Mid-Semester Review

The main things that I've noticed from my participation throughout this semester is that I love my job, and am very focused on working in Teen Librarianship, and that I am very passionate about the current state of e-books and libraries.

I honestly hadn't realized how passionate I am about how publishers will not cooperate with libraries to make e-books available and affordable to them until we started discussing it in class as part of my team's Think Tank activity.  I know that when my library has discussed subscribing to Overdrive and offering e-book loan to our patrons that I didn't really see a call for it in our community.  We don't get many requests for e-books, and the cost to subscribe to the service would be 1/8 of our entire collection development budget (that does not take into account the cost of then purchasing the use of any e-books from the service).  It really bothers me that some people don't see how much this affects those that are economically disadvantaged already.

I understand where the publishers are coming from, but I also think that this is just making it harder for the poor to be able to access this new technology.  I haven't really used e-books because I know I can't afford to pay $10 (at least) for each book I read.  I rarely buy books, I almost always check them out from the library instead.  The fact that these publishers are making it almost impossible for libraries to get their books (by most of them not even offering libraries the chance to purchase the books), just makes people like me unable to use this format.

The ethics paper also made me think some about my job at the library.  One of the first questions I was asked when I interviewed here was how I would handle the homeless patrons.  I said I would treat them just like anyone else, because I already did that working at a local cafe.  In fact, one of the more well known local homeless guys had his own table at the cafe and would come there almost every day, so I was used to working with the homeless.  While working on the Ethics Case paper I really had to think about the impact that the library has on the homeless population, and the impact they have on us.  At my library we've only had to ban one homeless man that I know of, and he did not get banned because he was homeless or smelled bad.  He was banned because he was a violent schizophrenic who refused to take his medication and was also hitting on underage girls.  That kind of behavior would get you banned from any library (I'd hope).