Rural libraries was Re: [BC] Another public station bites the dust

[Mark W. Croom]

Mike,

I'm right with you here.

I live in a town of 700 on the Iowa border, and one of the biggest 
adjustments for my family was the library situation. Back in Madison (WI) we 
were two blocks from a library branch, and could hop on our computer and put 
resources on hold from any library in the system and have them delivered to 
our branch, usually within a day or two. Since we educate our younger 
children at home this was wonderful.

We moved to Elmore (MN) and the library is just not very useful for our 
school purposes. Beyond that, when we came here you couldn't use your home 
computer to search the library system catalog or put items on hold. You had 
to got to the local branch to do that. They're open about 20 hours a week.

At least now they've changed the software so we can do our holds from home. 
The librarian calls to tell us the stuff's in. Of course, the truck only 
comes once a week, but that's OK.

If more material was simply available in digital form, we'd certainly use 
it.

Mark
MN

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike McCarthy" <Towers at mre.com>
To: "Broadcasters' Mailing List" <broadcast at radiolists.net>
Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 8:28 AM
Subject: Re: [BC] Another public station bites the dust


> For someone close to the resources of a major library which houses a 
> substantial reference or other collection of interest, that may be the 
> case.  But in rural USA...which is about 80-85% of the geography in the US 
> and over 95% worldwide, a digital version is better than no version what 
> so ever.
>
> MM
>
> At 09:03 AM 6/27/2006 -0400, Rich Wood wrote
>>------ At 11:11 PM 6/26/2006, Alan Kline wrote: -------
>>
>>>Who's going to digitize and organize the millions and millions of books 
>>>for
>>>that all-encompassing digital library?  More to the point, who's going to
>>>pay for it, and would it really be less expensive than maintaining the
>>>brick-and-mortar libraries? The simple logistics of organizing such a
>>>massive effort are mind-numbing.