I missed my yoga to go and see the NE screening of this film – was it worth it? It is billed as being a documentary about how libraries and librarians have been depicted in films. Well, it made a promising start, explaining the role of libraries throughout history and some of the film clips were entertaining (even spotted the Durham County Library book bus, from Billy Elliot, I think), but I thought it degenerated a little bit into too many clips of librarians saying how much they love their job. (I love mine too!). I liked the systems guy who talked about his job being about connecting content with questions and I learned that there are more libraries than MacDonalds branches in the US. Also that Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in a library basement and that the US spends more in Afghanistan and Iraq in a day that it does on libraries in a year.
I think I learned too much about the Salinas library closures due to tax cuts – a very similar thing happened when I was working in Quincy, MA in 1980 and it had some tragic effects then too, so I’m not unsympathetic, I just think the film laboured the point too much. I couldn’t quite work out who the film is aimed at – 96 minutes is a long time, I think half of that would have been sufficient to get the message across!

Oyster catchers in WA (photo from Darryl, WA)