Fiscal responsibility or failure to understand?

I'm not sure if anyone's heard about Bert Chapman's recent blog. Obviously I have problems with what he has to say. But I'm not going to waste my breath on them right now. It's the same crap people say every day, and despite their rampant craziness, most people don't pay them too much attention. Instead, I'd like to comment on a response to this blog post that was printed in my college newspaper. Below is the letter I sent them after reading Kevin Casimer's poorly researched response to Chapman:

I recently read the Exponent's mention of Bert Chapman's explosive blog post about the economic sense of homosexuality, which itself requires a response, but I'm sure there are thousands of others hotly debating his points at this very moment. Instead, I'd like to point out a problem I had with one of the student responses to this post. Kevin Casimer suggests that getting rid of a staff of overpaid librarians would make good fiscal sense. Perhaps slashing those few librarian jobs left would save the state some money, but the $80 billion he has in mind? Probably not.
First of all, those people checking out your library materials and re-shelving books? Those aren't librarians. They generally make minimum wage or just above it, and, in the case of Purdue's library system, are often student workers. The actual librarians are the trained, degreed professionals that make the library function. Their jobs are myriad and difficult to outline, because they vary from position to position, and from library to library. They create complex sets of metadata that make the catalog of books (the one on the computer, not the old card catalog) find the right titles; they can manipulate a database to bring up exactly the right article for a patron who has spent hours weeding through irrelevant results; they manage large numbers of staff, often with a high turnover rate; and they go through the often painstaking process of developing a useful collection that meets user's needs under a very tight budget (those databases are expensive!). This is only a short list of some of the jobs a librarian might do. The list is, in fact, much longer. There is no "Replacing librarians with minimum wage workers to put books back on the shelf and assist people with self-checkout" because those jobs are not done by Librarians.

Another misconception is that these librarians are well paid for what they do. Though the Bureau of Labor Statistics may cite the average salary for a government librarian is over $80,000, the same cannot be said for public and school librarians, especially in a low Cost-of-Living state such as Indiana. When I began my job search after completing my Master's in Library and Information Science last year, I was lucky to find opening that paid more than $35,000 a year. It is traditionally one of the lowest paid professions requiring an advanced degree. Most public libraries, however, are so under funded that they can't manage to pay too many people this piddling sum, and as a result, smaller public libraries rarely have more than one or two degreed professionals on their staff, and sometimes none at all, which, as Casimer politely points out, means a decline in service.
On top of all this, libraries, despite a popular misconception, are actually still bustling, busy places. They're not just stacks of unread books, but information and technology centers, and those librarians have degrees, not just in the Dewey Decimal System, but in technology, knowledge they use daily as they attempt to help their patrons, who often have very little experience with computers. Far from dying out, libraries are seeing their biggest boom in years, and finding new ways to help their communities every day. Far from being a waste of government funds, they are a shining example of how to get a lot accomplished with very little means.