wombat_socho

I understand the differences pretty well, and I'm sorry I didn't do a better job of drawing the lines between the different types of libraries and their missions. My beef is with the university libraries, who as Barnes points out have thrown away literally irreplacable items for trivial reasons. Barnes doesn't think they ought to be in the business of providing computer lounges for the students, and neither do I. It's our tax dollars being misspent, and worse yet our cultural heritage being pissed away.

With particular respect to the audiovisual collections - the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum, which operates very much like a public college, has many of the same issues with asset preservation, but you don't see them throwing out old aircraft or even movies about old aircraft because the curator thinks there need to be more comfortable couches around the place.