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| - I've lived in places with great libraries. Mainly, Tulsa, Oklahoma and the San Francisco Bay Area. I know what a good library is and what a mediocre and a bad library are. Henderson libraries fall into the "mediocre" category.
Now, I struggle with whether or not I'm for the concept of libraries. I like when people get paid for their hard work, and yes, I know authors can make money selling to libraries, but if all the people who checked out books purchased the books, they'd make more money. With that said, I don't go to the library often, but prefer to purchase books.
Last month I had purchased Robb Walsh's "The Tex-Mex Cookbook" along with "The Homesick Texan" cookbook. Because the later was a pre-order through Amazon, I won't get the either book until mid-September. I was antsy and decided to see if the former book I ordered was at the library - or any of the libraries here in Henderson. It wasn't.
That's one of my main beefs with the library system here - I can look up 20 different books, and they might, MIGHT, have one copy of one book that I searched for. They have a very small collection. Their small collection has led my Amazon list to becoming a behemoth. Most of the time, I like to flip through the books before I purchase them, and the library is closer than Barnes and Noble but yeah, they don't carry 99% of the titles I'm looking for. That kinda sucks.
The collection is so small that if you blink, you'll miss a section. Dogs, medicine, health, and gardening books all share a space with the cookbooks. It gets confusing trying to find the section you're looking for.
The Web site is sort of a mess. I hate having to Google "Henderson library location names" because it's hidden on their site. As well, there's a lot of run time errors when you look up a book's location. You have to cross your fingers that it will be at the location you're visiting. It needs to be fixed ASAP.
Anyway, it's a decent library, but definitely not at the top of its game. More titles and a better system for searching for titles would garner a better rating.
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