Nice! Salon's Laura Miller On "Why Libraries Still Matter"

An article by Laura Miller published on Salon.com:

Public libraries across the nation and the globe now face drastic funding cuts from politicians and administrators who often claim that they’re obsolete. For months, Britain has been rumbling with protests against plans to close as many as 400 local branches. Earlier this year, Gov. Jerry Brown announced that he was cutting all state funding to California’s libraries, leaving cities to pick up the slack. Defenders of such cutbacks typically ask why, in the age of Google and e-reader devices, anybody needs libraries.

Let’s set aside the obvious rejoinder that many citizens can’t afford e-readers and, furthermore, can only access Google via a library computer. The anniversary of the NYPL’s main building is an occasion to talk about why the library needs to be a place as well as an ethereal mass of data residing somewhere in “the cloud.” Not everything we need or want to know about the world can be transmitted via a screen, and not every experience can be digitized.

Also, not everything a library collects is a scannable book or document.

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Yes, they have laptops and yet they’ve come to the library. Librarians (who are of course the most invaluable feature of any library) tend to bristle at the stereotype of their profession as a glorified shush patrol, and typically respond by pointing out the many, many community services libraries provide, from storytelling for children to multimedia resource centers for job seekers to gathering places for seniors.

Filed under: Data Files, Funding, Libraries, Public Libraries