(Thanks to Robin in AZ)
A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system. Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.
(skip) Can a municipal service like a library hold so central place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then? “There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”
(more at As L.S.S.I. Takes Over Libraries, Patrons Can’t Keep Quiet - NYTimes.com)
There used to be this wonderful discipline called LIBRARY SCIENCE. With nonunion employees and cuts in pay and benefits, libraries will be staffed by someone with less education than it takes to be a Barnes & Noble clerk. (Bye bye small wonderful bookstores already.)
US has a high ILLITERACY rate (I have a whole collection of rightwing political signs with atrocious misspellings.) Many of the people who want English as an official (or only) language in America have not even mastered the basics themselves.
Here I am writing from Paris, where I'm staying next to the old Biblioteque Nationale (a new one was built in the more suburban 13th district.) It's stately, as is the Royal Garden that I can see out the window, where people are READING!! As they are on the subway, and not cheap novels. The average graduate with "le Bac" (high school diploma) is the equivalent of an American Associate of Arts graduate (two years beyond high school.) This is true regardless of occupation (though there may be different tracks.)
It is becoming almost "elite" in the US to even get an education. First of all, the state doesn't help. (A BA used to be free for tuitionin the CA system.) Tuition is now so much that my son's in-state tuition was approx. $1000/class. I used to pay $10/credit hour (a class was 3-5 credits.) I got 3 degrees for $1200 and my Work/Study was IN THE LIBRARY. How ironic.
Our local library system (Seattle) has reduced hours and they recently furloughed employees for a week and closed the system. It's not tax base - it's priorities. We could pay for useless wars, but not libraries. Wonder if the new libraries will stock a lot of "Left Behind" books about the Rapture and censor progressive political books? Or maybe a bunch of those Texas textbooks that revise history to the right will be ordered.
US is going down the tubes.
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