Bring Back Shushing Librarians; Salon.com, 1/30/13

Laura Miller, Salon.com; Bring Back Shushing Librarians: Library users plead for quiet places to read, write and study — but is anybody listening? : "A recent survey by the Pew Research Center, “Library Services in the Digital Age,” polled a nationally representative sample of 2,252 Americans about what they get, and want, from public libraries... “Quiet study spaces for adults and children” comes in fourth, and here is where the results go rogue. The percentage of people who consider quiet spaces to be a very important element in any public library is 76, only one percentage point less than the value given to computer and Internet access. A relatively silent place to read is almost exactly as valuable to these people as the Internet!... Granted, quiet isn’t a sexy or novel topic. Perhaps that’s why the handful of stories written about this survey — and the survey summary itself — ignore how highly the public rates quiet as a library service. Instead, the interpretation Pew promoted, and the angle taken up by Publishers Weekly and other trade publications, is that libraries have a marketing problem: The reason why patrons don’t rate libraries’ non-core activities and programs more highly is because they just don’t know about them. Maybe that’s true, and far be it from me to discourage any library from offering baby sitting or writing workshops or classes in estate planning — those are all boons to the community. But not at the expense of quiet. Does expanding the library’s mission demand that patrons surrender the peace they seek there? Couldn’t libraries do both? Apparently not, to judge by the input the Pew researchers got from an “online panel of library staffers.”"