LISNews: Library Futurists

I wish to share with you some insight, some words presented from the perspective of one who works daily and tirelessly for the public and the idea of a public library.

Firstly, please understand public libraries contribute significantly to society, offering everyone the opportunity to advance their knowledge through publicly available materials.

More educated people mean a better prepared, more literate, more functional, and more capable society.

Is this not what everyone should want?

Those who work in public libraries know well how we try and often succeed to bridge the gaps between the haves and the have-nots.

School districts often work in conjunction with public libraries, particularly as school libraries are often overwhelmingly under-funded, understaffed, and usually have few copies of reading materials for students to use.

Public libraries happily inherit those researcher's needs and work with other local libraries to interlibrary loan materials, ensuring at any moment, that we are filling the needs of those students to the best of our abilities.

Many people do not know this happens, and this is one of those examples that can demonstrate how your local public library collaborates with other public libraries to provide informational coverage across communities.

Once you understand that point, you realize that any diminishing of any public library in that scheme not only threatens the immediate community but also the surrounding communities in terms of cooperative material and resource sharing.

More than that, we offer research assistance to students, as they often cannot receive such service at their schools due to the smallness and limited resources of school libraries.

To remove or endanger public libraries through any alternative funding scheme would jeopardize our ability to help those students, among others in our respective communities.

The results of that -- scholastically, socially, economically, emotionally -- would be tragic for students, parents, and community members.

Your public library is more than a building with books it in, more than a place where people can check out occasionally controversial or sensationalized reading materials that frankly receive more hype than they are worth.

If you truly take issue with the collection development decisions of your public library, there are often formal means by which you can approach its board and/or challenge the inclusion of such materials in that collection by filling out a simple form possibly available at your library.

As public libraries are more than books, we are certainly more than tax dollars.

At a time when the economy presents new difficulties and challenges, it is public libraries that can and will help society to continue moving forward, despite any negative fiscal conditions, because our institutions do not function according to profit-based missions.

We exist for the common person, for the community, their intellectual well-being.

Do away with public libraries or threaten to diminish them in any way, and you will succeed in robbing communities of their developmental potentials and ultimately worsen economic and social conditions.

Just because you might not use your public library does not erase the fact that hundreds of thousands of individuals, every day in America and throughout the world, rely on such public institutions as a means of maintaining a realistic hope of contributing to society as a productive and informed member.

Would anyone seriously rather these people not have access to such life-changing information?

Does anyone seriously want these people to face the possibility of not being able to further their intelligence?

Would anyone seriously prefer these people to become burdens on their communities, be robbed of their potentials or their rights to free access to information?

As we know, not everyone can afford the escalating costs of a college education. With that in mind, let us remember that public libraries are, for all intents and purposes, often considered the "universities of the people," by and for and of them.

It is not far-fetched to say public libraries help preserve and promote democracy. We do.

Perhaps this is as good a time as any for public library advocates speak out against those who doubt our worth or question our existence or attempt to denigrate our missions and offerings through poor and sensationalized examples of certain reading materials that are easy targets.

By and large, the bulk of public library collections exist according to collection development plans which are coordinated and reviewed with librarians who choose to add materials to their collections primarily based on a community's needs and demands.

And this is done in the face of tight budgets. No such decisions are easy, especially as it becomes even more apparent we have to educate people as to the social and economic worth of public library institutions.

We have much work to do, so let us band together and remind the world what it is that public libraries stand for, what we have achieved, what we continue to contribute in terms of public service and educational opportunities to society, what positive impacts we have had throughout our collective histories, among so many other amazing achievements.

Public libraries have been a consistently wise investment, better than any stocks you might own at the moment, because the dividends libraries pay are decidedly innumerable and far-reaching and will outlast any company you might financially invest in.

"Priceless," as they say in the television commercials.

This is not merely about money but about human lives, the worth we assign to preserving dreams of advancement for others, how much of a price we are willing to put on giving the have-nots viable options and opportunities to become more than just functional members of their society but also leaders and supporters of educational efforts and positive, community-uplifting endeavors.

In return for your tax dollars, a public library invests directly in your community. This is true whether you use it or not.

And this is not merely about information: public libraries offer what the Internet cannot possibly provide in terms of community enrichment and free access to information of all kinds and in all formats.

We know some of you can and prefer to "Google it," but Google is not research. Let me repeat that: Google is not research.

Any search engine company is, for all its expansive efforts and intentions, essentially just a search engine, but more importantly, in this conversation, a business, and one that does not exist to serve your specific community's needs but rather the demands of its shareholders.

Public libraries, on the other hand, are non-profit, oriented to the betterment of their designated service populations, and often far better suited to serve the local information needs of its communities because we take the time and dedicate our limited resources to meeting the immediate needs of our communities.

In other words, if you somehow believe access to the Internet and a search engine makes the need for a public library obsolete, you are sadly mistaken: we offer more than just information.

That said, we often offer better information and research tools that do not exist on the Internet. Even some of the smallest libraries offer specialized databases, many of which you can access from home, that will do wonders for your research.

Surprisingly, many people do not know that, yet that is one example of how public libraries have extended their informational reach to provide quality research services to their communities.

Now, just imagine what more we could do if people took the time to appreciate what public libraries stood for and achieved on a day to day basis.

Our fight is the the fight for every person's right to read, right to access information in an objective atmosphere, a right to learn, a right to read for enlightenment or enjoyment.

Our fight is for you.

Yes, you.

And in a world where are increasing desires and technologies to control information, your future, and your very minds, your public library remains one of your closest allies.

Commercial search engines cannot and will not fight for you as an individual or your community: their sole missions are to produce profits, increase sales and ad-clicks.

In this world where information IS power, public libraries directly empower those who take advantage of that library's offerings.

To those who don't take advantage of their public libraries: you do not know what you are missing!

Please visit your library. Get to know your local librarians. They have done so much for your community, more than you probably will ever know!

Nevertheless, we in the library community are eager to meet and serve our community members and help them find the information they need and get on the road to success.

This truly is our mission, we who are sworn to uphold the sacred ideals of public librarianship: we want to help, and we will continue to help all those in need.

Some libraries are so severely underfunded or unsupported that they have lost their abilities to effectively serve their communities. This certainly must be viewed as one of our modern tragedies.

We hope you would agree that those who need our help deserve to be helped, and we hope you understand where we are coming from.

Please support public libraries. In doing so, you will be supporting the future of your community -- and not just yours but the future of all those who perhaps are not as fortunate as you.

They deserve a chance to further their minds, and you deserve a community whose future remains hopeful and full of positives and potentials thanks to a properly funded public library existing to serve everyone, not just a privileged few who can somehow mistake their own disuse for the lack of needs of others.

We know otherwise. We know our communities need us. We hear it, see it, and are reminded of that every day we open our doors or pick up the phone or answer our electronic reference questions.

Those needs will not go away. In fact, those needs have increased, become more intricate and involved, requiring of us more knowledge, better research tools, faster response times, all while conducting these activities within budgetary constraints and the knowledge that not everyone will understand or appreciate our efforts.

Regardless, we meet all these challenges on your behalf, your community's behalf, every day, whether you choose to understand it or not, and we will do so for as long as we can.

Thank you for considering these words.

If you read that column from start to finish, it sure doesn't come off as a clarion call for privatizing libraries...consider the analogous "cases" made first.

To my eye, the Opinionator's tongue was firmly in cheek.

How would you know which material/books you object and which ones you support if you have access to neither?

There's a difference between "privatizing" a library and what LSSI does. LSSI just takes over management of the library; it's still free to use and open to everyone. It's still a public library.

Here in Oregon, our libraries were completely shuttered. LSSI came in and was able to re-open them. Without them we didn't have ANY library. I'm all for paying a more to support our libraries, but couldn't convince everyone else to follow along. All I know is, now we have our libraries back, and as far as I can tell it's pretty much the same; even most of the same people still work there.