Bookstore model "how-to" website

As an example of a library system that's gone hog-wild for the bookstore model, the South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative takes the cake. These folks came up with a project called "Trading Spaces: Reinventing the Library Environment." Essentially, the project, presented on their website, is a guide to turning your library into a bookstore. Reading the site's content, you'll find countless references to "customers" (of course), ominous phrases like "merchandizing the collection" and statements that reek of business-oriented new agey pretension: "library staff at all points on the change-oriented and traditional scale can thrive in a library where the collection and services star." There's even a paragraph that makes the library seem to be striving to emulate a bank!

South Jersey offers training to assist in a library's transformation. There's advice on how to make your books face out on the shelves, how to walk around and make things spiffy, how to be a good greeter to folks who walk in the door. (Forget the bookstore--this sounds like Walmart!) Unfortunately, none of their advice seems to concern helping people find a particularly useful book or answer a reference question.

For an ominous moment, I even thought South Jersey had done away with a classification system. Luckily, I found a reference to DDC buried in one of their guides.

Well, maybe it's not all that bad. From the looks of the website, updates have been pretty infrequent, so the South Jersey staff must be pretty busy. There's a lot of postings from last year's PLA, for instance. It must be working out ok, though, 'cause South Jersey even offers a DIY toolkit on how to do what they did to their library to yours. Check it out--if you dare.

Bookstore model...disaster?

I just read a piece about the bookstore model run amuck. The story would almost be funny; instead, it's a little bit scary, because what happened at the featured library illustrates the direction in which a lot of libraries are moving.

Here's the story, in a nutshell: the library system in question, Washington DC, apparently has some of those administrators who are now as common as mud in April: they read in LJ or hear a conference presentation about a trend and jump in, head over heels, never giving a thought to the consequences. In this case they decided to implement the bookstore model for their system. So, to start, they took a branch library, weeded the collection in half (apparently by circulation figures and condition), then added lots of books with bright shiny covers, included tons of self-help, "Idiot's" guides. Science and history areas were decimated.

The only trouble was that some patrons (users/customers) in that part of town didn't want this kind of material. They're a highly education demograph (unlike a large part of DC), and those folks wanted good stuff on the shelves, including Caucer's Canterbury Tales. Which, guess what, was no longer available--although quotes from the book were ornately inscribed in glass panels on the library's shelves.

Now, at this point, I have to admit it--this is old news. The above all happened in 2007 and a lot of folks seem to have adjusted just fine. Turnstile and circulation numbers are up and the library has increased its db subscriptions as well. And as for Canterbury Tales, there's a number of copies in the system, including those at DC's Martin Luther King Jr. research-oriented library. Still, there seem to be some patrons who don't like what's happened to their neighborhood library.


So, I wonder: what would have been wrong with just weeding more judiciously at the above library, and retaining some the reference books and less-circulating material with re-bound covers, etc.? Sure, the shelves could be thinned, faceouts added, that kind of "bookstore" stuff. But don't the patrons at this library deserve at least some research material or less-read books such as classics that have fallen out of favor with most modern readers? Why should they have to go to another library, or wait for a book to be shipped to one closer to them? As I've said previously, the bookstore model isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just often seems to be applied without much thought given to a library's mission, collection or all the patrons/users/customers.

Here's a couple links about the story. One's from the The Hill, a DC paper. The other's from the Examiner website. Read 'em; see what you think.