Just as public libraries are rethinking their role in a digital world, communities are rethinking how to afford to keep their libraries open at all. An Associated Press story on the county library system in Medford, Ore., explored one trend at least 15 communities are trying: letting for-profit private companies run their public libraries. Fargo, N.D., ended such an experiment over concerns that the private contractor wasn’t paying bills on time, but for cash-strapped cities, the step has obvious appeal. As a Medford library official said, “Look, if it is either close the libraries or outsource them, we’d rather have outsourcing.” And, hey, at least the outsourcing of public libraries should not lead to the next step for so many American businesses: offshoring.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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17 Comments
Let’s stop and think about this for a second. If ALL the people in the community can’t afford the library, how does the small number of people who patronize the library support it?
Another f***ed up idea from the same folks that brought you war for oil in Iraq . . .
Bad ideal, that is like taking copy rights that you did not pay for and profiting from the usage of it.
99% of privitized public properties are attached too political personal agenda. Tax payer ran properties are supposed too remain public until they as tax payers vote to give it too the private sector. Herbert West III. west.herb@yahoo.com
We don’t need no lieberries! Ain’t nobody can reed nuthin no way anywayz!
Medford Ore brought us the Iraq war? Or Fargo ND started it? Amazing the things you can “learn” on this blog.
Oh..that’s right..consider the source, someone who doesn’t bother with facts.
“Another f***ed up idea from the same folks that brought you war for oil in Iraq . . .”- Capn America——————–You heard it here first folks. The library board in Medford, Oregon got you into this war in Iraq.
I heard that Fern May Hoffman is the ringleader.
Privatizing libraries to self serving business or closing them.
What was that old song?
“That’s America, to me”
America’s public libraries were created by the private benefaction of Andrew Carnegie. Maybe we need to reexamine this and try to convince our nation’s superrich to follow Carnegie’s example.
Or, if we are talking about protecting public treasures, how about enlisting unpaid volunteers to perform paid-employee duties. Medford Oregon has thousands of educated, affluent retirees who have a lot of time on their hands. If the city council is trying to enable a private contractor to make bucks, it sounds like a fast one to me.
We have the technology to replace expensive traditional book publishing with e-books. This would save a lot of money. The counterargument is this would create copyright-protection problems. Change the copyright laws. The Constitution gives Congress the power to secure “for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”. “Limited times” is anything Congress enacts. “Limited times” can be a year. They can be a month. Right now we have a situation where the best friend of the granddaughter of Laura Ingram Wilder holds copyrights (and earns money for material she never wrote) to “Little House on the Prairie” books.
We can charge people for library cards, or for individual-book borrowing. If you want to drive a car on public streets, you have to pay registration fees and gasoline taxes. If you want to visit Cheney or El Dorado Lake, both state-owned, you have to pay to get in.
Cash-strapped cities?
Government is a least four times the size it needs to be.
And they don’t even bother to answer the phone.
Cash-strapped cities?
Government is at least four times the size it needs to be.
And they don’t even bother to answer the phone.
And if government phones were answered on the first ring, people would complain that there are too many people answering phones. There is just no pleasing people.
You’re assuming facts not in evidence….typical.
If people continue to favor digitized media and TV over books, and if communities increasingly throw in the towel on libraries because no one has the attention span to actually sit down and read a real written work, then it’s hard to be optimistic about the future integrity of public information.
As it stands right now, people seem to have a difficult time telling the difference between news and propaganda, and when the digitized age is completely upon us and genuine scholars can no longer find a quality publishing outlet for their work, it’s easy to envision a scenario where people will toggle from site to site, only to be fed deep disinformation in the tradition of the deep lobbying firms which continue to manufacture junk science at the behest of their corporate financiers.
Much as been made of digitized encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, but that source in particular is unreliable, even to the casual observer.
For instance, not long ago I got interested in a not-so-famous, second tier American politician from the early part of the 19th century. I went to the WSU library and found a book that was written by a university scholar. Long story short, the information provided by Wikipedia about the politician’s parents and birthplace contradicts research that was done by the scholar. The Wikipedia info seems to have come from the peanut gallery in left field, and there must have been something toxic in the snack.
My point is that the Web has its place, but any clown can post something and pass it off as truth, whereas a university historian is much more likely to fact check and produce something of value.
Maybe you think that people will find the fully digitized, scholarly books on-line and sit at the PC scrolling down the page, but the trend seems to be in the direction of the inherently false TV sound bite and the poorly vetted, on-line encyclopedia snippet, if only because these last are easier to access. Once this sort of behavior becomes the norm (if it hasn’t already), then we are heading down the path to all manner of mischief in the realm of propaganda.
Am I overly gloomy? Possibly, but here’s hoping that libraries remain open and functional and have real books on the shelves, at least to the extent that properly researched materials are still available.
Our “Buddies” in the Middle East are busily rewriting history { and it’s a jailable offence to disagree with their version } so a “privatized library” will somehow survive the rewriter’s thumb?
Has the “The Eagle” become a “Monty Python” franchise?
Palestine? Forget it. There never was such a place and poor ole Dir Yassin is just barely hanging-on by its teeth and y’all are suggesting to “put the rat in charge of the cheese?” { vintage Friedemann }
Government is four time the size it needs to be, so there are solutions to this problem, but the one you’re suggesting is a joke { I have reservations about privatizing libraries }.
See how easy that was?
I saw two totally ridiculous and stupid comments in the same paper in ONE day. One was the opinion line comment about cigarette smokers and hubcaps (which made absolutely NO sense at all) and the other above..how libraries started the Iraq war.
Who are these crazed people writing incomprehensible things like this? Are they actually allowed outside without supervision?
When we privatize our public libraries we will have taken one of our greatest repositories of knowledge and placed it in the hands of the lowest bidder on a government contract. That will be a sad day for the community, for we will get exactly what we pay for: Finances that makes the taxpayer see red, and service that makes the citizens feel blue.
Ahhh..really intelligent to cast insults when I make an observation. Kind of proves my point that there are some really, really stupid people posting.