New Orleans: A Sorry Tale of the Public Library System

That is being 'run' by a musician, one Irvin Mayfield, 30 years old, a crony of Mayor Nagin's, and deeply disliked by the New Orleans musicians' community. From their perspective he's a politico, not a musician -- his chops are not up to the general standards of the average NO player. He has used the music community as a political career builder as he is now doing with the city's public library system, with Nagin's approval and assistance.

Now Irvin's widely perceived as building a political career by wreaking further destruction on a library system nearly undone entirely by the levees' failures in 2005, when Katrina devastated the Gulf.

It's happened before in many communities, that the public library becomes a playing field for the town or city's political rivalries and power struggles. But these plays have hardly ever been done so flamboyantly, with so little disguise anywhere else. This is New Orleans.

Full story here.

Needless to say that neither Nagin nor Irvin have an iota of library experience. They are turning the entire decision-making apparatus of New Orleans library system over to others without any library experience or training. This is reflected in their fund-raising and financial planning. Not a word there about personnel who are librarians, who do the work of a library, about the absolute necessity of institutional memory for a system anywhere, but particularly in this city where so much memory is living, and it has been forced out to the four corners of the compass, to never be retrieved again. There is no recognition in their planning of what a library actually does.