The Lesser Importance of Libraries?

 Much concern these days over which books are in school libraries and which are not. It's warranted: the presence of a book in a school library signals something. 

But these days hasn't it a diminished importance?  When I went to school the library was my source for magazines to read and books to take out. I didn't have other sources, unless my family could subscribe to a magazine or buy the book.  My appetite for reading material far exceeded the available money my family could spend. 

Today's youth have access to cellphones and printed material on the internet. I realize the material differs from the books whose presence in school libraries is currently questioned, but still.

Back in the day the two sources of perversive material were the library and the mass of rumor and fact passed down from older kids to younger kids. Today it's just a click  away.  

The bottomline seems to me that those trying to ban books are wasting their energy on the lesser threat, not the major one, while those fighting bans often exagerate the significance of the ban. 

On Public Service, Bureaucrats and Libraries

Neil Irwin at Wonkblog has an interview with Paul Volcker on his new ideas for governance. 

One exchange led me to do a Google ngram, comparing the occurrences of "public service" and "bureaucrat".  In American books the frequency for the two started out with "public service" more frequent and "bureaucrat" less, but the two lines cross about 1976 so we now think more of "bureaucrats" and less of "public service".  "Public service" peaked in 1920 or so.

That's bad.


But I'd like to recognize a very good bureaucrat, Ginny Cooper, the retiring head of the DC public libraries.  Among other things, in 7 years she tripled the number of books checked out.  I remember using first the Mt. Vernon building, then the MLK building on G street a lot in my years in the city.  Libraries to my mind are more important than schools--you know some of the students in the school are not interested, but you know all of the people in the library are interested.  (Except for the homeless, which is a problem in Reston as well as DC.)