousers or radicals, folks who want to help. Books, movies, computers, newspapers, reference help. For everyone. The poor, the people without wi-fi, without computers, without the skills even to use them. But, like I said, the librarians are there to help. Kind of the good guyz, ya know?
So when our little question and answer gets started, the crowd right away is hostile, primarily over the fact that the public meeting room will require the same criterion for use after hours as the general library customers. Most of the mob there were members of a Homeowner’s Association that used the meeting room for their twice monthly meetings, apparently plenty of issues that require lots of discussions and/or fighting. Over a hundred members, they said, and if the new rules mandated by the Sno-Isle Regime were instituted, each and every one of them would need a library card. Too egregious! Imagine, asking them to apply for a library card!! Too draconian!! Too authoritarian!!
This, they said, was a nefarious scheme to keep them from using the meeting room, concocted in secret then sprung on them at the last possible minute! No, they said, this would not stand! They would make sure the next library levy would be defeated, they threatened. They had voted for the Camano Library originally because they were promised a public meeting room. Everyone here, they said, was in attendance to fight this proposed change.
Um, wait a minute, I said. Not everyone. Definitely not me. I came to hear what was being proposed. Proposed. Not implemented. Proposed. Oh, they said, well, maybe not everyone. And then they continued to wail and whine about a potential loss of that meeting room for their HOA meetings. Not gonna drive the five miles to the Stanwood branch, that’s for sure.
I guess if the reason you want a library is for a free meeting room, I’ve misunderstood the function of libraries all my life. And … silly me, I never realized my librarians were Nazis.
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Tags: Librarian Dictators, Library Nazis, What is a Library For?