I stumbled into Walton Library recently. Now, like most libraries, it is a waste of time and space, despite being housed inside a lovely building.
Too much space is taken up by books and not enough space is allocated to the computers that the public can use for free to access so much more than is available in the relatively tiny selection of books.
In fact, not enough computers are there in any case. I guess it has about 25 or so, plus a bit of a queue waiting to use them. I think I’m right in saying that each user gets an hour allocated to them by the somewhat confused librarian, on a first come first served basis.
So whilst 25 people occupied the small area allocated to the computers, the rest of the place had two in it. One was reading a newspaper, another was looking around the actual books. Both were extremely old people who probably reject the concept of using computers and so are stuck in the old fashioned era of words printed on processed slithers of dead trees.
I really can’t see the point of libraries any more when it comes to storing the printed word. If it was up to me, I’d throw the books away and fill the place with more computers and a much higher speed connection to the internet, giving access to all the information ever needed in life. The librarians, instead of fussing about cataloguing books that nobody wants, and putting them onto shelves that nobody’s going to wander to, could re-train to help the older folk work the computers to read all they could ever want to read from the massive never ending selection that’s called the internet.
There was even a tell-tale sign that the librarians needed a bit of re-training to embrace the modern world anyway. And, I’m not being negative about them just because they told me off when I tried to take a photo of one of their scrawled notices that appears above almost every computer. Computers, I noted that, horror of horrors, were equipped only with Internet Explorer 6. Urgh! What sites can you view with that? However, this repeating notice said:
“Please do not download or use the Firefox or Google Chrome Search Engines as they are not compatible with our system and make it crash”
Ha ha ha ha. Knowledge is a dangerous thing, which is why the librarians think that Firefox and Google Chrome are “Search Engines” instead of ‘Browsers’.
I wonder if they read that in a book.
England's England 