Welcome to my new and improved blog. I’d really wanted to keep the old one, but alas, I had to upgrade and am far too lazy to move my old posts over. I promise to replace them right away with new and exciting links and commentary.
I was really disturbed by this story out of Buffalo . Apparently all of the Erie County Libraries are going to have to close as of January 1, due to the county’s decisions to drastically cut funding to the libraries. Public libraries everywhere have been feeling the strain of budget cuts, but I have never heard of a sudden decision by a county to cut a library budget by 80%. What I can’t understand is why the county didn’t try to come up with a solution before, as they must have known about the county’s financial problems for a long time. Maybe in this digital age people who don’t use libraries assume that libraries just aren’t necessary anymore. Why use the reference desk when you can just go on Google? According to the Libraries of Erie and Buffalo, circulation at their library is actually up from previous years. Gary Price just wrote an interesting article about the changing perceptions about conducting research and what librarians can do to combat the idea that libraries have little to offer in the age of Google.
