I have found myself in the resonably relaxed employ of the Baltimore County Public Library branch for going on the past two years. In those two years I have seen the system adopt portable mp3 players with preloaded books, do away with casette tapes, streamline e-book downloading onto Ipods and zunes...but most importantly to me was the adoption of video games, thats right, my library system openly rents xbox 360, ps3, and Wii titles for free on three week loan periods. Now I wouldnt go as far as to claim that I am responsible for this trend, because simply enough they carried ps2 and xbox titles before I arrived here, but in a severly limited capacity. Now even though I'm not even a full time employee here, they have taken my advice on a recomendation system and they have been ordering newer titles in bulk for the past few months(we just got Alan Wake and LP2). Now one might assume I could rest on my laurels and consider this a victory for Gamerkind everywhere...alas...my true fight seems to be rearing it's ugly head.


About three months ago I began a campaign to have the library start carrying mature titles for rental. Now before anyone jumps down my throat for wanting to make mature titles available to minors hear me out on our game policy. In order to even check out games you have to put a hold on them using our site which age locks out children under eighteen from even putting the old. Now assuming someone makes it past the block or, lets say, uses a parents card, they would still have to pick the title up using that specific card...so needless to say even putting childrens games on hold is fairly well secured. Anyway I wrote an email to Jim Fish, the head of the entirety of the counties library systems, and had a reasonably well formed business proposal. I explained that by looking at our increased revenue from the titles we had that if we began carrying mature titles that our revenue cap would boom. If parents and even gamers discovered that they could check out Modern Warfare 2 and risk only a $2.50 a day late fine AFTER having it for three weeks that would easily trump the $59.99 they'd risk on a title that they might not even like. After typing this out and sending it across the wonderful web I received my prompt rejection almost immediately that stated that it was BCPL's stance to oppose carrying M rated titles as it posed a risk to our younger patrons. My response was short in the sense that I brought up our policy for checking out games in the first place and I even went a step further and pointed out inherent flaws in the current system that allowed children of ANY age to check out sexually explicit titles. Needless to say I received no response and that leads me to where I am now.


I suppose that my question for you wonderful people would be this. Do you agree with the stance of the library or do you think this is simply "old blood". The system is full of people who opposed renewing our gaming contract and we had to fight tooth and nail for that. Thanks for reading and I look forward to any responses.