Friday, March 12, 2010
Library Update
I have a message on my phone machine from the Director of Elizabeth Public Library. I don't want to call & talk to the Director of Elizabeth Public Library. But I may have to, & my complaint now is that it shouldn't require a push from a city councilman & a personal call from the Director of Elizabeth Public Library to have someone on the library staff respond to a polite e mail sent months ago from a library patron asking why the website search function is unreliable & even the in-library computers freeze up. Could also add that more can be done with an interactive Facebook page than just posting "Calling kids of all ages! Join us for Fun on a String with Miss Penny Puppet Show!"
Urban libraries & libraries located near schools also have a problem with patron computer use. If you walk into an Elizabeth library late weekday afternoon, you find kids hogging all the PCs, & they ain't doing homework. At the main library, you see row after row playing online computer games. Fortunately, there's so many PCs that you don't have to wait long for a seat to open. I discovered that few kids can be bothered to leave the main floor, they probably have no idea what's upstairs. More PCs, more books, art exhibitions, & quieter rooms. They don't read books. They don't go in the book aisles. If you gave them free Kindles & downloads from Amazon, they still wouldn't read books. I figure most of them will advance & graduate high school & maybe even get through college without voluntarily reading a single book not assigned to them in a class. They'll do all their research online, & copy & paste it into their papers, which exist only on computer until printed out. They'll run spell check & the teacher will find all sorts of strange word substitutions & grammatical oddities, which will never be corrected or recognized for what are & deliberately used to entertain.
But it's not such a great change. Before the Age of http://www, you'd go into a library & find kids sitting at tables with open notebooks & stacks of thick reference books, looking baffled & doodling & sighing loudly. I was one of those kids, except I'd eventually distract myself with a newspaper.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Urban libraries & libraries located near schools also have a problem with patron computer use. If you walk into an Elizabeth library late weekday afternoon, you find kids hogging all the PCs, & they ain't doing homework. At the main library, you see row after row playing online computer games. Fortunately, there's so many PCs that you don't have to wait long for a seat to open. I discovered that few kids can be bothered to leave the main floor, they probably have no idea what's upstairs. More PCs, more books, art exhibitions, & quieter rooms. They don't read books. They don't go in the book aisles. If you gave them free Kindles & downloads from Amazon, they still wouldn't read books. I figure most of them will advance & graduate high school & maybe even get through college without voluntarily reading a single book not assigned to them in a class. They'll do all their research online, & copy & paste it into their papers, which exist only on computer until printed out. They'll run spell check & the teacher will find all sorts of strange word substitutions & grammatical oddities, which will never be corrected or recognized for what are & deliberately used to entertain.
But it's not such a great change. Before the Age of http://www, you'd go into a library & find kids sitting at tables with open notebooks & stacks of thick reference books, looking baffled & doodling & sighing loudly. I was one of those kids, except I'd eventually distract myself with a newspaper.
