top things about libraries to drive you insane
I've managed two school libraries in my teaching career. Being the librarian is probably the coolest job in the school, but it's not without nuisance and vexation. When you take over a library, you inherit all the weird practices and systems of your predecessors. Join me as I heavy-handedly criticize people I don't know and who can't defend themselves. Here are several things that drive me insane about other school librarians.
Wicker baskets
When I was at the GLP in Eden, it seemed the librarian who preceded me could think of nothing to store things in but big wicker baskets, the kind you would stuff with fake grass and chocolate bunnies. It didn't matter what it was: books, pens, important paperwork. Everything went into some type of Easter basket. It was baskets everywhere, filling cupboards, roosting atop shelves. If the contents of the basket seemed particularly important, like purchase orders or lesson plans, then they were sealed inside a Zip-Loc bag before going into the basket.
I spent what seemed like months rooting out all these baskets and putting things where they rightly belonged. Every time I thought I'd trashed the last basket, I'd find another one tucked into a filing cabinet or gathering dust beneath a counter. It got so that resented wicker baskets. I viciously stomped each one flat. I never wanted to see another basket as long as I lived. Which is why I almost lost it when I came in one day with several packages of colored pencils for the kids, and my aide (yes, I actually had one there) perked up and suggested, "Do you want a basket for those?"
My eyes shot bullets. "DO I WANT. A..."
The infestation of baskets was not quite so bad at Parkdale, but there were still quite a few to flush out. Just the other day I found a straggler in my cupboards and nearly pitched a fit.
Bad book practices
A more comprehensive treatment would divide this topic into numerous sub-grievances, but let's see how it goes.
My predecessors at both Eden and East Aurora had exasperating habits when it came to processing books. Both were fine with putting completely unprotected books into circulation. By this I mean they threw countless books on the shelves with no protective covers whatever. You might as well save a step and throw them directly into the trash. Without some type of covering, that's where they'll be after just one child handles them.
The Eden librarian liked to simply Scotch-tape the dust jackets onto the covers, as if that accomplished anything. It just made the inevitable rips and dings more unsightly. The East Aurora librarian, just as infuriatingly, cut corners by removing the dust jackets altogether, rather than protect them with poly covers. That may seem a logical shortcut--the dust jacket is fragile; the cardboard covers beneath can take more of a beating. But many books are simply incomplete without their jackets. Take the book above--one of the least offending examples I could find. At least Rosie Revere is one of those books that come with some hidden artwork beneath the dust jacket. Yet neither the title nor the author nor the illustrator is shown, making this a truly dumb way to display a library book. And that's one of the good ones. Other beneath-the-jacket artwork offers even less of a clue as to what book you're holding. Often it's just a solid color.
Try this one. What book are you looking at?
It's The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Duh, dumbbell.
How about this one?
I actually have no idea. I just took a picture of it and didn't look inside. I know it's an Oliver Jeffers book, but I couldn't tell you which one. If only there were some kind of decorative outer layer books came with that displayed the title.
Seriously, I inherited a cupboard full of cast-off dust jackets that the previous librarian was too lazy to sheathe in poly film and secure to their books. It's not that hard! It takes like three or four minutes to cut the cover to fit, then...
NO, NOT LIKE THAT.
You might think I'm being nitpicky, but once you have seen a matte-finish book cover, you will agree it is hideous. It's dull and, despite what you'd expect, it actually shows dirt and grime more than a high-gloss cover. For some reason, the previous librarian--when she covered books at all--favored the matte-finish variety, and I know you will agree it is the wrong choice.
Watch what happens when you actually bother to recuperate a couple of banged-up books and clothe them in kingly suits of high-gloss poly.
There, isn't that vastly better? That's another accusation I level at my predecessors: clearly nobody ever bothered to replace or repair damaged books. I know libraries are famously ill-funded, but buying replacements for high-interest titles that have been mutilated is a must. I would love to spend my entire budget on brand-new, never-before-seen titles, but I accept the reality that I'm going to be buying at least a handful of replacement Dog Man and Piggie & Gerald books in perpetuity. I don't think the former librarians at either the GLP or Parkdale knew it was possible to buy new copies of such books, making the same duct-taped and deformed copies serve for decades.
Another thing. At both Eden and East Aurora, I walked into libraries where the books were crusted in...let's call it slime; where ripped pages and dislocated covers and entire text blocks dangling by a thread were commonplace. Yes, we are talking about school libraries, so of course books are going to suffer abuse. But--and I hope you're sitting down for this--did you know you can wipe dirty books with a damp paper towel? Did you know you can tape ripped pages? I remember feeling at both schools that I was inheriting libraries of trash, and so it was no wonder the students were accustomed to treating their books badly; no wonder they called the public library the "real" library. Garbage books get garbage treatment.
Speaking of trash.
Never weeding anything
One of the lesser-known but vital aspects of librarianship is throwing books in the friggin' trash. Like, you have to do it, and quite often. Yes, even YOUR library does it, and they don't even feel bad about it.
Much of the time, weeding is a thoughtful, painstaking process. Is this book still relevant? Is it outdated? How much has it circulated? Et cetera. In an elementary library, it's rather more brisk and straightforward: ah, this book was gnawed into Swiss cheese by a rottweiler. Straight to the trash. This one had a whole Reese's cup used as a bookmark and was left in a hot car. Straight to the trash. This one fell into a bathtub and, according to the borrower, spent three hours submerged. Again, believe it or not, straight to the trash.
Once more, both of my predecessors seem to have missed that day of library school. And I've said nothing about the books that haven't been outright destroyed but have moldered on the shelves for longer than I've been alive. The book pictured above, which hadn't been touched since the seventies, is not even the worst example I could find of a horribly outdated book--I've hauled countless boxes of others to the Dumpster.
Being much too permissive about donations; or, putting literally anything resembling a book into the library
Something else people seem surprised to learn about libraries and librarians: we don't want ALL THE BOOKS. Donations are a fraught subject for us. Your library, and literacy in general, will survive without your donated crates of frowzy, malodorous books from your late grandfather's attic (Microwave Recipes Even YOU Can't Screw Up! Vatican UFO Secrets FINALLY Exposed!) After we fake-smile and say thank you, the majority of those books are going--say it with me!--straight to the trash.
It's about curation, my dudes, not hoarding.
I, an official librarian, am granting you this permission: if you have old books you don't want anymore, and you can't reasonably imagine anyone else wanting them, you are allowed to throw them in the trash.
I am not saying never donate books to the library. Public libraries can turn a small profit selling the decent ones, and I personally enjoy paying a dollar for a mint-condition hardcover that the original owner bought for thirty bucks. But no one wants your mold-infested stacks of Reader's Digest Condensed Classics or your cigarette-smelling Harlequin paperbacks.
Donations to school libraries are even less likely to make their way into the collection, or be of any use at all. And yet I feel strongly that the previous librarian at Parkdale had a lot of people in her life who were constantly asking, "You run a library, right? Want some books?" And she never said no. If it had pages bound together in some fashion, that was enough to put it into circulation. Just weird shit, you know? Like, when you get a "book" in a Happy Meal, but it's like ten stapled pages in a weird miniature size with no ISBN. Or a book of blueprints for building historically-accurate and fully-functional trebuchets. Or a guide to repelling home invasions (a couple of the life-saving tips: "keep a bowl of change next to the door to fling at intruders" and "hit burglars with rolled-up magazines").
You are allowed to turn down donations, just as a gardener would be within his rights to decline well-meaning offers of assorted yard waste. You garden, right? Want a bag of damp leaves? Got a lot of grass clippings, too. And here's a rotting log I dragged out of the forest. They're all organic matter, maybe you can use them.
Why. Just why.
While I'm shaking my fist at clouds, why did the former Parkdale librarian do this? Not only is this book missing its jacket (although at least the book board underneath is a duplicate image of that missing jacket), but check out the eye-catching, ad-hoc labeling system. Countless books in the folktales section have these ugly handwritten labels slapped on, displaying their country or region or culture of origin.
I don't blame you for thinking this is a good idea, especially for the library of the past. Nowadays if I cared to do something like this, so that I could easily find a story from a specific culture to fit a lesson, I would just edit the catalog records, or lazily Google "stories from Africa" and then see if any of the suggested books were in my collection. My predecessor may not have had such an advantage. But even so: how would the handwritten labels have helped? You'd still have to hunt through the shelves, book by book, searching for those labels. And it's not as though cataloging didn't exist before computers. First, you got your basic card catalog. Second, if you wanted an ad-hoc database just for those folktales, you could easily compile a list and just refer to that whenever you needed a story from a specific culture. Failing all of that, you could at least put the ugly label on the inside cover.
I have spent years trying to rid these books of their unsightly stickers--a laborious and messy process involving gallons of Goo Gone--and every time I think I've fixed the last one, three more pop up to unhelpfully announce they're from CHINA or EUROPE or THE CARIBBEAN.
Grossly inappropriate uses of tape
Land's SAKES, chile! Ain't you never heard of blue painter's tape?
This was another problem at both the GLP and Parkdale. Every poster the librarians ever put up was pasted to the wall with wads of masking tape or packing tape. These are not paint-friendly in the slightest. Every time I moved or took down an old poster, it took half a pound of drywall with it and left behind a crust of fossilized adhesive.
This bad habit was not limited to posters. For some reason, the previous librarians and their aides--yes, they had AIDES, people to ASSIST them and LESSEN THEIR WORKLOAD, which makes so many of these slovenly practices all the more perplexing--they would use the wrong kind of tape for everything. Spine labels were affixed with roughly-shorn hanks of packing tape. Spine repairs were done with Scotch tape instead of glue. New barcodes did not replace old ones but were simply layered on top of them like geological strata, pinned down with ripples of tape that appeared to have been bitten off the roll by an angry person in a terrible hurry.
Granted, the craft of book repair is one of the many things not taught you in library school, but proficiency is achievable with a modicum of effort and practice. I'd rank the difficulty somewhere between brewing instant coffee and refilling your windshield wiper fluid.
I know that I have been raking my predecessors over the coals, so in this sentence I hereby acknowledge that they were probably doing their best, just like anyone else, and there were probably lots of other things they did better in their day than I do now. But seriously...can we not, with the packing tape and the labels and everything.
Shoddy manufacturing
This last is not a complaint about my fellow librarians; it's a charge against publishers. I'm convinced they design some of their books to fail prematurely. Yes, children can (and often will) destroy even well-made books, but many brand-new books simply fall apart on their own, sometimes on the first or second circulation.
I'm well aware of the concept of planned obsolescence. It even makes sense, to a degree--companies need people continually buying their products to stay in business. But this is absolutely unnecessary when it comes to school library books, which do not need any planned defects to shorten their lifespans.
There is a certain type of hardcover book I simply won't buy anymore, if I can avoid it. The picture above is typical. In as little as one borrow, the entire text block peels away from the spine. You can see how little glue was used in the binding. This is not some unavoidable problem. At the cost of precious time, I can easily paint an appropriate amount of glue onto that backing and make the book stronger-than-new. But given the rate at which this exact failure occurs, this type of book isn't worth purchasing in the first place. My "book hospital" is towering with books in just this condition, waiting for me to get around to repairing them. The publisher wants you to have to replace these often--every year, if possible. So my pro tip for purchasing library books is to avoid hardcovers with flat-back spines whenever you can. Rounded spines hold up better. Even paperbacks hold up better, if you bother to cover them. There are also companies that rebind books in near-indestructible forms. They cost more, but it's worth it for the high-demand titles.
This concludes my essay on things about libraries that drive me crazy, at least the things I can think of at this moment. If I think of more, you can be sure I will write about them in the same agonizing detail.
Wicker baskets
When I was at the GLP in Eden, it seemed the librarian who preceded me could think of nothing to store things in but big wicker baskets, the kind you would stuff with fake grass and chocolate bunnies. It didn't matter what it was: books, pens, important paperwork. Everything went into some type of Easter basket. It was baskets everywhere, filling cupboards, roosting atop shelves. If the contents of the basket seemed particularly important, like purchase orders or lesson plans, then they were sealed inside a Zip-Loc bag before going into the basket.
I spent what seemed like months rooting out all these baskets and putting things where they rightly belonged. Every time I thought I'd trashed the last basket, I'd find another one tucked into a filing cabinet or gathering dust beneath a counter. It got so that resented wicker baskets. I viciously stomped each one flat. I never wanted to see another basket as long as I lived. Which is why I almost lost it when I came in one day with several packages of colored pencils for the kids, and my aide (yes, I actually had one there) perked up and suggested, "Do you want a basket for those?"
My eyes shot bullets. "DO I WANT. A..."
The infestation of baskets was not quite so bad at Parkdale, but there were still quite a few to flush out. Just the other day I found a straggler in my cupboards and nearly pitched a fit.
Bad book practices
A more comprehensive treatment would divide this topic into numerous sub-grievances, but let's see how it goes.
My predecessors at both Eden and East Aurora had exasperating habits when it came to processing books. Both were fine with putting completely unprotected books into circulation. By this I mean they threw countless books on the shelves with no protective covers whatever. You might as well save a step and throw them directly into the trash. Without some type of covering, that's where they'll be after just one child handles them.
The Eden librarian liked to simply Scotch-tape the dust jackets onto the covers, as if that accomplished anything. It just made the inevitable rips and dings more unsightly. The East Aurora librarian, just as infuriatingly, cut corners by removing the dust jackets altogether, rather than protect them with poly covers. That may seem a logical shortcut--the dust jacket is fragile; the cardboard covers beneath can take more of a beating. But many books are simply incomplete without their jackets. Take the book above--one of the least offending examples I could find. At least Rosie Revere is one of those books that come with some hidden artwork beneath the dust jacket. Yet neither the title nor the author nor the illustrator is shown, making this a truly dumb way to display a library book. And that's one of the good ones. Other beneath-the-jacket artwork offers even less of a clue as to what book you're holding. Often it's just a solid color.
Try this one. What book are you looking at?
It's The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Duh, dumbbell.
How about this one?
I actually have no idea. I just took a picture of it and didn't look inside. I know it's an Oliver Jeffers book, but I couldn't tell you which one. If only there were some kind of decorative outer layer books came with that displayed the title.
Seriously, I inherited a cupboard full of cast-off dust jackets that the previous librarian was too lazy to sheathe in poly film and secure to their books. It's not that hard! It takes like three or four minutes to cut the cover to fit, then...
NO, NOT LIKE THAT.
You might think I'm being nitpicky, but once you have seen a matte-finish book cover, you will agree it is hideous. It's dull and, despite what you'd expect, it actually shows dirt and grime more than a high-gloss cover. For some reason, the previous librarian--when she covered books at all--favored the matte-finish variety, and I know you will agree it is the wrong choice.
Watch what happens when you actually bother to recuperate a couple of banged-up books and clothe them in kingly suits of high-gloss poly.
There, isn't that vastly better? That's another accusation I level at my predecessors: clearly nobody ever bothered to replace or repair damaged books. I know libraries are famously ill-funded, but buying replacements for high-interest titles that have been mutilated is a must. I would love to spend my entire budget on brand-new, never-before-seen titles, but I accept the reality that I'm going to be buying at least a handful of replacement Dog Man and Piggie & Gerald books in perpetuity. I don't think the former librarians at either the GLP or Parkdale knew it was possible to buy new copies of such books, making the same duct-taped and deformed copies serve for decades.
Another thing. At both Eden and East Aurora, I walked into libraries where the books were crusted in...let's call it slime; where ripped pages and dislocated covers and entire text blocks dangling by a thread were commonplace. Yes, we are talking about school libraries, so of course books are going to suffer abuse. But--and I hope you're sitting down for this--did you know you can wipe dirty books with a damp paper towel? Did you know you can tape ripped pages? I remember feeling at both schools that I was inheriting libraries of trash, and so it was no wonder the students were accustomed to treating their books badly; no wonder they called the public library the "real" library. Garbage books get garbage treatment.
Speaking of trash.
Never weeding anything
One of the lesser-known but vital aspects of librarianship is throwing books in the friggin' trash. Like, you have to do it, and quite often. Yes, even YOUR library does it, and they don't even feel bad about it.
Much of the time, weeding is a thoughtful, painstaking process. Is this book still relevant? Is it outdated? How much has it circulated? Et cetera. In an elementary library, it's rather more brisk and straightforward: ah, this book was gnawed into Swiss cheese by a rottweiler. Straight to the trash. This one had a whole Reese's cup used as a bookmark and was left in a hot car. Straight to the trash. This one fell into a bathtub and, according to the borrower, spent three hours submerged. Again, believe it or not, straight to the trash.
Once more, both of my predecessors seem to have missed that day of library school. And I've said nothing about the books that haven't been outright destroyed but have moldered on the shelves for longer than I've been alive. The book pictured above, which hadn't been touched since the seventies, is not even the worst example I could find of a horribly outdated book--I've hauled countless boxes of others to the Dumpster.
Being much too permissive about donations; or, putting literally anything resembling a book into the library
Something else people seem surprised to learn about libraries and librarians: we don't want ALL THE BOOKS. Donations are a fraught subject for us. Your library, and literacy in general, will survive without your donated crates of frowzy, malodorous books from your late grandfather's attic (Microwave Recipes Even YOU Can't Screw Up! Vatican UFO Secrets FINALLY Exposed!) After we fake-smile and say thank you, the majority of those books are going--say it with me!--straight to the trash.
It's about curation, my dudes, not hoarding.
I, an official librarian, am granting you this permission: if you have old books you don't want anymore, and you can't reasonably imagine anyone else wanting them, you are allowed to throw them in the trash.
I am not saying never donate books to the library. Public libraries can turn a small profit selling the decent ones, and I personally enjoy paying a dollar for a mint-condition hardcover that the original owner bought for thirty bucks. But no one wants your mold-infested stacks of Reader's Digest Condensed Classics or your cigarette-smelling Harlequin paperbacks.
Donations to school libraries are even less likely to make their way into the collection, or be of any use at all. And yet I feel strongly that the previous librarian at Parkdale had a lot of people in her life who were constantly asking, "You run a library, right? Want some books?" And she never said no. If it had pages bound together in some fashion, that was enough to put it into circulation. Just weird shit, you know? Like, when you get a "book" in a Happy Meal, but it's like ten stapled pages in a weird miniature size with no ISBN. Or a book of blueprints for building historically-accurate and fully-functional trebuchets. Or a guide to repelling home invasions (a couple of the life-saving tips: "keep a bowl of change next to the door to fling at intruders" and "hit burglars with rolled-up magazines").
You are allowed to turn down donations, just as a gardener would be within his rights to decline well-meaning offers of assorted yard waste. You garden, right? Want a bag of damp leaves? Got a lot of grass clippings, too. And here's a rotting log I dragged out of the forest. They're all organic matter, maybe you can use them.
Why. Just why.
While I'm shaking my fist at clouds, why did the former Parkdale librarian do this? Not only is this book missing its jacket (although at least the book board underneath is a duplicate image of that missing jacket), but check out the eye-catching, ad-hoc labeling system. Countless books in the folktales section have these ugly handwritten labels slapped on, displaying their country or region or culture of origin.
I don't blame you for thinking this is a good idea, especially for the library of the past. Nowadays if I cared to do something like this, so that I could easily find a story from a specific culture to fit a lesson, I would just edit the catalog records, or lazily Google "stories from Africa" and then see if any of the suggested books were in my collection. My predecessor may not have had such an advantage. But even so: how would the handwritten labels have helped? You'd still have to hunt through the shelves, book by book, searching for those labels. And it's not as though cataloging didn't exist before computers. First, you got your basic card catalog. Second, if you wanted an ad-hoc database just for those folktales, you could easily compile a list and just refer to that whenever you needed a story from a specific culture. Failing all of that, you could at least put the ugly label on the inside cover.
I have spent years trying to rid these books of their unsightly stickers--a laborious and messy process involving gallons of Goo Gone--and every time I think I've fixed the last one, three more pop up to unhelpfully announce they're from CHINA or EUROPE or THE CARIBBEAN.
Grossly inappropriate uses of tape
Land's SAKES, chile! Ain't you never heard of blue painter's tape?
This was another problem at both the GLP and Parkdale. Every poster the librarians ever put up was pasted to the wall with wads of masking tape or packing tape. These are not paint-friendly in the slightest. Every time I moved or took down an old poster, it took half a pound of drywall with it and left behind a crust of fossilized adhesive.
This bad habit was not limited to posters. For some reason, the previous librarians and their aides--yes, they had AIDES, people to ASSIST them and LESSEN THEIR WORKLOAD, which makes so many of these slovenly practices all the more perplexing--they would use the wrong kind of tape for everything. Spine labels were affixed with roughly-shorn hanks of packing tape. Spine repairs were done with Scotch tape instead of glue. New barcodes did not replace old ones but were simply layered on top of them like geological strata, pinned down with ripples of tape that appeared to have been bitten off the roll by an angry person in a terrible hurry.
Granted, the craft of book repair is one of the many things not taught you in library school, but proficiency is achievable with a modicum of effort and practice. I'd rank the difficulty somewhere between brewing instant coffee and refilling your windshield wiper fluid.
I know that I have been raking my predecessors over the coals, so in this sentence I hereby acknowledge that they were probably doing their best, just like anyone else, and there were probably lots of other things they did better in their day than I do now. But seriously...can we not, with the packing tape and the labels and everything.
Shoddy manufacturing
This last is not a complaint about my fellow librarians; it's a charge against publishers. I'm convinced they design some of their books to fail prematurely. Yes, children can (and often will) destroy even well-made books, but many brand-new books simply fall apart on their own, sometimes on the first or second circulation.
I'm well aware of the concept of planned obsolescence. It even makes sense, to a degree--companies need people continually buying their products to stay in business. But this is absolutely unnecessary when it comes to school library books, which do not need any planned defects to shorten their lifespans.
There is a certain type of hardcover book I simply won't buy anymore, if I can avoid it. The picture above is typical. In as little as one borrow, the entire text block peels away from the spine. You can see how little glue was used in the binding. This is not some unavoidable problem. At the cost of precious time, I can easily paint an appropriate amount of glue onto that backing and make the book stronger-than-new. But given the rate at which this exact failure occurs, this type of book isn't worth purchasing in the first place. My "book hospital" is towering with books in just this condition, waiting for me to get around to repairing them. The publisher wants you to have to replace these often--every year, if possible. So my pro tip for purchasing library books is to avoid hardcovers with flat-back spines whenever you can. Rounded spines hold up better. Even paperbacks hold up better, if you bother to cover them. There are also companies that rebind books in near-indestructible forms. They cost more, but it's worth it for the high-demand titles.
This concludes my essay on things about libraries that drive me crazy, at least the things I can think of at this moment. If I think of more, you can be sure I will write about them in the same agonizing detail.