Editorial: Blockbuster Strikes Again

Popular or not, whatever users want

By Francine Fialkoff, Editor-in-Chief, fialkoff@reedbusiness.com -- Library Journal, 6/15/2007

The Blockbuster arguement is back. Actually, it never went away. We've heard it all before: librarians pander to popular tastes. They buy books and DVDs that compete with Blockbuster, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. They throw out the classics, weeding titles that haven't circulated in two years, five years, or whatever number the library has set as the cutoff. “Do we want our libraries to be Blockbusters or Borders?” ask the alarmists.

It's a marketing nightmare for administrators. And it's often set off by staff with heartfelt concerns about the library's direction. It pops up when centralized selection is instituted or when circulation statistics fuel decisions about what to buy and what to remove. If only these conflicts were settled in-house between management and staff before they headed out into the public sphere to do damage.

The pop culture argument made the Sacramento Bee last month, with two stories about Sacramento PL sparked by a petition of no-confidence in management. Six hundred people signed the petition, including some staff, retired librarians, volunteers, and library patrons. According to the Bee, a number of issues prompted the petition, among them the purchase of multiple copies of items like Paris Hilton's Confessions of an Heiress and the DVD Jackass 2, “staff's diminished role in choosing books” after selection became centralized, “shoddy security,” and “redecoration of the Martin Luther King Jr. branch with a Sacramento Kings motif” following computer donations by the Maloof Foundation (the Maloof family owns the sports team).

Obviously, there's more going on at Sacramento PL than just disgruntlement over the invasion of pop culture. In response to the petition, the library board has asked the administration to produce an analysis of the complaints for its next meeting, scheduled for June 18, board chair (and county supervisor) Roger Dickinson told Library Hotline/LJ editor Lynn Blumenstein. (For more details on Sacramento, see updates at libraryjournal.com.)

Meanwhile, stories like those in the Bee—and ones earlier this year in the Washington Post (“Hello, Grisham—So Long, Hemingway?”) and the Wall Street Journal (“Should Libraries' Target Audience Be Cheapskates with Mass-Market Tastes?”)—mainly serve to minimize the value of libraries at a time when they are desperately needed. Witness the enduring digital divide, the challenges of serving populations from kids to teens to boomer retirees, and the ever-vital role of the library as a “place” in communities that lack such a common ground.

Perhaps those librarians who are anti-Confessions should package it with a slew of other titles, both highbrow and lowbrow, thus turning more patrons on to the whole collection, following a strategy Neal Wyatt has suggested in several articles urging “whole collection readers' advisory” in LJ (“Exploring Nonfiction,” LJ 2/15/07; “Reading Maps Remake RA,” LJ 11/1/06). That would surely be more useful in garnering patron support for the library than several hundred signatures on a petition.

Libraries have been accused of lowering standards even before the debates about buying popular fiction in the 1930s and the “give 'em what they want” arguments of the 1970s and 1980s. Writing in LJ in 1896, John Cotton Dana (director of Newark PL, NJ, 1902–29) stated, “See that your library is interesting to the people of the community, the people who own it.... Deny your people nothing which the bookshop grants them.... Open your eyes to the cheapest of books....”

That advice is as good today as it was then. Confessions and Jackass may be “cheap,” but they're only part of a larger collection at the Sacramento PL. That library, according to board chair Dickinson, holds onto titles, even if they haven't circulated, longer than many libraries do—six or seven years. And many of the titles ushered out the door may be those ephemeral pop culture ones, fodder for the Friends sale. Ultimately, however, what matters is that the library isn't the librarians'; it belongs to the users, who pay for it. All of them.