So, librarians at the Sacramento Public Library are circulating a petition to have a Vote of No Confidence for their managers, because their shelves contain 10 copies of Jackass 2 and 6 of the Paris Hilton biography. But, as John Blyburg points out, all those copies are either checked out, on order or missing, meaning that they don’t have enough copies of Jackass 2 and the Paris Hilton biography to meet patron demand.
Quality control is one thing but Democracy, as we are told, is untidy. Sometimes, instead of hunkering down with War and Peace and The Ten Commandments, people would rather read or watch something, well, fun. And as any librarian will tell you, dictating fun is not our job. Dictating is not our job. We just provide people with the information they want. If they want lousy info, (or books or movies), well, we just smile, hand it to them and then make fun of them after they leave.
Link via Librarian.net.
My big problem was that I kept forgetting the “after they leave” part when making fun of them. You can only order so many extra copies of the latest Ann Coulter screed before you come to the inescapable conclusion that your patrons are morons.
True. We have a whole section of New York Times best sellers and cataloging those is always, er, fun.