Library Hijinks

I’m the first to admit it: I am a big, fat, wallowing cynic and have been since I was about twelve years old.  So news items like the following headline from Alternet.org don’t surprise me. They should–I would dearly love them to–but they just don’t and that  is likely to say a lot more about me than it does about the unholy marriage between libraries’ need for funds and the cash-heavy world of Big Business. That said, this is hitting me in a very unhappy spot this morning.

To wit, feast your ocular sensory organs upon this tidbit:

NY Public Library Trades Naming Rights to Greedy hedge Fund Billionaire for Big Bucks.

You may commence vomiting at any time.

"But wait a minute, you pretentious, hypocritical, lout," you say, "did you or did you not slobber all over Andrew Carnegie in your last post?" Well, yes, I did.  But I think I was justified in doing that, and here’s why.  Carnegie amassed a fortune of about $1 billion, of which he left $300 million to fund public libraries all over the world.  In 2008  dollars those values would be worth something like  $20 billion and  $6 billion respectively.

Got that?  That’s a $6 billion dollar endowment in today’s dollars to build a world-wide system of public libraries.  Nothing like it had ever been done, neither the gift nor the project it funded.

According to the linked article NYPL sold the name of their main building in exchange for a donation of $100 million. That’s it.  100 million stinking greenbacks that aren’t worth  anything like what they were worth in 1914 and will continue to be worth less and less every year, considering the Federal Reserve Bank’s current attitude towards inflation (i.e., if it keeps the country working a bit longer, it’s worth it.) And that just to change the name on the main building.  If there is an exchange of something of genuine value here, I’m not seeing it.

Granted, $100 million buys a lot of library resources and even in the world of Richistan is not quite chump change, at least, not yet.  But it’s not $6 billion, either. In those terms, in my not so humble opinion, they should have held out for a lot more.  If Stephen A. Schwarzman wanted to buy his way into history, then fine.  But he should have paid what the related goodwill (as accountants call it) was worth.  Had the call gone out for a $1 billion capital drive and had he written a check on the spot for the entire amount (or hell, even half the full amount) I could have lived with it.   I would still be pissed since the NYPL is the jewel in the crown of the city’s public library system, but $1 billion (or $500 million) is real money and the gesture would have been genuine.

As the Yoruba say, "The world is the marketplace," and that’s fine.  Public libraries are always short of funds and sometimes bend over backwards to encourage rich folks to jam crowbars in their wallets, and that’s fine, too.  But this time did they have to settle for so little ?

SirsiDynix’s hosted account servers are back on-line and we’ve had nothing but consistent access to our catalog and ILS all day. The explanatory e-mail that we received from their tech people said that IBM, seeing a weakness in BellSouth’s service conduits, allowed their primary service system to fail to bring the secondary into play. That done–and the plan seems to have worked–they’ll take a good long look at the server to see what happened.

Huzzah!

Everything is is chaos.  If you own a house with a mortgage you may lose it if you’re not careful.  The FDIC may not do much to preserve your bank account if push comes to shove. The financial elites are wrecking what’s left of the economy, the ex-spooks are suggesting that the rabble can analyze intelligence every bit as well (or better than) the CIA, and there are firm plans for the U.S Air Force and Navy to bomb the living crap out of thousands of targets in Iran.  And, oh yes, all that jazz about eating locally is a pipe dream, although Suzi Steffen has put together a decent if small reading list on the subject to wade through.

Faced with all this mishegoss and woe, I did what any red-blooded patriotic American would do. I made beer.  More on that in a bit.

But first I made sure that SirsiDynix actually migrated the catalog properly. (It did.)  Then I did a check on whether the proxy server was tested on time (it was not). Worst of all, in the time I originally wrote the previous paragraph and the time I now resume writing, the proxy server situation has deteriorated to the point where beer news seems far more important to me as opposed to IP addresses, EZProxy configuration and authentication permissions and a lack of access to a number of electronic resources.

(I know, I know . . . nothing is more important to the library or its patrons then access to the necessary resources.  All true.  But the IT department is aware of the problem, I am aware of how to contribute to its solution and we’re doing what we can as quickly as we can to get things back to normal.  In the meantime, I made beer.)

The story is here.  I won’t make any jokes about how much room they’ll need to house both books, but I am wondering of the book about the pet goat will be part of the collection.  I’m pretty sure that Richard Clarke’s book about what went on prior to 9/11 won’t be, but that’s the cynic in me talking.  Again.

Ah, well.  A new library is a new library I suppose.

We’re officially beginning the migration of our catalog from a 13-year old in-house server whose performance can only be called "less than satisfactory"–I’d use stronger language considering what I’ve heard about the device’s past history both at the technical and political level, but I’ve only been here a couple of months (not even) and speaking ill of those no longer employed at MCNY seems rude–to a spanking new CMS account at SirsiDynix’s off-site servers. A proxy server will be brought online soon after and all operations should (I hope) be finished by the last week in August which would give us about a week to field test the new systems before classes begin after Labor Day.

At any rate, as I think about these things, it strikes me yet again just how much of our modern libraries’ livelihoods depends on resources we take for granted.  Electricity is one. We don’t think about it much but so very much of our work depends on it being readily handy at the touch of a button or the flick of a switch. As an example of this we were emplored by the college president some weeks ago to please turn our desktop PCs off when we left the office at night. Doing so, she said, would save us roughly thirty thousand dollars a year in wasted energy. Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of electric power.

We don’t, granted, need electricity to run our libraries.  But it makes everything infinitely easier.  I mean, we don’t need XML or MARC or JPEG2000 or a million of the other modern tools we (all right, I ) use on a nearly daily basis.  A case in point that’s been making the rounds has been the BBC’s recent story of the Bibliomulas, the book-carrying mules who are led through the mountains of Venezuela to promote reading to the country’s rural population.   By the reporter’s account, people there seem to approve.  People like to read, and they’re just happy that they haven’t been forgotten about.   

Of course, in rural Venezuela, electricity is an option, and an expensive one at that.  And I confess that I worry when I realize that I’m paying ConEd twice as much this year for power as I did last year without using twice as much of the stuff.  And when I note that I note a major difference between the library here and the one I left at the Academy . . . MCNY doesn’t have a card catalog.  A lot of libraries built after the 1980s don’t have them, either.  Which means that electricity isn’t really an option anymore, it really is a necessity and we really do need it.  I can’t pack our reserve and reference collection on the backs of mules to take them to students who might live in Brooklyn, Queens or upper Manhattan. The simple truth is that once power gets to be a certain price we’re screwed.

I’m not suggesting this is imminent but I do wonder sometimes if we librarians are as smart as we like to think we are (meaning smarter than me.)

At any rate, we’re migrating the catalog.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.