Local library

dekaspace

Serendipitious wrote: »

I love our libraries and have visited most branches within the county.

Each has a very well-stocked fiction section, then they each specialise in one or more genres as well, so one branch has an extensive SF section, another will have a large Crime/Thriller area, and so on.

I find if I get jaded by seeing the 'same old' novels, it's soon cured by a trip to a different branch.

Ours also has a shelf for donations & purchases by the main doors.

But I miss the personal element and the chat now there are so many self-service machines. (Although sometimes it can be a saving grace - one branch is staffed by the most unfriendly bunch!)

The local library where I first lived when I left home (and visited for a decade before that) used to have a massive desk at the front door with 2 or 3 staff on at all times, one side for taking books out, one for taking them in and a 3rd member of staff for the overflow, then a reception/enquiry desk at side of door for signing up, or reserving things.

Now the desk has been replaced with 4 self serve machines and no staff at all except on the reception desk who even seem to want you to sign up online and print off the forms pre signed! and a black and white A4 page printed off is 50p!!

Frogletina

My local council, in its wisdom, has closed most of the libraries in the city.

I'm fortunate that in my area volunteers have been able to maintain the running of my local one as a community library with reduced hours. I used it regularly as a child, and often by myself (it is next to the primary school)

Had it not continued, then the nearest would be the one in the city centre as it is now for several areas of the city.

phizzimum

Like a lot of others I buy books from charity shops and use the library too.

I don’t tend to find the books I want on the Library shelves so I reserve them online from elsewhere in the County. This costs me 60p so it’s not really much different from buying a second hand book.

The advantage of charity shop books isn’t that I can take more than 3 weeks to read them, can lend them to friends, and it doesn’t matter if I drop them in the bath.

Pollycat

I think it's clear that there are people who do read books.
And those people get their books from all sorts of places - charity shops, bookshops, friends and of course libraries.

And there are people who don't read.
Those people won't bother to visit libraries even if it's just to keep them open.

dolly84

A good friend of mine was a librarian for 30 years until her recent redundancy. She once asked the central library in our area (the one that deals with all the finances etc) if she could go to the supermarkets and buy a paperback copy of the popular best sellers that they sell for under a fiver usually. They said no, all purchases had to be made through one of the council approved suppliers at full cover cost. The council needs to think like a business would.

[Deleted User]

dolly84 wrote: »

A good friend of mine was a librarian for 30 years until her recent redundancy. She once asked the central library in our area (the one that deals with all the finances etc) if she could go to the supermarkets and buy a paperback copy of the popular best sellers that they sell for under a fiver usually. They said no, all purchases had to be made through one of the council approved suppliers at full cover cost. The council needs to think like a business would.

The Library is thinking like a business. If one member of staff buys a book from a shop it would not be shelf ready.

It would need jacketing, an RFID tag adding, a barcode and then cataloguing.

Books bought from a supplier come with all this already done. They turn up at the correct branch library you zap it into the system and it can go straight onto the shelf. This is much more cost effective than having individual people buying books from supermarkets.

P.S. I used to run libraries.

[Deleted User]

In reply to the OP.

I save money on bills, food etc so that I can spend them on things I really enjoy - one of which is books.

I buy them new, use our rural library van, buy from charity shops, buy secondhand online and swap with friends.

Why do I use so many different suppliers? I read about 2-3 books a week ranging from sci-fi to heavy non fiction history books. By using the different sources I can read the wide range of genres in which I am interested.

Lingua

GreyQueen wrote: »

My library has an irritating habit of splitting series across the county, so you read one of them and find all the others have to be ordered in from up to 40 miles away. If the system only runs to one copy of each installment of a series by a best-selling author, and sprinkles them around the region, I feel its a cynical money-making ploy.
...
The library won't accept donations of books more than three years old and I've been frustrated and disbelieving to see, only a couple of months after I've paid to reserve certain titles and waited some time for other readers to have finished with them, that they're being offered (in undamaged condition!) in the library book sale only slightly more than the res fee.

My county also splits series across the entire area, which is no doubt far more costly for them when I make requests! They also had a series available, but the first book had gone missing. When I asked the librarian to order it in, she was very apologetic but said the system wouldn't allow her to buy it from the council-approved supplier because it was too old. The issue was that without the first book, barely anyone is likely to read the rest of the series, so they're just taking up space! The system is really quite broken.

I've all but stopped going to the library for these reasons. If they had a decent selection and had the books available, I would use it more often. As it is, I buy books online and just keep them in my house. Easier to reread them that way too.

Lingua

maman

Spider_In_The_Bath wrote: »

In reply to the OP.

I save money on bills, food etc so that I can spend them on things I really enjoy - one of which is books.

I buy them new, use our rural library van, buy from charity shops, buy secondhand online and swap with friends.

Why do I use so many different suppliers? I read about 2-3 books a week ranging from sci-fi to heavy non fiction history books. By using the different sources I can read the wide range of genres in which I am interested.

Although provoking an interesting conversation about reading habits and libraries in general, isn't it strange that OP hasn't returned?


The mild reprimand implied in the original post was obviously a case of jumping to conclusions and getting them wrong!


I agree with your philosophy entirely spider. I'm in the fortunate position unlike many other posters where I choose to be mse because I hate being ripped off. I can then spend the money saved on whatever I choose whether that's books or anything else.:p

[Deleted User]

GreyQueen wrote: »

...

Observations; the fee for reserving books not in branch is well above what many charity shops charge for books in my area, sometimes double or triple...

My library has an irritating habit of splitting series across the county, so you read one of them and find all the others have to be ordered in from up to 40 miles away. If the system only runs to one copy of each installment of a series by a best-selling author, and sprinkles them around the region, I feel its a cynical money-making ploy...

It will not be money-making, in fact it will cost the library a lot more to send the book to you than the reservation fee costs. Think of all the stages the book has to go through to be sent to you:
- a staff member goes through the reservations list and picks the requested books from the shelf
- zaps the book on the system to show it has been found and places it in a box
- on collection day the filled boxes are collected by another member of staff and driven to a central location
- the books are sorted and then put into boxes marked for individual branch library
- the boxes are loaded back onto a van and sent to each branch library
- the books are zapped into the system at the branch library to show they are ready for collection and then placed on the collections shelf.

It costs a lot of money to provide reservations for people.

Many libraries charge a fee to stop people putting on unwanted reservations. When the service is free many people reserve lots of books and then never collect them costing the library a lot in terms of time, effort and cost.

Also, the reason the books from a collection are spread around at different libraries is due to the fact that people request them. Books usually no longer have a home library. They used to be marked for one branch and when returned to another branch they would (using the system above) be sent back to the home branch. This costs a lot of money so they now usually stay at the last branch they were issued from.

So if you have 5 books in a series at branch A and someone requests books 1 and 2 at branch B you then have the collection split over two libraries. They then return book 1 to branch B and book 2 to branch C near work. The collection is now split over three libraries. It does not take long for this to happen.

Hope this explains things a bit