Who needs Librarians?

"Ronald Harbert, president of the OCL [Orange County Library, Florida] board of trustees, has asked patrons to alert him to “shortages of service” occasioned by the library’s staffing plan. How do library patrons know when they’re receiving inadequate service, beyond egregious examples? People who are not expert library users can easily mistake earnest but uninformed and inadequate service as passing muster, just as someone who knows little or nothing about medical procedures can assume that a careless doctor’s diagnosis and treatment are on the ball.

It’s the same all over: As expenses rise and municipal budgets erode, managers struggle to fill the holes while papering over the resulting shoddy public service with happy talk. The selfless heroes in the Michigan legislature not long ago saw to it that they received pay raises of almost 40 percent. These same ascetic public servants, annoyed over tuition hikes, are busy telling the state’s public colleges and universities—which they have been underfunding for years—to “tighten their belts, like everyone else.”

source: Uncle Frank's Diary