Want your library to be a Blockbuster? Read Michael Skube’s article first
Certain vendors aim to hook libraries on videos—on competing with Blockbuster—but perhaps a few ugly facts can help immunize librarians against this. Time for some systems to focus anew on boring basics like literacy and knowledge?
The latest fodder for my grumpiness comes from today’s Washington Post. Michael Skube, a Pulitzer winner who teaches journalism at Elon University in Elon, N.C., has tracked words that many students don’t know. He writes:
You may be surprised—and dismayed—by some of the words on my list.
“Advocate,” for example. Neither the verb nor the noun was immediately clear to students who had graduated from high school with GPAs above 3.5. A few others:
“Derelict,” as in neglectful.
“Satire,” as in a literary form.
“Pith,” as in the heart of the matter.
“Brevity,” as in the quality of being succinct.
And my favorite: “Novel,” as in new and as a literary form. College students nowadays call any book, fact or fiction, a novel. I have no idea why this is, but I first became acquainted with the peculiarity when a senior at one of the country’s better state universities wrote a paper in which she referred to “The Prince” as “Machiavelli’s novel.”
Young people as a book market–or nonmarket: The news from Elon is not good. Skube says of one class of college sophomore: “The author of ‘The DaVinci Code’ was not just the best writer they could think of; he was the only writer they could think of.”
Bottom line:: Use e-books, p-books, accompanying videos, whatever it takes, to get kids reading. Just don’t go Hollywood and divert library funds from books in a major way—which is already happening in some DVD-crazed districts, and which may be increasingly common as libraries discover online video, including feature films. Should libraries offer informational videos to teach fishing or VW maintenance? Of course. But I’m hearing of one system in Utah where perhaps half of the content budget goes for DVDs. If that’s true, maybe the local paper needs to reprint the Skube article.
“No one’s perfect” department: I’m not! And even Michael Skube isn’t. His Post article attributed to Joseph Pulitzer the quote that journalists should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. As far as I can best determine, the source is Finley Peter Dunne. Regardless of my disagreement with Skube over that detail and perhaps on other topics, I think his heart is in the right place.
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