I moved to a new state this year and have been checking out the local libraries. I was surprised to find one has two D&D books on its shelves, the 3.5 PH and _A Practical Guide to Monsters_. I checked both of them out and have been reading bits of the Practical Guide to my five year old.
I haven't seen a D&D book I could check out of the library since the 80s when I think my local library carried Dragon magazine. (I saw a couple 2e books on the donated book sale shelves a couple years ago though).
Any libraries near you that carry any gaming books?
I'm a librarian, so I may be qualified to answer this one. Actually, many libraries (at least in bigger towns and cities) have RPGs in their collections, but often these collections are sorely "outdated" (in my country, many libraries acquired RPGs during the 1990s, but most of them have not done any collection development since then). This is mainly due to four reasons:
1) Lack of expertise (knowledge)
2) RPGs are "niche material"
3) RPGs are expensive
4) Lack of funds
All these four reasons overlap each other, so that most librarians who're aware of RPGs in their library's collection see them as expensive material that serves only a very small percentage of their patrons (while being totally useless to the rest), and they acknowledge the fact they don't have enough knowledge of RPGs to do proper collection development (acquisitions and weeding). Libraries that *do* have a good, up-to-date RPG collection usually have active roleplayers as patrons or in their staff and/or more funds at their disposal.
Even if a library carries RPGs in its collection, it all comes down to the numbers, such as: the funds, the size of the collection and the library (in general and the existing number of RPG titles in comparison to the rest of collection plus shelf space), circulation (RPGs in general and per title per year), and also the "visibility" of the roleplaying patrons (i.e. how often someone asks for RPG titles or suggests titles for acquisition). If you and a few others persistently keep asking for D&D books, the library will likely purchase some of them; likewise, if you suggest that you could start running a weekly/monthly D&D campaign for kids in your library.
Selection policy/criteria vary from library to library, but a good RPG collection, in my opinion, consists of a wide range of genres, and both "indie" titles and the most relevant mainstream titles (4E, WoD, WFRP, RQ and so on). For me, the big question is balancing the number of acquisitions between rule books and supplements; for example, even if 'Career Compendium' would be a good acquisition, we already have four WFRP supplements in the collection and at that price we could acquire two or even three indie RPGs (which do not even have any supplements). Likewise, if we have a lot of fantasy RPGs, do we really need 'Savage Worlds Fantasy' or 'Warriors & Warlocks', if we can purchase a couple of sci-fi and/or horror RPGs? Or if we have 'GURPS Space' for 3rd edition, is it so different from its 4th edition counterpart that it must be acquired? And so on. The less funds and/or shelf space you have, the harder it is, to the point where it may not even be possibly to get a single supplement (at least unless you want to favor a certain system over the rest, but that would be unprofessional).
As I already said above, if your local library carries RPGs in its collection, you can always go and suggest which new titles they could acquire (or submit your suggestions via their webpage or email); if your friends will also do it, it's likely that they *will* acquire them. Don't submit a huge list of titles, but rather one or two at a time (also note that they're not likely to acquire any supplements if they don't have the rule books, i.e. don't try to suggest 'Divine Power' if they don't have 4E core books). You can also tell them which titles are just gathering dust on the shelf and could be weeded from the collection (as I said, many librarians don't probably even know that they have RPG titles in their collection, and even if they do, they can't tell which ones should be weeded).
