Letter: Something very sad about sale of reference books
Wednesday 7th September 2011, 6:00AM BST.
Letter: For the past two weeks there’s been a sale of books at the reference library at Shrewsbury. It ended on August 26.
If featured a wonderful collection of books on a variety of subjects and special interests.
This will never be repeated in this town.
Some say that you can obtain anything on the internet; the question being, who feeds the net?
Our libraries were stocked by highly skilled librarians and committees who catered for a wide taste.
We’ve lost something very special with this sale.
I’ve gained some very interesting books.
Sad they can’t be shared by my fellow Salopians who are looking for a book on a specialist subject in the county library.
Today they say we must progress and embrace IT.
I don’t know, there’s something special like the feel of a book and the joy of finding something you want in those paper pages.
John R Brown
Shrewsbury
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Agree books in your own home are great , library however IT less space faster access.
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I’m not mourning the decline of reference books. At university, I laboured for hour after hour in the library in search of information I needed for my dissertation. I’ll never get that time back and the information I was able to glean was limited to whatever they had on the shelves.
In answer to your question, “who feeds the net?”, it’s “anybody who wants to”, which includes people who collate material for reference books.
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Re the first paragraph, me too. But I’m less resentful of the fact than you seem to be. For a start, when you found something in the library, you knew it had to be a fairly reputable source for it to have got there in the first place. In other words, the sort of junk that makes up half (maybe more) of the internet got weeded out by a half-decent library.
Guess you can say that made us a little less free – we were limited only to the ‘wisdom’ libraries saw fit to give us access to.
But on balance, and as book-lover, I think I’m with Mr Brown on this one
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Very sad. And they said the reference library wasn’t closing, it was a merger. Obviously not true.
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Skilled librarians ?? i find them as spooky and as weird, as some find clowns.
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That’s because you associate them with books….
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I know four, one talked to her car every morning when she parked it in the car park at work she even stroked it and said “see you later hun”, .
The second one, a friend of mine was asked to show her bee keeping and she cried and called it murder when he told her some bees die when handling.
The third one thought everyone was thick apart from her, and once complained about an article in a newspaper thinking the guy and people who are interviewed for a story actually write the articles, rather mind blowing .
The fourth was as mad as a march hair and was my cousin , she actually retrained as she said she found her work and colleges all rather boring.
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They do have a lot to put up with though, like the librarian in Glasgow who was approached by a drunk:
“Two fish suppers, Hen” he bawled across the counter”
She pointed at the “Quiet Please” sign and said “this is a library”
He looked embarassed for a moment, then whispered “Sorry Hen, two fish suppers….)….
Copyright Lembit Opik, 2010
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you must be a graqde one clown!
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You can’t get everything on the net and you often have to pay for it, Btw, if anyone collects I’ve just donated hundreds of academic books to Oxfam (Dogpole branch). They are mainly law.
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