The Librarian's Lounge

Fashion Police

A school in Sweden won’t allow book borrowing to pupils who enter the library with their underwear showing.

Hmmm... this would not bode well for our circ stats. Not exactly a "patron-centered" policy, either.

The first shared-use libraries

I was reading in my textbook today:

        "A persistent question was whether schools should depend on the public library or establish their own libraries. In 1896, Melvil Dewey recommended to the National Education Association that it form a library department (as it had for other subject disciplines) because the library was as much a part of the educational system as the classroom. The previous year, a branch of the Cleveland, Ohio, Public Library was established within Central High School, and in 1899, a branch of the Newark, New Jersey, Public Library was places in a local high school. In 1900, Mary Kingston became the first library school graduate appointed to a high school library (Erasmus High School in Brooklyn)."  --p63-64, Donelson, K.L and Nilsen, A.P. (2005). Literature for Today's Young Adults, 7th edition. Boston: Pearson Education.

What struck me about this was how relatively new the concept of shared-use libraries, serving both a school and the public, are, and also school libraries in general. I think back to my own high school library, which seemed to me as a teenager to be too small and full of old uninteresting books. Knowing now that at that time, school libraries had only been around for about 90 years (and probably less in this area of the country), it suddenly doesn't seem that bad.

I'm always kind of amazed when I discover the things I've taken for granted my whole life haven't been around for very long, especially as I get older. I've heard this mentioned about the "millenials" lately, too - that what separates them from us is that us older generations consider a lot of the current technology as new, whereas they've never lived in a world without it. Thus, they are a lot less intimidated by it all. Although I am a member of Generation X, I don't count myself as one of the intimidated - I'm one of the intrigued.