The library and "customers" (Part One)

In the past months, my library system has been merged into a larger entity. The move was inevitable: due to the recession/sub-prime crisis, the influence of a Republican governor in the pocket of the no-tax crowd and a not-so friendly Democratic mayor, my system had gone into life-support mode. Without the merger many libraries would have closed, with a lot of staff having to go bye-bye. So, we were sucked up by the big kids. And for the most part, that's ok.

But the new system is far more corporate than we're used to, with the library just a single entity in their big picture. And as a smaller fish having to learn to swim with the big one, an aspect of assimilating is figuring out the new library's culture.

In this case, the culture has a large customer-service base. In fact, the term "customer" is front and center, used in all discussions and communications. I have to admit this bothers me. I know the word is predominant in current library literature, spouted in LJ and blogs and library websites galore. But to me, customer implies a financial exchange between the library and the library user, a deal which goes way beyond the formerly accepted concept of a library patron merely paying taxes and getting various library services in return. Instead it smacks of the infamous public library-as-bookstore model, first presented years ago by Steve Coffman in American Libraries:

Coffman, Steve. "What If You Ran Your Library Like a Bookstore?" American Libraries (March 1998): 40-46.

As we've been merged for eight months now, and I've heard the term coming out of my colleagues' mouths on an ever-increasing basis, I've been doing some thinking. Why does this use of the word customer in a library context nag at me so much? Why can't I just join the crowd and parrot the word in meetings like everybody else? Of course, being a librarian, once I putting my brain to work on something, I needed to find out more. So I starting investigating the bookstore model more deeply: in articles in library literature, books, online. And I discovered an interesting thread popping up in some of the more-radical lit. A thread that reveals the whole basis of the bookstore model, and one that got me to the root of why I dislike the library-as-bookstore model--a concept known as neoliberalism.

More soon.





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