Quote:
Originally Posted by JeremyR
As I've said before - quit buying/loaning cds, dvds, and video games. Those have no place in a library...
Doing a quick seach for "DVD" on that Tacoma library's catalog, turned up 8500 hits...(no video games that I could see, though)
Better yet, since so many people use Libraries as video rental places, stop renting them and put a couple Red Box machines in front.
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This is both nonsense and, more importantly, bad strategy.
Nonsense because there's no real difference between Nora Roberts or Lawrence Block or Greg Bear, on the one hand, and renting DVDs on the other hand.
Novels and DVDs are about entertainment, and I don't see that one has a higher moral claim than the other. And of course books are just as available for as DVDs.
And libraries began carrying media other than books pretty much as soon as it was feasible - the library I went to as a kid, in the pre-VCR 70's, had vinyl records and cassette tapes. The only reason libraries have traditionally focused on books is because books were basically all there were. However, some of the early Carnegie libraries did have billiard rooms and bath houses.
But, turning to strategy, libraries are *expensive*. I pay, through my property taxes, about $150/year to support my library. It's a good deal for me...but it's less of a good deal for the 85-90% of the population who don't read 10+ books a year, and who may wonder why they pay so much money to subsidize those who want to read the "Wheel of Time" series, when no one does anything for people who would like to watch "Babylon 5" on DVD.
Second, when libraries argue about their budgets, the *best* point they can make to justify their budgets is the number of annual visitors and the number of items checked out annually.
Third, my library's big expenses are salaries, debt service, and operating the buildings (including heating, cooling, etc.). The cost of DVDs compared to all of that is *tiny*. My library's budget is $40 million per year. It's been frozen for a while, but due to various economic issues, it is facing a $3.5 million shortfall. If it bought no DVDs this year, (and assuming it hasn't already cut back) it could save maybe $50,000. (Of my library's 2.1 million items, 29,000 are DVDs). So this won't save libraries. This won't help libraries. Libraries won't even notice this.