But this really got my gander up today and I had to blog about it. The following is a real email exchange; names have been changed to protect the guilty:
From: {Fort Bend County Libraries}
Sent: Tue, August 29, 2006 3:41 PM
To: {me, i.e., the Aggie Librarian}
Subject: RE: Cowboy action shooting
Dear {Aggie Librarian--actually it was my real name--you get the idea},
We received your requests for the titles, Cowboy Action Shooting, by Kevin Michalowski, and All About Cowboy Action Shooting, by Ronald Harris. Unfortunately, the books you requested are not available for purchase from our vendors. If you still wish to obtain the books, you may call the branch of the Fort Bend libraries where you would like to pick up the books and request they be obtained through Inter-Library loan. Postage cost to you for this service is $1.50 per book, if the ILL librarian is able to obtain the books from another library system. Any further questions you have will gladly be answered at any of our branches. Thank you for using the Suggest-a-Title service.
{Polite Public Librarian}
George Memorial Library
Adult Services Department
somebody@fort-bend.lib.tx.us
-----Original Message-----
From: suggestatitle@fortbend.lib.tx.us [mailto:suggestatitle@fortbend.lib.tx.us]
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2006 4:56 PM
To: suggestatitle@fortbend.lib.tx.us
Subject: Cowboy action shooting
{Patron} wrote:
I would like to suggest the following title:
Title : Cowboy Action Shooting: Gear - Guns - Tactics
Author : Kevin Michalowski
Format : Book
Library barcode : 23219004057609
Pickup location : Sugar Land
Additional comments : here is a similar title on Cowboy Action
Shooting...this sport is very popular in Texas!
{The Aggie Librarian}myname@myreal.address.com
I'm not making this up....Cowboy Action Shooting really is very popular in Texas. But seriously, this is why doing Approval Plans and Approval Plans ONLY as a way to save money really can SUCK, because in the end, diversity suffers. This wasn't even a request for "alternative" materials from some radical point of view, either. It damn well has appeal and interest to this local community, not just yours truly. The librarian's response is ultimately a cop-out; they could always special order an item not on their vendor's list if they really wanted to. Unless it's county-wide policy not to...and if so, it's stupid. HPL does this, and, while I partly understand, owing to the scale of the greater Houston Metro community they're trying to service with their limited funds, it still means, in the end, that diversity suffers, because relying on vendor approval plans always produces a mainstreaming effect that shuts out smaller publishers; Maybe the vast majority of patrons would never notice or care, but as librarians, we should be willing to color outside the lines and have the courage to expose our patrons to ideas outside their normal boundaries of thought. We should give comfort even to those with ideas that buck mainstream trends, or provide information about hobbies that are a little unorthodox but rewarding in their own right...like Cowboy Action Shooting. Even if these specific titles were NOT available from the vendor, did the library even bother to look if anything remotely related to this subject WAS available? I really can't tell, but I sort of kind of doubt it. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. My point is, they SHOULD have, and should have reported on their findings..."sorry, our vendor doesn't seem to offer any books even on this topic, let alone the titles you requested" or "but we did find these titles....but we do not have the necessary funds to aquire them at this time,", yada yada yada.
Obviously I'm not going to go all Saklad on their ass, but this interaction was a little irksome, especially since I am a librarian and know a cop-out when I see one. I once turned down a book request for a dual biography of two leading figures/founders of the state of Pakistan for the campus library at TAMUG, noting that the focus of the book was too narrow for our institution and that its subject matter fell outside the scope of our curriculum. (Which isn't to say I didn't sometimes order some titles that could have the same criticism leveled against it, perhaps). But the patron's suggestion did prompt me to look and see what our holdings were for books about Pakistan, the UAE, and other Islamic-World countries. I found that most of our information was woefully out-of-date. The book suggested by the patron was too narrow in focus, but as a result of the suggestion, we DID order 2 very good general accounts of Pakistan and its recent history and politics. I also ordered books on the UAE (since the Dubai Ports scandal was just breaking at that time), as well as less obvious but equally important books on locales like Lybia, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and more clearly needed works on Saudi Arabia, and surrounding countries, etc. Of all the books I was instrumental in the acquisition of while at TAMUG, these were by far the ones I'm most proud of, even above and beyond the excellent Naval Science and Maritime Industry books I ordered for the library. Approval plans are great, they have their role, and they can be an efficient way to allocate limited resources, but they shouldn't be a straight-jacket that stifles diversity either. {climbs down off soapbox}
