Public libraries are to be deprived of protected funding status under New Labour. As undergraduate study is closed down for qualified and eager candidates, New Labour is hacking at another of the pillars of our culture. For as long as there has been a culture of self-improvement and working peoples' education in more than skills, free at point-of-use access to librarians and their libraries has been as essential as free at point-of-use health care. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Internet access is undermining the need for libraries says New Labour, in justification for their authoritarian and depriving vandalism. So how many of you have access to JUSTOR? How many of you, in the sense of the general population, have access to a computer and broadband? And even if you have, what use is it without the skills to use it? Not just the superficial operator skills but the Weltanschauung, the heightened by university-level study and its conferred independence of thought and understanding of the connectedness of things? What if you are very small and seek the books your family cannot afford to buy? Or rather older and want to read the journals you cannot afford to subscribe to? Or wish to seek advice on what to look at (librarians are not just for fine-collection).
Never did Angels think to borrow the words of Ian Paisley, but this is beyond fury.
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8 comments:
Last time I looked, I did not have access to "JUSTOR", but did have access to "JSTOR". Keep it accurate please.
seems like they are only taking the knife to the easy targets. my local library has just been refurbished, but will they have any books in there. what a shame
I try.
Well then Anon 17:28 you must be part of a Univerity that subscribes to it
Roy, we're just going to have to start all over again, and put it all back - the decent municipal provision of libraries, museums, sports facilities, transport local and connected to a national network, evening classes, subsidised social facilities of all and every kind. We might lose some services delivered to individuals but they would be amply compensated by having things they might like to do in places they might like to go to rather than be stuck at home.
People have found skips full of reference books behind town libraries, discarded because they failed to fit tick boxes.
All part of the deculturalisation of England. Finish off the job started by TV.
I just hate them.
It is less inflamatory than just burning the books.
In Scotland, many - or even most - of the public libraries were originally funded by Andrew Carnegie. They belong, properly, to the people of the towns where they stand.
Alas, this does not stop the State from closing them down, as they do to so many institutions they do not value. Village halls are another example; many were charitable donations, taken over willy-nilly by the Local Authorities, now being closed.
Typical statist behaviour - take over and crowd out any private or charitable initiative, then transform it into the likeness of the State, or close it down completely.
The State is not your friend.
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