Patron prompt

A suggestion some nice person put in the box this past month got me to thinking.  The patron asked us, essentially, to "trade in" our books on tape collection for more books on CD.  Oh, were it so simple!    But the request is a fair one and, looking at the state of both our collection and "modern" technology, not surprising.  Or is it?  Many of the big box stores like Wal-Mart are shrinking their offerings of CDs and DVDs in favor of Blu-ray movies and downloadable music.  After all, sales of CD music albums are down drastically and number of users downloading music is up.  There are numerous tongue-in-cheek articles such as this one celebrating / mourning the passing of the CD medium.  There are compelling reasons to think that the CD is as dead as the 8-track, not least of which is the advent of the cheap mp3 player and the rise of iTunes and other music clearinghouses.  Even audiobooks, with which my patron is concerned, are becoming widely available in a downloadable form.

I have to stop and think, then, about where the library should put its resources.  Because the root of the problem for the library is that it takes a LONG time to build a substantial collection.  On one hand, I imagine millions of people own CD players and DVD players (I still have one of the latter).  On the other hand, according to wikipedia (an unimpeachable source, I know - wink, wink), 220,000,000 ipods alone have been sold worldwide.  That's just iPods.  Add tens or even hundreds of millions of other mp3 players to that and it is hard to imagine that we'll be using disk media much at all in the very near future.

The current state of affairs is that the library's collection money is split.  While we try to add a greater selection of titles to our downloadable audiobook collection, augment our CD audiobook collection, expand our DVD collection, AND contemplate adding more ebooks, we mustn't neglect, of course, our fairly diverse and deep print collection and our fledgling DVD collection.  Phew!  That is a lot of splitting!  Hmm...now I am getting a little depressed.

Perhaps the best way to move forward is through a collaborative effort.  If the patrons will let us know the specific titles they are interested in, in the specific format they prefer, then we will bear those things in mind as we expend our limited funds.  Until we arrive at another great plateau in formats for conveying information I think we all, but especially librarians, will have to gamble on investing in what seem to be the likeliest formats to succeed and last.