Over the weekend I had to go to my local branch of the Seattle Public Library to return four books & pick up one I had on hold. The forcing function was that as of Monday, 31 August, the entire library system is closed tighter than a tavern under Prohibition. It doesn't reopen until 8 September.
They’ve been announcing it on the local public radio stations (the assumption being, I guess, that if you listen to NPR, you may also read, you know, books). Not only the libraries, but the book drops are sealed. That’s because there’ll be no one there to empty them for eight days.
(They’ve assured us that you won’t be charged a fine for any book due during this period. Yeah, right.)
Even the website & book catalog are dead—just this placeholder announcing the closure in 15 languages.
The culprit is budget cuts.
At least the King County Library System is open. &, from what I’ve seen so far, that system holds more volumes & is better organized than Seattle’s.
Still, for a city that touts itself as the intellectual vortex of the universe, this is a pretty piss-poor state of affairs.
No comments:
Post a Comment