Friday, February 25, 2005
 

Yeah, Yeah

To everyone who responded, in person or via e-mail, to the "national movement" regarding Citrucel in the previous post, yes, ha ha, I get it.

Moving on to the subject of monumental stupidity (or maybe just unfathomable disorganization), 43 states, including the one where I'm currently working, received a music CD settlement that's resulted in boxes upon boxes of CDs pouring into our little County Library.

Our library doesn't, at the moment, offer audio CDs (other than books-on-tape) to check out; we don't have the money, the space, or the demand for that. Also, things like this quickly become the subjects of the five-finger discount, so they're not worth buying in the first place (example: a shipment of DVDs was ordered for the library; within a few weeks of the cases being on shelves, which are directly in front of the circulation counter, a massive number of DVDs had been removed from their cases and slipped out of the library; we can't afford a financial drain like that, so no more DVDs will be ordered).

But now the library has massive numbers of CDs piling up in the workroom, because there's nowhere else to put them. This sounds like a good idea in theory, if you ignore the fact that small libraries like ours don't have the resources to catalogue these, the funds to keep a supply of CDs up, space to store them, or even a demand for music CDs.

The other problem is one that's apparently plaguing all libraries hit by this settlement: what are these CDs, where did they come from, and why do we have 50 copies of the same CD? In our haul (which I have not scoped in its entirety), there were at least 30 Jessica Simpson CDs (this enriches the public how?), probably 30+ Shostakovich sets (interestingly, two different sets were involved), and literally 40 or 50 by some country artist none of us had ever heard of. Seriously, we've got 20 copies, easily, of a ton of CDs.

And the selection is random, to say the least. I mentioned Jessica Simpson, Shostakovich, and unknown-country-dude above, which should give you some idea of the seemingly blind free-for-all that went into packing these boxes. Other big features in our shipment were Christmas CDs galore, a great deal of jazz, a fair amount of chant, lots of Spanish-language CDs, and more.

Our director has approached the problem of how to deal with this by allowing employee mass looting. I saw one employee drag out two full plastic bags, another with a stack a foot and a half high, another with a full bag, and I have a small boxful, myself. I strongly suspect that we're not the only library dealing with the influx in such a manner. What are we supposed to do, set up a side business selling CDs? The notion of what a library is has gotten so vague over the past century. I confess that I'm not a fan of the idea of loaning music (keep in mind that these CDs aren't completely free; it'll take money to tag them and prepare them for circulation, plus all the extra worktime needed to catalogue these over and above a library's normal intake) or popular movies, but I'll settle with it as long as the budget keeps reading material in mind (don't get me started on the internet). And seriously, if we try to loan them out, they're never coming back. We hemorrhage materials.

So I have probably forty or so new additions to my collection, mostly classical, blues, and jazz. I don't think I took anything of which there was not more than one copy, except for a Lena Horne CD (Lena has already made the jump from the CD to the mp3 player).

Below, I've collected some articles about the settlement. Skimming these will give you an idea of the often hilarious choices of CDs libraries are getting. And it will probably horrify you as to how this settlement is working out. A sampling:

*This one is a particularly good one; the livejournal author, who's apparently some sort of library director, has actually counted out the multiples of many of her CDs, plus worked out percentages of new versus cut-out music. If you don't read any other article, read this one.

*: There's a Martha Stewart CD?

*: Strangely, even though I work circulation, I haven't noticed such a high demand for the Bee Gees.

* "is there a nicer word for 'junk'?

* there were criteria?!?

Supposedly, all of this stuff had to reach a certain ranking on the music charts before we received it. Most of this music hasn't even seen the underside of a music chart. We can't give these CDs away for free, and that's a problem. Also, the CDs are supposedly first-quality; that's blatantly untrue, as a significant number of our CDs have notches cut into them (from the other articles I've read, this is by no means limited to our library). Also, we received hundreds of CDs that were simply put in Zip-Loc bags, liner notes and all, no CD case. I suppose we're supposed to buy those, too, before we put them on the shelves? [shelves here being hypothetical, since we're suffering a severe shortage of shelf space as it is]

I can certainly understand that libraries couldn't possibly all compile their individual want / need lists for CDs; that's just not feasible. But it's not fair to make a mockery of the settlement by using the public library system as a dumping ground for rejects: their problem is now our problem. Money-- to add to those oh-so-tight budgets-- specifically for audios would have been quite nice, to say the least. Sure, audio could draw people to the library system, and that's a good thing, but 60 copies of a Martha Stewart CD aren't going to make many faithful library card holders.

I suppose we'll end up selling them; our budget is in very bad shape, and the funds for getting these into circulation aren't available. Theft has also become such a tremendous problem (our sensors at the door are broken, and we can't afford to fix them, causing the alarm to go off every time anyone leaves the library with anything, and hence making it a breeze to steal whatever you want) that it would be a financial drain (once the CDs are tagged etc.-- and again, there's that issue of labor hours in terms of cataloguing a huge influx of any item), because people are going to steal them, period. I've spent too many hours in the library to have any rose-colored glasses about that. I've already told about the DVDs; I could go on about how people steal one or two tapes from an audiobook before returning it (why? this happens too often to be an accident), the day I discovered that four out of five copies of a book were missing, the day I discovered that nearly $700 of reference material had walked off, or even yesterday, when a catalogue search for a patron revealed that all five copies of a particular novel were missing. I could go on, and on, and on . . .

So, there's my lengthy rant for the evening. If you made it all the way down here to the end, congratulations on your fortitude.

And don't steal from your local library. It makes us grouchy.

Elvisette philosophized at 11:27 PM