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I wish Francine Fialkoff's “The Borders Concept” (Editorial, LJ 3/15/08, p. 8) was true. Except, possibly, for the last paragraph, it is a fantasy. Even then, those small communities that you put so much hope in are connected to places like Borders through the Internet....

Many factors shape our reality. There is our hypercommercialized culture, there is the hurdle of library ordering and processing systems, there is the change-by-committee sluggishness of many systems and the persistent archival mindset of many library professionals. But wait, there's more!

Bookstores don't cost anyone their precious tax dollars, and bookstores pay their staff, on average, less than a third of what librarians receive. Not only do...bookstores get far more bang for their buck in terms of efficiency, they also represent wonderful, mind-expanding opportunities to consume (and spend)....

Don't get me wrong. I have thought for the longest time that it is a zero-sum game for libraries to follow so slavishly after the business (in this case bookstore) model. All we can do is play catch-up, and we are playing “against” masters of the game.

Being a slightly better-but-tax-based bookstore is the road to extinction. If we want libraries to survive or even thrive, we have to think far out of the box (library or bookstore), something that librarians are not, historically, inclined to do.

—Daniel Carr, Community Lib. Specialist, San Geronimo Valley Lib., CA

Loved Francine Fialkoff's “To Kindle or Not” (Editorial, LJ 3/1/08, p. 8).... Some colleagues in public service haven't had much opportunity to learn about the peculiarities of digital collections regarding intellectual rights. This knowledge gap directly affects the quality of service offered to library patrons in their use of these materials. Her editorial is an excellent education piece on these issues.

Although copyright issues have been important to librarians for many years, with the ubiquitous role of digital “materials” in library collections today, collection development librarians need expertise in these disciplines more than ever.... We need...to promote training opportunities for our colleagues in public service to help us educate the public about the benefits and drawbacks of digital materials.

For example, patrons complain all the time about OverDrive ebooks not being compatible with Mac/Apple devices (that is expected to change in late June when OverDrive releases some 3000 iPod-compatible audio titles for libraries), yet I doubt more than a handful of our reference staff know to tell them that the incompatibility arises because Apple will not license its software to the library market, not because the library is too cheap, too stupid, etc., etc., to make these available.... Such misconceptions only reinforce the unfortunately too common perception that the library is a technology dinosaur. Let's do what we can to help our reference colleagues understand the issues better.

—Sally Kramer, Collection Development Mgr., P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.

John Berry paints an undeservingly harsh picture of librarianship (“The Vanishing Librarians,” Blatant Berry, LJ 2/15/08, p. 10). I'm always disappointed when I read a polemic instead of a constructive examination of an issue. True, some library administrators have jumped too quickly on the bandwagon of complete self-service and have forgotten the value that good staff bring to the job, but Berry tends a little toward the melodramatic in his assessment of what libraries are becoming. Finding staff who are extroverted, knowledgeable, and customer-service oriented is very difficult, whether they be librarians with an MLS or professionals without one. Today's customers (users, patrons, whatever you may want to call them) come in the door with a different set of needs and requests (often well researched before they arrive) than they did in the past, and it may not always be necessary to have a very highly paid “professional” out on the floor eight hours a day.

Furthermore...many of us don't think it's necessary for the whole staff to meet every week and debate the merits of the most recent releases in Publishers Weekly. Two or three people to select materials seems perfectly acceptable. I trust those two or three people, because they were hired carefully, to make the kind of decisions about materials that will keep the library well rounded and well used. If a vendor is going to send us the next Harry Potter book automatically and several others with it, I'm not going to decry the amount of time that has saved staff who would have purchased it anyway.

Berry bemoans the fact that so few library leaders have raised their voices in alarm over the so-called “erosion of standards.” Maybe that's because they are dealing with the day-to-day reality of how to keep the library relevant to the community and trying to provide what their users value while staying within their budgets, rather than looking down their noses from the ivory tower.

—John Alita, Asst. Lib. Svcs. Dir., San Bruno P.L., CA