I'm just wondering who libraries, anywhere in the world, are supposed to be serving these days. I live in Auckland, New Zealand. I pay rates (city taxes) of $3,000 or so a year towards upkeep of local libraries and other amenities. It had been some years since I visited my local library looking for helpful books for research on NZ (what with Wikipedia and all). When I asked to be directed to the New Zealand section -- what used to be the popular section in my day -- the staffer thought a while, scratched his head -- and finally referred me to a Dewy-Decimal number, might have been 995 point something. Well, I looked for that, couldn't find it, but couldn't miss 8 shelves devoted to Mandarin language studies. This is an ordinary suburban library we're talking about, in a very ordinary suburb, in what is, or used to be, the Western World. Globalisation might have some advantages (I'm making a big assumption here), but the idea that it should be so over-archingly dominant over local issues makes me wanna puke.