Remote library
A remote library (also known as a mail order lending library ) is a library that lends its books exclusively by mail and usually rents them out for a fee . The remote library is a special form of the magazine library .
purpose
Purely remote libraries close the supply gaps that other libraries leave open. In contrast to a local city or university library, the target audience is geographically dispersed.
For reasons of communication-economy and perception-psychological reasons, a remote library does not position itself as an all-sorts, but as an assortment library. From a logistical point of view, the books in a remote library are set up as a magazine library ; the book catalog is now usually available on the Internet.
functionality
Established public libraries such as city or university libraries sometimes also function as remote libraries for ancillary purposes. The established libraries, however, continue to lend most of the books to those customers who visit the library personally.
Through the inter-library loan of books, the established libraries function among themselves as a kind of remote libraries.
There are only a few pure remote libraries. A remote library can also function as a return library for a network of locally available open access libraries for which it is not worthwhile to purchase many books for subjects that are less in demand.
Pure reverse libraries - back office libraries or hidden libraries - without direct end customer contact also lend entire partial stocks to libraries, which are exchanged for another partial stock after a certain period of time. Other remote libraries store older book stocks from different libraries in a central location, where the land prices and thus the inventory costs are cheaper.
New forms of remote libraries caused by the lending of e-books on the Internet, even eLibrary called. The electronic copy of a book can be viewed by the user on his own computer or reader for a certain period of time.
The first remote library with the generic name in the company name is the Evangelical Remote Library EFB , founded in Rüti ZH in 1987 , which only lends non-fiction books to Switzerland by parcel post.
Reasons for use
Most of the time, a customer only pays a remote library loan fee if it is much lower than the price of a book in a bookstore. Clear reasons for lending are when, for example, a book is out of stock in the primary book market and is only rarely or expensively available in the secondary book market ( second-hand bookshops ). A loan order must be cheaper for the end customer than the purchase, despite the return shipping costs.
Business economics
Like almost all libraries, the remote libraries are not economically self-supporting. The legal form of the association is ideal for remote libraries.
From an economic point of view, remote libraries make sense above all if they are designed as subject libraries, i.e. with books by specialists for the general public. The remote library is unsuitable as a public libraries because most of the libraries in communities, schools or, in some cases, parishes are already designed as public libraries with a corresponding range (including novels, sound and image carriers) and so the range of books is traditionally huge. In addition, there is a strong antiquarian book supply for books from the lower price segment, which has been massively increased due to the popularization of the Internet. The popularization also makes the remote libraries, like other non-fiction and specialist libraries, good customers of the book second-hand bookshops, since their offers favor the high division of labor among the specialist libraries. When purchasing books, the economy forces you to concentrate on the core collection areas.
As with all libraries, not all book acquisition and storage costs can be passed on to the customer for a remote library. Because that would make the fees so high that nobody would borrow any more. A remote library therefore operates within the normal economic constraints of all public libraries and requires an external source of money.
The remote library as a library type would probably only have a great future if the state withdrew from the library system for financial reasons . With the remote library instrument, appropriate specialist and interest groups, as well as institutes, could largely guarantee basic library services outside of state control. However, this would only be possible through generous patronage and sponsoring . However, since the library system is one of the core areas of education, the withdrawal of the state as a donor is very unlikely and is not politically required of anyone.
In many countries around the world, a remote library would be the only functional way to provide basic library services on a large scale, which in practice fails because of the poorly functioning distribution systems ( post office ). The future of the remote library idea for many countries must largely be handled via the Internet.
As in all libraries, the great art is to choose the right books, solve the computer problems, approach the return discipline in a motivational and psychological way and manage the logistics.
A remote library cannot serve everyone, but has to decide on a specific target audience. In contrast to the traditional library, which is the center of attention in the city and is constantly recognized, a remote library has to fight for recognition. For a remote library with a specific subject collection area, this can mean not only gaining lending customers, but also integrating the collected knowledge back into society in other ways, e.g. B. by editing newspaper articles from the collected field of knowledge, travel lectures, implementation of knowledge in the film and computer game industry, etc. As a result, the professional role of a remote librarian is particularly strongly interdisciplinary. The work breathes the spirit of a university institute library more than that of a book-lending factory.
Due to the rapid availability of information in postmodern society, the traditional book trade is under economic pressure, and the book return discipline in remote libraries is coming under pressure.
Virtual libraries
Thanks to modern computer technology, there is the rational possibility of designing remote libraries as virtual libraries . An organization with a catalog appears to the outside world as a remote library, but the books are physically brought together at a shipping location from different libraries at different locations before being sent to the customer or delivered directly.
Lending books across national borders is not disputed today from a professional library perspective or from the perspective of the knowledge disciplines. The division of labor among libraries is an expression of the division of labor in education and society in general. Problem areas are currently the areas of tension of a legal nature, since the loan of books across national borders is affected by different copyright laws and cultures of legal perception.
The future of remote libraries lies in the digitization of book collections that reach users via data carriers (e.g. DVD) or online (e.g. via the Internet). The cost of digitization puts a heavy strain on the library's finances. A major problem is copyright law, which does not allow copying and ingestion until 70 years after the authors' deaths. After all, it can be cheaper in the long term to store the holdings electronically, as the sponsors are often unable to bring in more and more money for steadily increasing space costs, even if the rationality of storage compression that is typical of magazine libraries is fully exploited.
Since the books are already electronically available in a publisher's archive (e.g. as a PDF file), it is obvious that the publishers themselves exercise part of the longer-term library function in the sense of the cultural property protection idea, as they also have control over them can preserve the works they have published over the generations. The publishers can also delegate this to external publishing libraries, which are borne by the publishers themselves. These publishing libraries can also secure the electronic copies of the books of the no longer existing publishers for posterity and keep them under lock and key until the copyrights expire. The operation of an external publishing library requires the implementation of certifiable quality assurance mechanisms. Until the copyrights of the collected works expire, the publishing library functions as an archive library. After the copyrights have expired, the publishing library changes from an archive library to a remote library in that the book files are offered over the Internet, be it for a fee or free of charge. Since this task spans generations, it makes sense to legally organize the function of a remote publishing library as a foundation .
The archiving function for the next generation is also becoming much easier due to the rapid increase in the number of e-books.
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ Evangelische Fernbibliothek: Main catalog 2012. 7th edition, Verlag der Evangelische Fernbibliothek, Wetzikon ZH 2012, p. 5f.
- ↑ http://books.efb.ch/uebersicht.php?CAT=0 books.efb.ch (accessed on March 21, 2014).