In defense of librarians--and library etiquette

A couple bloggers have gotten their panties in a twist over this letter to Dear Abby, which deals with patron etiquette.

Please keep your children with you at all times. A librarian is there to help you select materials -- not baby-sit or clean up after your children. An unattended child can create hours of cleanup work in only a few minutes. Teach your children not to run or shout in the library.

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If you want to view pornography, buy a home computer. While we support free speech, our facility needs to be child-friendly. No one -- not children, other patrons or staff -- wants to see your "private life."

Dakota Pundit responds:

Hey, Marian, don't worry. My snot-nosed kids and I won't be darkening your door anytime soon. We won't make a mess -- or a sound -- anywhere near you. We won't get your precious books dirty with our jelly-stained fingers, and we won't waste your time and resources that should be better spent on the rest of the large population you supposedly "serve."

...And we certainly won't subject you to any aspect of our private lives. (Which you just know are dirty, dirty, dirty. Yes, most of us are crazy sex fiends. We crave pornography. We can't get enough of the stuff, and we will try to access naked pictures on your computers if you only give us half a chance.)

And Julie at Lone Prairie blog adds:

I confess a low tolerance for working with the public in the retail sector, but in a library? Helping someone find a book, or helping someone with a questions, is a dream job. What an opportunity. I would be ashamed to qualify and quantitate it, even in spite of those patrons who probably abuse the system.

Hey Julie, what make you think the "public" are any better behaved at the library than they are in a store? In fact, stores can kick out drunks, smelly people and perverts, while libraries face lawsuits if they try to do the same.

And your children? It's not unusual for parents to leave children, some as young as 3, at the library while they go about their daily errands. Here's what the little darlings are up to while their parents are elsewhere:

Other 8-year olds are sent to libraries as the caretakers for even younger kids. A Monterey, Calif., librarian recalled having to call the police about a set of four siblings, the eldest 8 years old and the youngest 4, who were dropped at the library daily. The policeman had to explain to the parents that 8 was too young to be given such a responsibility.

The presence of so many latch-key and abandoned children has changed the atmosphere of libraries. No longer do adults attempt to maintain quiet. The kids chat, nap, surf the Internet, flip open cell phones and talk to friends, or do homework. Few seem to be spending the time reading. One Palmdale, Calif., librarian told the L.A. Times that she was alarmed to see an unsupervised boy swinging from the outside of the staircase.

And that's not the only reason parents should accompany their children to the library. In Philadelphia last month, a man was arrested for sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl in a library bathroom. Library staff already knew the guy, who had been thrown out of the library once before when a 16-year-old library worker reported that she had seem him "exposing himself and masturbating while seated at a computer."

Blaise Cronin, Dean & Rudy Professor of Information Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, says libraries have become default social agencies, caring for latchkey kids and sheltering the homeless. He reports that the Tacoma Public library had to institute a policy prohibiting patrons from bringing in "bedrolls, big boxes and bulky bags" into the library after it found itself the destination of choice of more than 1,000 homeless people a day.

[A]s I hear accounts of patrons viewing pornography on library terminals and read stories in LJ and elsewhere with headlines such as "Barefoot patron sues library," I sometimes wonder whether sanity has gone out the back door of that library. I wonder whether we haven't lost sight of the commonly understood purpose of this venerable institution.

Let me, therefore, enumerate a number of things that a library is not. If I offend your sensibilities, so be it, for this is the quotidian reality in parts of the nation. A library is not a community masturbation center. A library is not a porn parlor. A library is not a refuge for the homeless. A library is not a place in which to defecate, fornicate, or micturate. A library is not a bathing facility. A library is not a dumping ground for latch-key children. There you have it, straight from the hip.

You may find these statements distasteful, not to mention blindingly obvious, but anecdotal and other evidence suggests that such quirky and deviant practices are depressingly common in our urban libraries. Indeed, the perpetrators of said behaviors have been blessed with the wonderful euphemism "atypical patrons."

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It seems to me, and not a few others, that we are getting to the point where a disruptive minority is effectively preventing the majority of bona fide library patrons from exercising their rights.