Ink Paper Words' Profile

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Pacific Northwest, United States
In elementary school, I desperately wanted my mother to order books for me from those flyers Scholastic hands out to kids. She refused, citing the "perfectly good library down the street." I exacted revenge by becoming a card-carrying ALA accredited reference librarian. Ha! Take that!

Saturday, October 23, 2010

This is just all kinds of wrong


SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.

Anger as a Private Company Takes Over Libraries


 From the article:
“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

And from the LSSI site:
"At LSSI, we create an environment that brings our librarians out from behind the scenes and outfront serving their customers."

Frank Pezzanite, Library Privateer
Wow. You'll never believe this, Mr. Pezzanite, but in libraries there is this thing called a Reference Desk. Out front (which, BTW, most librarians could tell you is two words, not one).

Frank, you might want to visit a library one day and see what librarians actually do. We're so damn cheap we recycle scratch paper. Whereas you're so damn cheap, you pay low wages to non-union employees to pad your own retirement. I don't know a single librarian who entered the profession because they wanted to make a ton of money, or to find a chair to sit on to wait down the clock until their retirement.

As I posted on LinkedIn, I want your attempt to line your pocket with public funds to fail – but the real losers will be all the dedicated, professional librarians you've displaced, along with those whose access to information has been limited while you got a nice chunk o' change.

I just thought I'd mention that I considered applying for the position of Acquisition Plan & Content Development Specialist in Saudi Arabia that you posted on the LSSI site. The problem is that I could not figure out whether to use the West Coast Application or the East Coast Application. Nyo well. Your loss.

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