Jeff Chang on libraries

[owlectomy]

Via Racialicious: Jeff Chang's In Defense of Libraries is a must-read.

When music is determined to hold no more monetary value, it is deleted. That is where most of our recorded history lies. In the cut-out bin. In the Trash file. Locked behind the copyright fence. Lots of it belongs there like the Eagles. But what about when it doesn’t?

We change the culture, and politics follows.

The folks who are against us, who are against a vibrant vital public core, know this. The budget cuts inflicted we face here and all around the country are about laying waste to the public space and fencing it off. And they are about stopping cultural change right where it begins.

In the library, I am in a space beyond the marketplace, beyond consumption, beyond the money censors, beyond the noise. I am in a place where librarians have accumulated the knowledge and the stories important to me and my community.

The library is the embodiment and the refuge of our collective imagination.

Yes.

And I've seen enough times when libraries have failed at being that, and -- still, this is the ideal that I have, this is what I believe in.

Comments

[laughingrat]

Yes. I want us to be that too. I want New Modern Librarianship to stop bullying libraries and librarians into being something equivalent to "profit-driven."