Witness to the decline of books
by Thomas Washington, a librarian in an independent Washington, D.C., area school.

From the column:

I’m a librarian in an independent school in the Washington, D.C., area. We’re doing all the right things. Our class sizes are small. Most graduating seniors gain admission to their college of choice. The facilities are first-rate. Yet from my vantage point at the reference desk, something is amiss. The books in the library stacks are gathering dust…No, I’m not foolish enough to think that the books are going to move off the shelves like jeans at Abercrombie, but any school librarian who hasn’t figured out some way to market his goods probably needs to find another line of work. These days, librarianship is all about making the sale…Still, I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet. I’m turning the new-arrivals shelf into a main attraction in my school’s library. Recently I stood Charles Dickens’ Bleak House next to the DVD version produced by the BBC. Lady Dedlock (Gillian Anderson) graced both covers. A senior fingered the DVD for a minute, then turned it over to read the blurb. “The book is too long,” she said. “Is the movie any better?”

Source: The Washington Post (via Houston Chronicle)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 and is filed under Libraries and Librarianship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.