Paying for silver bullets, believing in magic bullets, now you will accept that libraries will store fiction and not history.
Paying for silver bullets then traded for heroin to the wrong guy(Hekmatyar vs. Masud, Afghanistan, 1980's), believing in Senator Arlen Specter's JFK Magic Bullet, later called the Pristine Magic Bullet because after it made numerous right angle turns in the air and in flesh it landed on Governor Connolly's gurney at the hospital, without a scratch on it, moving on into dumb down. Are taxpayers paying libraries to stock books for the greater good, the average good, tyranny of the majority, or hierarchical expert librarian Brittany belly-button pointy-toe-shoe points? The answer to those questions will be found in George Mason University economics professor David Levy's Vanity of the Philosopher, which thoroughly documents the continuing evolution of hired gun pseudo scientist public policy Goebbels-Lansdale propagandists and the conspicuous overlap of the oligarchy's hired gun pseudo science with popular prejudice, almost as if the Vanity of the Philosopher could be explained by the mercenary pseudo-scientists' love of being hired by the love of money to use the neuro-linguistic superstitious mind handles of their time, as advertising, while posing as science. Ya think? Goebbels said so, and Lansdale's background was advertising. Used bookstores turn over more fiction than history, but history books cost much more there than fiction. At these Virginia libraries, fiction is more highly valued than history because the library is only using and abusing a pseudo market rhetoric for cover to stiff-arm reporters. And used bookstores will actually pay more for history and scientific books than for fiction, while public librarians pay nothing for books or shelf space. Used bookstores are not subject to the censorship that retail bookstores are, so compare the pseudo market propaganda rhetoric to used bookstore reality rather than to retail bookstore political correction. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/01/AR2007010100729_pf.html Hello, Grisham -- So Long, Hemingway? With Shelf Space Prized, Fairfax Libraries Cull Collections By Lisa Rein Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, January 2, 2007; A01 You can't find "Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings" at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or "The Education of Henry Adams" at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson's "Final Harvest"? Don't look to the Kingstowne branch. It's not that the books are checked out. They're just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them. Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months. Public libraries have always weeded out old or unpopular books to make way for newer titles. But the region's largest library system is taking turnover to a new level. Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system's return on its investment by each foot of space on the library shelves -- and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz. So books that people actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading are gone -- even if they are classics. "We're being very ruthless," said Sam Clay, director of the 21-branch system since 1982. "A book is not forever. If you have 40 feet of shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one is checked out, that's a cost." That is the new reality for the Fairfax system and the future for other libraries. As books on tape, DVDs, computers and other electronic equipment crowd into branches, there is less room for plain old books. So librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes. Library officials say they will always stock Shakespeare's plays, "The Great Gatsby" and other venerable titles. And many of the books pulled from one Fairfax library can be found at another branch and delivered to a patron within a week. But in the effort to stay relevant in an age in which reference materials and novels can be found on the Internet and Oprah's Book Club helps set standards of popularity, libraries are not the cultural repositories they once were. "I think the days of libraries saying, 'We must have that, because it's good for people,' are beyond us," said Leslie Burger, president of the American Library Association and director of Princeton Public Library. "There is a sense in many public libraries that popular materials are what most of our communities desire. Everybody's got a favorite book they're trying to promote." That leaves some books endangered. In Fairfax, thousands of titles have been pulled from the shelves and become eligible for book sales. Weeding books used to be sporadic. Now it's strategic. Clay and his employees established the two-year threshold 18 months ago, driven, they say, by a $2 million cut to the budget for books and materials and the demand for space. More computers and growing demand in branches for meeting space, story hours and other gatherings have left less room for books. And nowadays, library patrons don't like to sit at big tables with strangers as they read or study. They want to be alone, creating a need for individual carrels that take up even more space. And the popularity of audiovisual materials that must be housed in 50-year-old branches built for smaller collections only adds to the crunch. To do more with less, Fairfax library officials have started running like businesses. Clay bought state-of-the art software that spits out data on each of the 3.1 million books in the county system -- including age, number of times checked out and when. There are also statistics on the percentages of shelf space taken up by mysteries, biographies and kids' books. Every branch gets a printout of the data each month, including every title that hasn't circulated in the previous 24 months. It's up to librarians to decide whether a book stays. The librarians have discretion, but they also have targets, collection manager Julie Pringle said. "What comes in is based on what goes out," she said. Classics such as Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" are among the titles that haven't been checked out in two years and could be eliminated. Librarians so far have decided to keep them. As libraries clear out titles, they sweep in new ones as fast as they can. A two-month-old program called "Hot Picks" is boosting copies of bestsellers by tracking the number of holds requested by patrons. This month, every Fairfax branch will display new books more prominently, leaving even less space for older ones. "We don't want to keep what people don't use much of," Clay said. Circulation, a sign of prestige and a potential bargaining chip for new funding, is on pace to hit 11.6 million in the Fairfax system this year, part of a steady climb over the past three years. No other system in the Washington area is tracking circulation as quickly -- or weeding so methodically. Montgomery County, a similar-size suburban system, has not emphasized weeding in several years, said Kay Ecelbarger, who retired last month as chief of collection management. In the District, library director Ginnie Cooper said she has not tackled weeding and turnover policy in the system, which is struggling to increase circulation. She hopes to address those concerns with a recent infusion of cash from the D.C. Council. There are no national standards on weeding public library collections. As Fairfax bets its future on a retail model, some librarians say that the public library may be straying too far from its traditional role as an archive of literature and history. Stupid Fahkin Shermans http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd50inITULk 20/20 Stupid in America 41 min http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfRUMmTs0ZA
