Here
in the city, I really like the selection of books they have in the public
library system, and they have *extremely* good branch distribution, where you
pretty much come across a branch library everywhere if you’re out bopping
around in different neighborhoods.
Their
shipping system between libraries is *way* inefficient, however.
For
example, I had requested a feminist sci-fi novel (“Grass”, by Sheri [sp.?]
Teppers [sp.?]) back on Dec. 12th, and by the end of the month, it
still hadn’t come in.
I
checked with the staffer at my local branch library, and she checked the
transaction and said that that was because the book was being held at a library on
the other side of the city, and it had to go from there to the main branch and
then the main branch to my local branch, and on top of that things were backed
up.
“It
probably won’t get to be a month, though,” she was like.
In
comparison, in my state where I was born and grew up, they started up a
statewide library affiliation program supported by five vans; all holdings from
participating libraries are accessible through one catalog, and you can request
a title from there and pretty much always get delivery within a week – and
that’s from across the entire state!
First
off, I think it’s wonderful, how much more libraries in my homestate are
hooked in than when I was growing up; I did interlibrary loan a lot as a kid,
and I always felt kind of bad that I was wasting the library’s money.
Second
off, I think it’s kind of fun to just wait many weeks for a book to come in at my current library in the city;
it’s fun to have a non-neurotic part of my life that I just let happen as it
happens.
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