I work in a Public Library and every day I feel kind of good about helping people in the community with their problems...

I work in a Public Library and every day I feel kind of good about helping people in the community with their problems. Unemployed people use our computers to search for jobs, parents bring their kids in to read books, older people come in to get out of the house and read newspapers, foreigners come in to work on their English skills(we have a lot of books about learning English), perverts come in looking for copies of Fifty Shades of Grey on DVD and we host a bunch of community groups, book clubs, writing groups and other stuff for the public good. We've got a pretty good rating in terms of customer satisfaction and work hard to engage with the community.

However we don't make any money as the library gives practically everything away for free every day, so we cost taxpayers a lot of cash. I believe that the public good we represent outweighs the cost but was wondering what Sup Forums thinks of public libraries.

So are libraries Sup Forums approved or not?

>so we cost taxpayers a lot of cash
not really
unless your library is the one in the picture

in my book, obviously approved

Yes, they are good

I wish I worked in that library. But no sadly.

>the public I.e. The taxpayers use the library

They are getting what they pay for.

Glad you like your job though, librarian seems like it would be pretty chill.

taxes are theft, it isn't charity or generous if you fund your generosity with stolen funds.

It's a pretty chill job, some of my co-workers are blue pilled as fuck which is annoying.
I just avoid politics as much as humanly possible. Thankfully working for government we're not meant to take any stances on politics and remain neutral as much as possible.

I work maintenance at a church. It's always quiet unless I'm making noise and I'm usually alone all day. I get to just do my work and chill. Everyone is blue pilled obviously but I rarely have to get involved in all of that.

The main thing I like is working alone at my own pace. If I don't feel like working hard I don't have too.

I always figured working in a library would be similar.

that library looks super comfy

>Pic is the BNF in Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale de France or National Library of France, the buildings are made to look like four open books.

It is kind of similar, we get a few lazy people who just seem to be forever doing random paper-work or nose deep in their computer. The ratio for men and women is like 30:70 across all libraries which really contributes to a lot of the culture of the job.

When I went for my interview there were about ten guys who'd got through to my round from a starting group of over five hundred people(men and women), from what I gather a hell of a lot more women than men apply to work in libraries so it isn't entirely sexist but if the same imbalance existed the other way around I guarantee you we'd have a royal commission about it.
They mostly come from teaching and have kids so they work two-three days a week instead of full time teaching but they aren't really strong so they avoid doing the shelving more than an hour or so per shift.

Me I like shelving books so when I'm not on some specific duty(like doing kids story time or handling the front counter) I just shelve for hours at a time, I once lost track of time and shelved books for five straight hours and only stopped because there weren't anymore to do.

I'm pretty sure it's Trinity College Library in Dublin.

The problem with today's libraries is that they cater to the masses, assisting in dumbing them down.
My local library provides more new media services and pop culture (internet, computer games, movie DVD's, music CD's, magazines) than books, and many of the books are pleb tier like GoT, Dan Brown, and Harry Potter.
If they'd just stick with classical literature and non-fiction, they wouldn't need to waste so much tax money.

CURRENT YEAR

>a starting group of over five hundred

>why can't millennials get jobs

Also

Sounds /comfy/ as fuck. Good luck.

The problem is that the people using libraries don't want the classics(or more precisely they don't want ONLY the classics) they want a really wide range of books so we have to try and cater to as wide an audience as possible.
If we were only stocking the most essential literature we'd lose 75% of our customers(also for some stupid reason we refer to them as customers not patrons, drives me nuts, stupid commercialism) because all the old people love their trashy mystery novels, the middle aged people like their war books, the young adults and twentisomethings like their fantasy and sci-fi and the kids like books about poo.

I do understand your point about new media, the DVDs alone are a nightmare for us, we have to clean them regularly which is a tedious stupid job. We get people who come in and borrow the maximum amount of DVDs possible, then come back a fortnight later and renew them and keep doing that for weeks at a time. Also people get weird about magazines for some reason, they go through all of them looking for something they haven't read and will spend more time looking for it than actually reading it.

Thankfully, we lend out more books than anything else at least for now. The kids, once they can read, tend to borrow out dozens of books at a time which is always great to see.

Also we have a rotation in place for who has to clean the Fifty Shades of Grey DVD when it comes in because you need to drown your hands in sanitiser afterwards every time.

Cheers, I was really glad to get the job because I've been through a few dozen interviews for similar positions and was always just outside of what they wanted. I had to volunteer in a few museums and school libraries to get good references to help my application along and still just made it.
The actual starting group, before the interviews, was around nine hundred for ten open part time positions and most applicants who got to interviews were 40+ year olds with civil service experience

>Me I like shelving books
goon on ya champ, tis a noble endevour

Then let that 75% fuck off.
Them consuming trash should not be subsidized, and by giving people the option of lighter entertainment, you discourage the ones that would also read better stuff.
When I was young I fist read all of the kids section, and later I could choose a bit more in the adult section, but I have to admit that if there would have been computer games and DVDs available, I would have gone thought them fist.

>87636870
I know brah. Stay East of here.

Last time I used a library, a sixty year old homeless drunk man stole my information and used it to check out 70 DVD box sets and never return them. The bureaucrats at the library treated me like human scum. I still get calls from collection agencies.

Keep up the good work, Library Bro.

I agree with you BUT that 75% are the people who fund us, if we don't serve them then the first politician to come along and threaten to slash our budgets will get their votes.
We basically keep the maximum amount of people happy so that we end up the third rail of elections, no-one is willing to cut our budget(they do anyway in bad years when everyone has to take a haircut but never as an election promise).

Shit, that sucks, did you guys use some kind of self checkout machine or something which you didn't log out of or did he get your info some other way?
Our system(in my library) is set up so that if someone has a card they can borrow on it because adding PINs or security to them is too expensive and wastes time for customers when borrowing, but they forget to finish up on the Check-out machines all the time and people borrow shit on their cards accidentally as a result.

We also limit borrowing to about 30 items max and have the DVD sets split up over different cases(so Season 3 of Buffy is Six DVDs and should be all together, but we have it in two cases as two separate items to borrow(DVD Case A has DVD Discs 1, 2 and 3 and DVD Case B has DVD Discs 4, 5 and 6)). We're usually pretty good with collecting debts and not pushing it too hard, I actually feel bad when someone has $50+ worth of fees and they just pay it so that they can borrow some books for their kids.

Talk to your city councillor, they might be able to sort it out for you. That's what they're there for.

Compared to other public services, libraries are pretty cheap and their benefits definitely outweigh the costs. As a taxpayer, I fully support public libraries in my country.

Good to know!

When I was a Backpacker wandering around Europe, Asia and America I used to use the libraries all the time to get online and check my email and shit.
Now I see younger foreign versions of me coming in all the time and trying to set up WiFi on their phones.

You should start a porn library then.

I would if I could but I think the taxpayers would complain.

Libraries a great public service. I went to my local libraries a lot as a child, and I take my son to them now. I tend to read too slow and casually so I order my books online.

We get a ton of kids and families through all the libraries. I keep trying to get my friends to sign their kids up but they're all dragging their feet.
I think they're of the mindset that you should buy things for your kids despite the fact that the baby books are useful for about six months at most before you have to move on and up the difficulty. So you end up with dozens of useless books.

it is so fkn sad how bad the selection of books is in the biggest library of my city.

i mean i dont demand mein kampf or some shit like that but at least SOME classics (left and rightwing) would be great,

While we do stock a lot of the essential classics(the stuff you need to have, like Austen, Dickens and James Patterson) anything even upper-middlebrow published before a certain point is nearly impossible to find.
For my library it is because we keep track of the number of times a book is borrowed so eventually after a certain number of years we take the average borrows per year and if it is below a certain point for the last couple of years(which is ludicrously low on purpose) we dump the book. It is all done via computers and we have the option to save some of them but we can't save all of them.
We also shuffle the books around to different libraries if they aren't being borrowed enough, hoping that a different audience might pick it up.

i see.
thanks for the info.