Differences in libraries

September 13, 2009 11:09 AM

Librarians on Metafilter: Do you still find significant regional differences in U.S. school and public library collections?

I'm not speaking of obvious differences (e.g., local history and area guides, collections in languages other than English), but demographic, social, and political influences on collection building between, say, urban and rural regions, or the Northeast U.S. vs. the South or West.

I'd expect that the Internet would have a homogenizing effect on library collections. The education of librarians might also have a homogenizing effect.

However, it is traditional that public library collections, dependent on state and local funding, reflect community standards. There are many areas of the U.S. that are less connected, more conservative and more religious.

This also impacts the job search -- can blue-state librarians seek jobs in red states / localities, and vice versa?

At the risk of chatfilter, I'm interested in your actual experiences, not just academic studies. I haven't visited enough public libraries in different states. I live in a blue area of a blue state; the public libraries buy a range of political viewpoints, but political books by people like Hannity, Beck, and Coulter tend to remain on the shelves. I'm aware that it might be different elsewhere.

posted by bad grammar to society & culture (4 comments total)

Well, I am in Canada so I hope this doesn't disqualify my answer but yes, I have worked in a small town public library and a large urban library and their collections were completely different even thought they were less than half an hour away from each other.

Both libraries had mission statements that directed to collection policy and what was in the collection refected what the community needed (or what the library thought they needed). The urban library has more queer/transgressive stuff and the rural library had more cozy murder mysteries. As well, non-english materials reflected the languages in the community. When I worked in a Catholic school library I had my more controversial book choices pulled off the shelves (yes, the same school system the banned the Golden Compass) but the public school library I worked at was more flexible in my choices (such as the goosebumps series).

I do not think there is as much movement of librarians around the country as you think, so the impact of education is mitigated.
posted by saucysault at 12:04 PM on September 13

Since returning home to Alabama from time in Boston and New York, I have found locating a diversity of religious texts problematic.

For instance, in Boston I could find various critical texts on Christianity. I could also find copies of the more complicated systematic theologies. Here in Alabama, books in Christianity tend to be devotional in nature.

I think it would be interested to examine how two different libraries would understand precisely the same mandate. Beth Moore books take up whole shelves here, but that same author would have maybe one book in the libraries I frequented before. Something as basic an essential as a copy of Barth's Church Dogmatics is impossible for me to find. Two libraries are understanding "Christian" books very differently.
posted by jefficator at 1:16 PM on September 13

Yes. When I was in Alabama they basically have a religion section in the public libraries. While the sticker has multiple denominations on it, it's basically a Christian or gentle fiction section. No big deal, but you never ever see something like that in public libraries in the Northeast or the Pac NW (where the bulk of my experience is from). There's definitely local flavor to collections other than this (you see a lot of libraries with specific collections as you've noted) but in rural Vermont for example you see a lot more farming/DIY culture stuff and a lot less computer books. In bigger cities you see the opposite.

This also impacts the job search -- can blue-state librarians seek jobs in red states / localities, and vice versa?

If you're committed to serving your community, you can pretty much get a job wherever. You may, if you're very left leaning or very right leaning, have difficulty in a population that is different from you. A lot of the big books by Coulter and the like get purchased specifically because they're terribly popular and most libraries buy at least some degree of popular books to begin with.

I'm a big fan of both intellectual freedom and serving the needs of your own communities. I've interviewed at some libraries that have made their intellectual freedom stance very very clear [indicating that it was an important value of the institution, etc] but generally speaking the values of most public library institutions lean towards what we would think of as the "left" because generalized American library values such as diversity, outreach, the right to read, the reading rights of children, opposing censorship [see more in the Library Bill of Rights] tend to be thought of as liberal values. There are conservative librarians who agree with these values, there are also conservative librarians who oppose these values, some quite vocally. I find these folks to be in the super-minority, but it only takes one who is running their own library for that to be a data point.

You might also be interested in the Association of Christian Librarians who are not just Christian but evangelical, and read a little bit about who they are and what they believe in. I could go on and on about this topic and there are a lot of nuances to it -- check out any library-oriented wikipedia article's talk page to see a bunch of back and forth about the various topics -- but I find that what has the most homogenizing effect is that all the libraries buy their stuff from the same four or five major book jobbers for the most part, and tend to buy stuff from major publishers and on sort of "normal" topics. That issue itself is a biggish topic in the library world.
posted by jessamyn at 2:22 PM on September 13

As usual, Jessamyn has it.

The job search factor only really matters insofar as you are willing and able to live in a place whose prevailing values contradict your own, while maintaining a commitment to serving the needs of that place.
posted by willpie at 7:21 PM on September 13