No, you chose to pontificate on something you are ignorant about. Your ignorance and your ill-conceived opinion are your own responsibility. To say otherwise would be like claiming that it’s Stephen Hawking’s problem that you don’t understand String Theory better.

if people come asking me to fight for them to keep their jobs on the public’s dime during a time when there just isn’t enough money to go around, i’m going to question why the jobs are worth fighting for. if that that makes me an asshole, so be it.

You’ve proven yourself to be quite the smug little prick throughout this post. I found it especially funny how you blame your own ignorance about the libraries on librarians.

You also apparently don’t understand that unemployment benefits are taxable, as you very classily demonstrated while characterizing people who’ve lost their jobs as “sucking up” these benefits. Puts a nostalgic “welfare mothers” spin on the whole recession, no?

y’all can think whatever you want about me, but i don’t think it’s out of line to ask you to justify your continued existence seeing as how we’re all being asked to pay for it and, as the unemployment stays high, those of us who still have jobs will obviously be paying more than the folks sucking up the unemployment dollars (who, apparently, are your main customers.)

but you make plenty of good points, and if y’all had been making them in a place most people actually read, and constantly (instead of just in times of crisis when your dollars are directly competing with fire companies and trash removal) you wouldn’t need to be defending yourself at all. good luck.

But a librarian is not just trained to memorize a few online databases. Not everyone thinks to check out books from our career collection to expand their sense of “marketing” oneself to employers. But then again, you would expect us to push you to the catalog. So there’s also the effort of my colleagues to gather resources to point our patrons to the organizations that can do further referral, give more workshops, review more resumes. Careerlink comes to mind, there are many more.

Our academic training also encourages us to think about “information seeking habits”. We know from the vaguely “scientific” studies by the PhDs who train us that personal relationships are often where normal people go first for information. Perhaps it’s an obvious truism to many, but giving tips to particularly focused job hunters about tracking down contact information for specific individuals in the fields in which they’d like to work is particularly gratifying to me. Especially so if they get a response.

The Free Library pays for access to subscription based databases and services that are made freely available to you, the library card holder. I highly suggest checking them out:

http://search.library.phila.gov/advSearch.cfm?bySubject=false

There are even services that will provide feedback on written work within 24 hours. What a relief that was to a patron yesterday who wanted some focused attention on a writing sample she needed to provide for a job lead.

As a librarian, I can tell you I love Google and Wikipedia and how they’ve helped more internet users feel growing confidence as searchers. However, many of you intuitively know that some in my profession see it as a threat. I too cringe when I see the discourse (or the amateur scholarship) on the Internet essentially relies only on those two resources. But Google can only index a tiny fraction of the electronic information available on the web, and Wikipedia articles are often poorly sourced but readers don’t think critically about authority.

Meanwhile, I understand that librarians have done a poor job letting you, the sophisticated web surfer, know that we offer services far broader than you imagine from this exhilarating hyperlinked perch. Frankly though, the elite “what do we even need libraries for?” crowd come across sounding quite boorish and middlebrow to me. Not only is their an air of snobbishness about one’s own privileged access to information, but there’s also ignorance of how sophisticated the library is as a democratic institution that has the perhaps hubristic mission to index, collocate, pre/post coordinate all the universe’s information, as well as tenaciously serve any individual’s curiosity about any subject. More humbly as previously mentioned, we offer entertainment for the life of the mind, space for communities to share their knowledge, and an open and safe environment for babies and children to be reared. Historically, literacy really has been the tool and the barometer of progress and civilization… so programs from Books Aloud to LEAP need not be seen as daycare that could best be located elsewhere.

With the exception of those who are so over libraries in the Google-century, our municipal library systems tend to be one of the few government institutions citizens almost universally like. Fire departments are certainly admired and certainly vital in life or death emergencies. If we had Medicare for All we would probably like that too, especially as our health systems started healing us instead of trying to profit off us. Kinda like the way libraries in America simply serve their communities as a passion and without regard to class or social status.

Don’t forget either that running a large complex urban library system depends on the labor of hundreds of library assistants, guards, youth leaders, maintenance folks, IT Techs, clerks, et cetera. These are good an accessible jobs that provide much stability to families throughout Philadelphia. When you take the following steps to save the Free Library and the rest of Philadelphia please keep that in mind:

http://www.library.phila.gov/about/actionnow.htm

I hope the budget impasse is settled, but make no mistake about it: Nutter is twisting arms of local citizens in hopes that they will pressure Harrisburg. Gangster pol move 100%.

The fact that they provide books honestly is secondary. In Europe, no one has heard of a free library (lending libraries exist but they are not free) and plenty of people read. It is the community aspects that make libraries so important to the citizens of Philadelphia.

And, Central Branch is pretty f’in sweet.