Crisis? What crisis?
Fine. I agree that public libraries have been taking some pretty wicked shots to the chin for quite a while now. We all know the litany of issues: decreased funding, increased number of formats to purchase, publishers being squirrely about granting us access to their content... and so on. All true. All relevant. And nowhere close to being the full picture. Just last night a colleague from a neighboring library system and I did a presentation on library business resources for an entrepreneur/business plan class hosted by the local Chamber of Commerce. To a chorus of many oohs and ahhs, we covered the content that we originally planned to cover. Comments ranged from "This is the best night of my life" to "I loooove the library" to "Who knew?!?" to "Get out!!!". And then they wouldn't let us leave the room. Beyond the library's straight up business resources they wanted to know about our ebooks. About our downloadable audiobooks.