readings for 1/31

With all of these readings I thought about a quote that got repeated a lot in my intellectual freedom seminar. something along the lines of, we should celebrate when we pay our taxes, because collectively we can supply so much more then we can as individuals. MCPL has $30,000 (I swear I heard that once- but that sounds low) of books on it's shelves, nobody (besides, maybe, John Cougar Mellencamp) in Bloomington can provide that for themselves or their children. I wish this was a more commonly championed idea in America, there are many things in America, besides just libraries, that need oh so much funding.

Bottoming Out: When reading this article I kept thinking about the power point presentation done by OCLC about who went to the library and what they thought of it. In times when more individuals have fallen on hard times and are using the library more, the library funding is getting cut at exponential rates. It really seems like libraries do a bad job at advocating for themselves about what vital resources they are.  During a rescission it seems like a place where free services, should as GED classes, job searching help, and just books and wifi, should be a place where the government should be putting more funds. It was very interesting to find out that the midwest is one the best places to be a library right now (no coast like no coast)!

Performing Triage on Budgets in the R*E*D: I found this article extremely dated (which is a bit intense as it was only written in 2003), it's focus on dotcom was pretty irrelevant to todays technical landscape. Especially when it suggested that states were leery of libraries diving into technical advancement due to to the dotcom bubble bursting, the rapid advent of technology since the early 00's has made it necessary for any organization constantly stay on top of electronic interfacing with clients and potential clients. However I got a lot more excited about the article once it started suggesting tools libraries could use to save their budgets. Some of them I found very dynamic like the idea of regional or state wide librarian budget problem solving team or "pooling resources." I found the one about foundations quite confusing (any insight would be helpful). And I enjoyed the suggestion that we should be protesting to keep libraries well funded- while he clearly doesn't know what direct action means- I think fighting for state sponsored social programs is pretty darn important.

Vote of Confidence: I found this article somewhat flat, it showed me victories and defeats in the introduction, and explained ways to have victories in the middle and end, but didn't connect the two. Like the Cromaine District Library, which was supposedly very popular, but got destroyed by efforts of the tea party, if it was popular how did that happen? Where are the downfalls in the lack of mobilization that community in the support of the library? Are things happening now to try and get the library back? Or was it not REALLy popular? I found all the examples in the beginning of the article to be intriguing, and wish they tied into the examples of how to fight and save libraries that made up the meat of the article.