Librarians laid off, libraries to close all over Detroit

[English]

May I ask, what genre?

Golden Age of Science Fiction. Some of the classic stories are not available for purchase or download online. Independent bookstores, both brick and mortar and online, are the best source for old magazines and/or pulp paperbacks. E-books haven't gotten to those yet, and again, I doubt everything will make it to e-format.

[English]

The problem that has developed at all levels of government is this: PEOPLE are too expensive!

We developed these systems of education, libraries, public symphonies, and public offices when the employees would work for peanuts. Teachers [[and librarians) used to be able to afford to live only if they were married and earned a supplemental income to help support the family, lived at home, or lived in rooming houses, boarding houses, or had multiple room mates.

You have the same phenomena in the armed services. Sailors no longer make $78 a mionth and live on the ship. Soldiers no longer make $78 a month and live in the barracks.

I am not saying that we should go back to that, but that is a big reason that public payrolls and budgets have ballooned [[well also Parkinson's Law which has caused the bureaucracies overseeing the frontline workers to increase exponentially).

Ray was talking about the cost of the missiles fired into Libya. That cost pales when compared with the cost of military pay, benefits, and all of the personnel support facilities on our military posts.

This has caused the taxpayer [[squeezed economically) to call into question the need to fund some of these socially desirable public efforts.

You are exactly right about all of the above. The economy no longer works for the way our society is organized.

[Yooper]

Archive.org
Libravox.org
If it's in the public domain, you will probably find what you are looking for.
I love old time radio...puts me to sleep most nights.
Sci-fi, Bob and Ray, Escape, X Minus One, and hundreds more.
My point is that there are virtual libraries all over the net.
Check 'em out.

[Ray1936]

"Another role is a museum role, the preservation, cataloging and archiving of significant, mainly print, objects. Much of that can be and is now being digitized but preservation of the source objects is still an important role."

Boy, I couldn't agree more with you on that one. I've been hauting libraries here n' there since I got into this genealogy stuff spending hours at microfilm readers with rolls of old newspapers. Just the other day I found a news article from May, 1900, announcing my Dad's birth!

[Vox]

Golden Age of Science Fiction. Some of the classic stories are not available for purchase or download online. Independent bookstores, both brick and mortar and online, are the best source for old magazines and/or pulp paperbacks. E-books haven\'t gotten to those yet, and again, I doubt everything will make it to e-format.

Right up my alley, if I may say. I love old sci fi, although I never read anything quite that old, outside of When Worlds Collide, and some others. The 20s to the 50\'s? Short stories? Specific authors?

[j to the jeremy]

Archive.org
Libravox.org
If it's in the public domain, you will probably find what you are looking for.
I love old time radio...puts me to sleep most nights.
Sci-fi, Bob and Ray, Escape, X Minus One, and hundreds more.
My point is that there are virtual libraries all over the net.
Check 'em out.

To get at what Lowell's pointing out, libraries are still necessary for those who don't have the means to either purchase books online, or even know how to use the internet.
Reference librarians who help build those online archives also are trained in helping "newbies" or poor people search them in a library, without making them feel inferior. Just because we have the internet doesn't mean that everyone in America is on laptops, although we are moving in that direction.

[Yooper]

Yes I'm serious.
Go to a library and ask a librarian to point you to the latest articles on let's say, distributed power architecture in solar panel arrays.
You would get a dead fish stare.
We're no longer in Mary's Bedford Falls.
There are free white papers all over the net.
Do you think that engineers in Silicon Valley go to libraries to do research?
I digress

[Vox]

Archive.org is a nice spot. Hardly inclusive. But English, there are scanned copies of the pulp Amazing Stories from 1941 there, among others. Get your computer ready to download the PDF, and a list of the titles you want.

[LodgeDodger]

One thing we haven't mentioned here is the unequalled experience of just sitting in a library, reading. You can't duplicate that serenity anywhere...

[mwilbert]

Golden Age of Science Fiction. Some of the classic stories are not available for purchase or download online. Independent bookstores, both brick and mortar and online, are the best source for old magazines and/or pulp paperbacks. E-books haven't gotten to those yet, and again, I doubt everything will make it to e-format.

I spent too much time here decades ago:

http://web.mit.edu/mitsfs/

Their catalog is online.

[Danny]

That's how dumb America is? We don't read books.

[English]

I can find the biographical information for what I'm looking for, but not the e-book. Story's not digitized yet.

[DetroitTeacher]

Great...just in time for research papers for my kids! Most don't have computer access at home and our school has no librarian and the computers don't work most of the time, anyway. We never did get the Netbooks for our kids, as promised, either. This just puts a kink in things. I REQUIRE the kids have at least 3 print sources [[books, magazines, periodicals, newspaper) that can't come from the internet. I want and need them to have experience doing things the "old fashioned" way and want them to utilize the library. We have a library just blocks from the school, too. Any suggestions on how I can do my job with no darn resources in the city? Most of my kids don't have transportation to go to the inner ring libraries, either. <sigh>

[old guy]

Great...just in time for research papers for my kids! Most don't have computer access at home and our school has no librarian and the computers don't work most of the time, anyway. We never did get the Netbooks for our kids, as promised, either. This just puts a kink in things. I REQUIRE the kids have at least 3 print sources [[books, magazines, periodicals, newspaper) that can't come from the internet. I want and need them to have experience doing things the "old fashioned" way and want them to utilize the library. We have a library just blocks from the school, too. Any suggestions on how I can do my job with no darn resources in the city? Most of my kids don't have transportation to go to the inner ring libraries, either. <sigh>

That pretty much says it all. The last thing we need to do [[well, one of them) is to close libraries.

[Vox]

I can find the biographical information for what I\'m looking for, but not the e-book. Story\'s not digitized yet.

What is the title? Author?

[laphoque]

Another shout out for Detroit's libraries. I would vote yes on a millage to fully fund them. I love the Main Library, I love the Skillman branch with its limited foreign news paper collection. It's got Le Monde & Die Zeit which I go read sometimes.

Librarians are great resources in finding information as well. That's what they go to school for. It's actually a Master's program. Wayne State is a good school for it.

[laphoque]

Something I discovered the other day when at the Main Library: they have a whole selection of music scores to play. Awesome. They also have the news clippings that haven't been put online yet. And in my experience Detroit libraries get used. They're also important for job training and for literacy training.

[RickBeall]

Who needs libraries? We have the internet.

[Detroitnerd]

I'd like to add that libraries host some really interesting events that it would be hard or expensive to host elsewhere. The library in Hamtramck has several events a month, whether performances, screenings or talks.

[maxx]

Interesting article on the dangers posed to public goods, such as libraries, by free market fundamentalism.

QUOTE: Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life. We're coming to see that old Karl Marx had his finger on the heart of the matter when he pointed out that the market in the end will destroy everything we thought was safe and solid."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...kill-libraries

Oh, no! Someone is giving Marx credit for being right? Oh, it's only those commie Brits. I'm sure the free market and capitalism will take care of this library problem. And the public school problems. And the pension problems. Which way to the company store?

And concerning libraries, I wonder how many people actually used the library regularly.It's been years since I went in the main library and I don't recall it being crowded. What a great building. Maybe libraries could have a cover charge for entering.

[old guy]

And concerning libraries, I wonder how many people actually used the library regularly.It's been years since I went in the main library and I don't recall it being crowded. What a great building. Maybe libraries could have a cover charge for entering.

I think the small satellite libraries that used to be scattered all over the cities were possibly the most important part of the library system. I do have fond memories of Detroit's main library though. I doubt you're ever going to see crowded libraries again.
What bothers me is that you hear blanket statements that every home now has a computer. That just isn't true. There are a large number of homes that either don't have computers, or have computers but can't afford internet access. There have to be large numbers of families that have several children but only one computer or a computer that's so old it barely functions.
With the economy in the shape it's in, I'm sure a number of households have had to choose between paying utilities or paying for internet access.
Streamline the system, don't eliminate it.

[Danny]

'I can't live without books.' BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

[agirlintheD]

A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life
- Henry Ward Beecher -

[Yooper]

Millions of humans have been displaced by modernization.
That what cannot be displaced by machines has been sent overseas.
Meanwhile, the communities who used to reap benefits from the Detroit Powerhouses of old are toast.
It's called productivity, a Wall Street metric.
More automation=less pay for proles.
Think ATMs, self serve checkout lines, self serve petrol, automated electronic assemblies, robotic welding stations that replaced thousands of workers.
Sure my thoughts are Faustian, but it's pretty clear that stockholders are more important than ordinary humans.
I'll make a simple data point.
Look at pictures of Detroit prior to automation.
Compare these to the dead city you call home.
Farming is the future, plants and not humans.

[Hypestyles]

Similar to how things were handled with the DIA or the Detroit Zoo, is it possible to spin off the Detroit Library System to a Non Profit entity, have them manage it, solicit grant funds to keep operations open, while the city still technically owns it? or possibly merge municipal libraries, as a Wayne County Library system?