I wish much of the lore about librarians were actually true, but these days they seem to be mostly focused on either filling up dumpsters full of old books for sale (why are they getting rid of all of the old books), stocking the shelves with DVDs (why are libraries in the movie-rental business?), or else organising things that seem to be quite tangentional to being a "library". For example, I think it's fine to take family photos or ID photos for kids... but is this really the primary mission of a library?

When I need an inter-library loan of a hard-to-find book, they say they can't do it since the Amazon price of the book is over $1,000. (Of course, we all know the Amazon prices are basically made up - offering books for sale that aren't in stock, and on the chance they get an order at an outrageous price, go try and find it cheap on the secondary market.)

Nonetheless, they're always asking for money - whether applying for grants, putting property tax levies on the ballot, attempting to raise sales taxes, despite the ever-decreasing levels of service, alongside requisite threats "If we don't pass this item, the library will close!!!"

I view librarians as ones that completely missed the boat when it comes to their traditional domain of organising indexes to literature, which has been eclipsed first by Google, and now by AI in general.

> When I need an inter-library loan of a hard-to-find book, they say they can't do it since the Amazon price of the book is over $1,000.

That's extremely odd. My experience is that libraries will sometimes exclude their particularly rare books from the interlibrary loan system (or from lending more generally), for the obvious reasons, but I wouldn't have thought the library you're trying to use to place the request would have anything to say about it at all.

> why are libraries in the movie-rental business?

Because why not. Books and DVDs have similar footprint and cultural relevance.

DVDs? Probably incentives. They get some kind of kick backs or “points”.