March

Let me start at the hardest spot. Libraries, sometimes, throw books away. We really do.

How could we?! Don't librarians understand the value of the book?

And by book, we mean:

* Your college textbook. You didn't actually read it. The parts you did read, you marked up heavily with a yellow marker, and scores of obscure comments. But that was the year you also met a young woman who gave you a completely different idea of yourself. That's what makes that book valuable to you, so valuable that even though you're convinced that you can't keep it any more, surely it deserves a place at your local library!

* A book published 20 years ago, in a field where things change quickly. It wasn't that long ago that I strolled through a local high school library and found a book published in 1965. It was in the science section. This is an act of profound disservice to young minds.

* A bestseller! Of course, this is from 5 years ago, from an author that had only that one book, and it didn't really make much of an enduring impact.

A few weeks ago I gave a talk up in Golden. Later, a journalism student interviewed me. Was there still a place for the library, he wanted to know, in the age of the Internet?

I told him that I've been asked that by a lot of reporters over the years. But it has a particular poignancy to it now. Before this young man, the last person to ask me worked for the Rocky Mountain News. (The financially troubled Rocky, as surely everyone now knows, recently shut down operations after failure to find a buyer.)

Some years after earning her Ph.D. in neuroanatomy, Jill Bolte Taylor woke up one morning and ... had a stroke. A congenital malformation of the blood vessels in her brain burst, flooding the left hemisphere. She was 37 years old, and home alone at her Boston apartment. She tells the whole story in her book, "My Stroke of Insight."

"Stealing from one person is plagiarism. Stealing from many is research."

One of the jobs of leadership is to keep an eye on the competition. Librarians, as I've written before, tend to be very open about what has, and has not, worked for them. So word gets around.

Library experiments fall into a couple of broad divisions. They are interesting, or they are useful.

Why do people rob banks? Because that's where the money is.

That old joke provoked some interesting thinking for me.

Right now, our staff handles a lot of reference calls. Some come to us by telephone. Some come to us over the Internet. Many questions we handle in person, face to face.

But there's a flaw. Do you see it?

On the one hand, yes, the library is the place where the answers are.

But it's not where the questions are.

I had the pleasure recently to hear a talk by Lee Rainie. He's the director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

The folks at Pew do a lot of research, and lately have begun to focus on a group dubbed "screenagers." These are people between the ages of 12 and 20 who spend a lot of time in front of various screens -- TVs, computers, iPods, cellphones, etc.

Below are some of Pew's findings.

Seventy percent of American adults now use the Internet. For teens, it's 93 percent.

I've always been fascinated by "idiots savant" -- people who are, for instance, lightning calculators, or able to tell you, the instant they hear your birth date, what day of the week that was. That's the savant part.

But the "idiot" part means that often these remarkable super-abilities are coupled with disabilities. No doubt some folks with super-abilities learn to hide them. It may also be that such abilities are linked to accidents of biochemistry, and thus are coupled with various kinds of physical or mental impairments.

At the beginning of my career, the buzz was all about "automation."

Most libraries in the late 70's and early 80's used one of two methods to handle the checkouts. Most common was a paper-based checkout card system. You slid the library card, with its metal plate, into a device, then inserted the book cards, one by one, to be ka-chunked and stamped with a due date. That night, all of the cards had to be manually filed -- by author for fiction, and by Dewey Decimal number for non-fiction.

It could be that I hung around with the wrong kind of kids in high school. Now that I think of it, I probably WAS the wrong kind of kid in high school, and that's why they hung around with me.

My daughter's experience has been different, and almost certainly better. She's a senior at Douglas County High School. She's also in the International Baccalaureate program.

I have to say, when I watched her, for 2 years now, bring home some 4 hours of homework each night, I wondered if that was altogether good.