At the library again. The computers are all taken up by Madison's homeless, who spend most of their time playing online video games until their two hours are up. I'm not exactly sure why the library allows this; it seems like it should be against some kind of rule. There is a small, hooded Asian kid to my right watching Wrestlemania clips, and an elderly black man to my left doing his taxes. His half-hour session is almost up, and he's not finished. Across the aisle, a stubble-cheeked guy with a stack of VHS is looking at Craigslist postings of sublets. Every so many minutes I hear a different person complaining to the young woman at the tech desk about how the computer won't let them log on, and she has to explain about the two hour limit. Again. Everyone turns around to watch because the tech desk girl is pretty. The Asian kid just got busted for using multiple cards to log in past his limit. I had no idea the library was such a hotbed of intrigue.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Libraries talked about in weblogs
An interesting local weblog posting on the Madison Public Librarymakes me wonder how today's blog musings will work as the primary sources of tomorrow's library histories. For example:
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I think that a narrative like this one will be far more helpful to future historians than any number of circulation statistics and user studies has ever been. In two paragraphs (I read the entire entry) the author has covered topics from the homeless to technology and given a very accurate physical description of the Madison Public Library. While she did not show us a floor plan, like the article about library architecture, she described how people were interacting with the space, and the library services, two issues that I felt have been missing from histories such as Pawley’s and others we have read for this class.
The computers are all taken up by Madison's homeless, who spend most of their time playing online video games until their two hours are up. I'm not exactly sure why the library allows this; it seems like it should be against some kind of rule.
I wonder what the author means by "this" in the last sentence. Does s/he think there should be a rule against playing video games in the library, or a rule against homeless people using computers?
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