Caveat Lector

Jenny asks whether any library-systems vendors allow library users to reserve books that they can later go in and pick up. (If I read the entry right. Jenny may have been asking something quite different.)

The Madison Public Library and its Southern Wisconsin affiliates let me put any book in any member library on hold. If it’s not from Sequoya Public Library (down the street from me), they ship it there. And they send me email when a book I reserved is in.

Despite the ugly UI—I have to type my fourteen-digit library-card number for every book I put on hold—I get most of my books this way. Love it to death. Somebody blogs an interesting-looking book, I telnet in and put it on hold, a bit later (depending on the length of the waitlist) I bring it home and read it. I dig that.

Jenny has also been wondering why anyone would do the Google Answers thing when there are librarians around for free. I suspect that Madison is not unique in hiring anybody they can find who’ll work for less than nine dollars an hour (and zero benefits) for front-line library positions. Trained librarians are in management when they’re hired at all; their interaction with patrons is kept to a minimum.

Which is not to say that Madison front-liners can’t or won’t help; just that they aren’t typically the highly-trained information professionals that Jenny herself is and talks about. Nor is the situation likely to improve in Madison; the Wisconsin legislature is trying to cut library funding, damn them to the ninth circle of hell. (Yeah, ninth circle, and third section, too, the place where you’re buried head to foot in ice for unconscionable treachery.)

(Addendum: The fourth section, of course. Dang it. Not everything in Dante comes in threes. Just most things.)