Even in the first world in a giant city it can be crap advice.
I wrote a paper in library school about how the Vancouver Public Library failed to offer anything of substance to intermediate language learners (with a focus on Mandarin materials because of the high Mandarin speaking population) - if you're a person learning Mandarin to communicate with immigrant populations there, you skip from basic travel phrasebooks to videos/movies in Mandarin for Chinese audiences.
Public libraries aren't great at serving the long tail or more advanced interests for various reasons. And academic institutions usually have rules preventing use of their materials by people not affiliated with the school.
As a fellow Canadian i can tell you another story about our broken library system.
It NEEDS to be consolidated.
I live in ($smalltown$) just outside Toronto. The border between my smalltown ands the other small towns that surround me are unclear at best.
Oddly enough, each smalltown has its own library system, its own staff and each for the most part has a terrible book collection.
I rarely go to the library for the town i actually live in because it is a forgotten wasteland. The library from the other town is just a few blocks away and they have done an excellent job keeping their library current and active.
In my town it would basically be you, the librarians and a few insects in the building, next town over is full on a regular basis. They also have programs and stay current, my town is dead and boring.
Why are we paying for libraries like this? All that duplicate staff and their associated pensions and benefits could and should have went to books, services for the public, etc.
I asked my town mayor once why the library building is so nice (granite flooring, floor to ceiling windows, it really is an attractive building inside and out) but yet the book collection is terrible.
The mayor at the time told me the library is a showpiece to attract new residents??? I guess they assume new residents don't actually step inside and discover the book collection is terrible?
Public libraries are a valuable asset, but need to be managed properly as well.
I live over on Vancouver Island and we have a regional library that serves the entire island and the coast.
It is fantastic! Each individual library is kind of small near me, but collectively they have a massive collection. Occasionally you have to wait a few days for a book to come from some remote location, but it is pretty rare for them to just not have something.
Library systems really should be managed at a larger level, they are much more powerful when networked.
I'm actually not Canadian, I just did my MLIS there. ;)
It is odd that your small towns don't have some kind of consortium agreement. There are benefits and drawbacks to having separate versus consolidated systems. Consolidated systems would, as you note, be more efficient in terms of staff costs and probably allow for materials to travel more easily. On the other hand, a consolidated system can end up only really serving the richest or largest community, rendering the rest of the population as afterthoughts.
Like from an ROI perspective, it makes sense public libraries are terrible at serving the long tail/the part of the population who want to educate themselves to a high level. Patrons are more interested in popular fiction and children's books, so that's the most bang for the buck.
But ugh on the building rationale. Without knowing what the building was like before, I can't comment too much (e.g. if there was mold/water damage/etc.) but that does seem like an odd use of funds.
> But ugh on the building rationale. Without knowing what the building was like before, I can't comment too much (e.g. if there was mold/water damage/etc.) but that does seem like an odd use of funds.
There was no library there before it was built.. Right next to city hall at a cost of millions of dollars.
Sure, cities need to build and grow but this was a terrible use of money and a decade later it is still an albatross..
+1 for your comment on children books, this is why we went and it was incredibly valuable to us.
Given most of us are technical, we all know libraries are not a good resource for current technology books and this is not my issue. My concern is a city with a very tiny Chinese population has a large collection of Chinese books.. something is wrong.
PS - my ex was Chinese and loved it because she could go there and the books she wanted were always available, there are so few people in this city who can read them..
Obviously whomever is responsible for buying books invested heavily in foreign language books for some reason?
Sounds like your town has a government/mayor that really wants to look good to their peers (other municipal/small town mayors and city council members) rather than serve their population. Those types of buildings get features in all their stupid trade magazines, etc. And then the gov officials use them to hobnob with each other.
My bet on the Chinese books is that it's one of the librarians' special interests. It's not uncommon to have some % of the buying budget set aside for staff recs (that allows for some inclusion of things people may not have known they'd like), and if the system is small enough for one person to be doing all the buying, she might have overspent on her interests.
The cynical answer would be that the librarian wants to have the books so she can write an article on foreign language collection development and angle for a job elsewhere: Very few small town librarians grew up in their small towns and it's a very gentrified profession. She might be angling for a position at the VPL or TPL systems.
They want to. The publishers won't sell to them/place ridiculous limitations on them. They're why a library has only so many 'copies' of a digital book to lend at once, why libraries won't have popular books as ebooks, etc.
I wrote a paper in library school about how the Vancouver Public Library failed to offer anything of substance to intermediate language learners (with a focus on Mandarin materials because of the high Mandarin speaking population) - if you're a person learning Mandarin to communicate with immigrant populations there, you skip from basic travel phrasebooks to videos/movies in Mandarin for Chinese audiences.
Public libraries aren't great at serving the long tail or more advanced interests for various reasons. And academic institutions usually have rules preventing use of their materials by people not affiliated with the school.