The Meaning of the Library
edited by Alice Crawford
(Princeton 2015)
"The library," we find, "means" many things over time and throughout these essays. it is a collection of books, a center for scholarship, a universal memory, a maze or labyrinth, a repository of hidden or occulted knowledge, a sanctum, an archive for stories, a fortress, a space of transcendence, a focus for wealth and display, a vehicle of spirituality, an emblem of wisdom and learning, a mind or brain, an ordainer of the universe, a mausoleum, a time machine, a temple, a utopia, a gathering place, an antidote to fanaticism, a silent repository of countless unread books, a p lace for the pursuit of truth. A concept that has inspired many metaphors, the library as an idea has appealed to the human imagination throughout the ages.
Pages xvi-xvii.
By conceiving the idea of completeness ... the Alexandrians necessarily conceived the idea of its opposite also. If the library could contain the whole memory of mankind, the possibility had be confronted that that memory could be lost: encased within man-made walls, the entire memory fio te human race could be "vulnerable to complete erasure."
Page xvii.
Strong in its pursuit of the whole record of civilization, it is nevertheless unavoidably susceptible to disintegration and decay.
Page xviii.
In medieval, as in ancient, times there was no consensus that the library meant something unassailably good.
Page xviii.
Victorian books proliferated and were consumed by an exponentially expanding community of readers. Themselves industrialized by new mechanized processes of papermaking, printing, and bookbinding, books were "a cheap luxury," and suddenly plentifully available to a demographic that had benefited from two reforming acts of Parliament. The 1850 Public Libraries Act had instigated a shift from costly circulation libraries to free ones, and the 1870 Education Act built further on this to drive up levels of literacy among ordinary people.
Page xxi.
Public librarians functioned as teachers of taste, moral improvement, and social behavior. Classification schemes that determined juxtaposition of books on shelves, catalogues that structured readers' pathways from one book to another, indexes that directed the navigation of a book's content - all exerted a subtle but insistent control of reading behavior.
Pages xxi-xxii.
Curating, producing and facilitating the use of the cultural record in all it myriad forms, digital and ancient libraries share the same mission; both have "a commitment to sustaining culture despite, and perhaps because of, changes occurring all around.
Page xxvi.
Attention to four focal "pillars" of activity - curation: engagement with research and learning; publishing; and the management of spaces for users and collections - will ensure the library's relevance in the digital age.
Page xxvi.
Libraries facilitate a widening out of thought. "... They are temples of pluralism, where books that contradict one another sit peacefully side by side on the shelves just as intellectual antagonists work peacefully next to each other in reading rooms." Libraries are for everyone, inclusive in both their membership and holdings.
Page xxvi.
We go to libraries perhaps because we love telling ourselves stories and are drawn to the places where these stories are held. What we find in libraries helps us to shape things and make life seem coherent. ... libraries, like the books they contain, offer the order we crave and into which we retreat for comfort, confirmation, and the reassurance that somewhere there is meaning to it all.
Page xxvii.
"A place to read" may be meaning enough for any library.
Page xxviii.
*
The ancients were very clear that there was a difference between the materialistic bibliophile who collected books as commodities, and the cultured person who actually understood their contents.
Page 4.
It was the people of the first two generations after Alexander the Great who saw the establishment of the first libraries that can be described as "public" in the modern sense, even though scholars disagree on the nature and degree of public access, especially given that literacy rates in many ancient cities may not have exceeded 10 to 20 percent of the population.
Page 7.
The first great public libraries were set up in the kingdoms established by Alexander's successors, notably the Ptolemies' near-legendary library in the Egyptian Greek city of Alexandria. The city had been founded by the Macedonian conqueror himself in 331 B.C. He had been instructed on the precise location by the shade of Homer, who visited him in a dream.
Page 7.
Book collections, of all sizes, were often attached to or housed within temples.
Page 7.
The selection or deselection of books for inclusion in a library's collection was already acknowledged by historians in antiquity to have been a charged political issue.
Page 10.
Of far more lasting significance ... is the actual concept of the library as an institution where the whole resource constitutes something infinitely greater than the sum of the parts.
Page 10.
The scholars at the library of Alexandria undoubtedly undertook the Herculean task of preserving the entire literary output of the Greeks, which is why they went to such extreme lengths to obtain a copy of every known work, even placing all books that arrived in the port of t heir city under embargo until copies could be made.
Pages 10-11.
Our idea of the library in English-speaking lands is ultimately if unconsciously affected by our adoption of a word from another semantic root that the factual, descriptive bibliotheke.
Page 14.
In English-speaking lands, the visual rather than aural similarity between the words library, liberty, liberalism, and liberal arts has been one of the most ideologically potent results that can be imagined of a completely false etymology.
Page 15.
Ancient creators of libraries were always either very powerful (like Ptolemy or Trajan) or just rich (like Pliny): for equally obvious reasons, they always presented the creation of a library, whether public or private, as a self-evidently good thing.
Page 17.
The Romans loved to think about how their great city had transformed the simple rural environment.
Page 25.
*
Libraries, medieval and modern alike, are simultaneously collections of books, spaces in which books are kept, and concepts. They are a body of knowledge and also a means of organizing it.
Page 31.
Depictions of libraries are in generally short supply during the later twelfth century and throughout the thirteenth. The circumstance that the period in question postdates the golden age of the monastic library yet pre-dates the heyday of princely and university ones is surely part of the explanation for this.
Page 39.
A feature of private or scholars' libraries ... is the provision of curtains to screen off the shelves from the rest of the chamber. ... The function of such curtains was surely less to conceal the books than to give them modest protection against light and, above all, dust - a far from negligible concern in chambers heated by open fires.
Page 47.
Angled, L-shaped wall shelving ... was particularly relevant in an era whose library culture was based on lecterns and whose books might accordingly have titles inscribed on the front- or the back-boards.
Page 47.
One must be circumspect about how far one accepts any such image as a factual record of particular library practices.
Page 49.
... led to the emergence of an iconography of scholars, scholarship, and learning, or which books and library furniture formed an integral part. It may be doubted that many fifteenth-century artists sketched actual libraries and their fittings to guide them, as opposed to copying or confecting from other images.
Page 51.
Visual conventions probably dominate even those portrays that are superficially individualistic or idiosyncratic.
Page 51.
In effect, a relatively modest number of books became the iconography for a major library.
Page 51.
Two further aspects of contemporary libraries that were, in general terms, authentic: first, the coexistence of different types of storage - desks or lecterns, shelves, chests and cupboards - and second, the likelihood that books were not invariably stacked or shelved neatly therein or theron.
Page 52.
All our depictions, however realistic (or otherwise) they may appear, were designed less to represent the realty of a library than to convey its essence, to show what it stood for, rather than the banalities of how it operated.
Page 52.
The depictions of libraries of educational institutions, whatever their limitations, unmistakenly broadcast the concerns for the security and preservation of the books that indeed characterized such bodies.
Page 52.
While the picture tell us little or nothing abut particular titles held by specific libraries, they do make important points about medieval intellectual life and culture in general. They reveal a world in which libraries were valued, and a society that pondered the purpose of book collections and how they should be used.
Page 53.
The depictions shed light on much wider issues - the nature and function of a library in medieval tie. More than any other source, these images illuminate "the library as a concept" and give us visual pointers to how its role in nourishing the mind, not to mention to soul, was understood.
Page 53.
Yet almost all the depictions of their divers way, portray the library as an emblem of wisdom and learning. The imagery thus corresponds to the laudatory views expressed in writing.
Page 53.
A figure in a study that was lined with weighty tomes was self-evidently a man of letters whose ownership of a collection of books indicated metaphysical as well as physical possession of the learning that they contained.
Page 53.
If the setting of a library "flattered" the figure working in it, reciprocally that person could add dynamism to the library, indicating use and transmission, as opposed to mere accumulation, of wisdom.
Page 54.
To foster wisdom and holiness: this was the purpose of a medieval library, however it was constituted and arranged.
Page 56.
True wisdom was grounded more in depth than in breadth of reading Pictures showing chests, cupboards, shelves, or lecterns with limited numbers of substantial tomes conveyed precisely this idea. Collecting, preserving, and using the right texts in the right w ay - which often meant slowly and contemplatively - was far more valuable than just accumulating different titles.
Page 56.
*
It might have been thought that the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, and the huge increase of the availability of books, would usher in a great new age of library building. In fact, the opposite was the case. Many of the great Renaissance collections were broken up, the victim of predators, politics, or neglect.
Page 73.
Printing, of course, did not invent the book. Medieval Europe was full of books, all carefully crafted by hand.
Page 73.
Contrary to what is often supposed, the invention of printing did not immediately destroy the manuscript trade. On the contrary, the two modes of book production coexisted for at least to generations.
Page 74.
What scholars and collectors wanted was texts. it was the huge demand for texts that had helped fuel the search for a new means of mechanical reproduction. The traditional purchasers of manuscripts were among the greatest enthusiasts for the new experimental printed books.
Page 74.
Collectors' acceptance of the new printed books was assisted by the fact that the first printers consciously modelled their work on manuscripts.
Page 75.
Mostly, though, it was the sheer profusion of books that domed the Renaissance library. Before print, the creation of a library was the work of a lifetime.
Page 75.
For Europe's ruling elites the accumulation of a library lost its allure.
Page 75.
Spending on sculpture, tapestry, paintings, palaces, and warships replaced the building of a library.
Page 76.
The conflicts between Catholics and evangelicals also spilled into the libraries, as the prevailing power insisted that the shelves be searched for anything forbidden or heretical.
Page 80.
The Renaissance library was a noisy place - a place of conversation and display, rather than for study and contemplation. It was only n the seventeenth century, with these new institutional collections, that the library began its long descent into silence, emerging as that new phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the library as mausoleum, a silent repository of countless unread books, its principal purpose the protection of books from the ravages of human contact.
Page 81.
Most sixteenth-century books are extremely hardy. If anything they benefit from use.
Page 82.
The French revolution brought the confiscation of around ten million books from France's abolished religious orders.
Page 83.
The data collected by the USTC [Universal Short Title Catalogue] project indicates that by 1600 around 345,000 separate books had been printed. An average print run is normally calculated at around seven hundred to one thousand copies - this is something over two hundred million copies all told. But for each edition the average number of copies that survive is around 3.5. That is, far less than 1 percent of all the books printed in the first age of print have made it through to the present day.
Page 84.
Thirty percent of the copies of the Gutenberg Bible published are still extant. But the tendency of great libraries to collect the same sorts of books means that whole categories of book have been lost altogether. About 30 percent of the books now known to have been published before 1601 survive in only one copy, and many have disappeared completely.
Page 84.
Books were meant to travel.
Page 86.
Technological innovation is frequently accompanied by excitable rhetoric and totally false prophecy.
Page 86.
The major areas of innovation through print turned out to be in areas where scholars had little interest - the development of a market for news for instance, or the popular religious literature that encouraged wide public debate and incited religious discord. Humanist scholars did not want this at all. They wanted a larger, more convenient supply of texts for people like themselves. If they had known how the market for printed tets would evolve, they would probably have heartily disapproved.
Page 87.
The book survives because it is an object of technological genius.
Page 87.
The sixteenth century represented critical era, not because this was a moment of technological change, but because following this technological change the book became commonplace. This empowered whole new classes of reader.
Page 87.
Only in the seventeenth century was the library re-created as a physical space with a new role, as a center of scholarship.
Page 88.
*
Booksellers purveyed ... knowledge in the form of books, and librarians organized it onto bookshelves.
Page 92.
Not all philosophers rejoiced in the growing access to books. Far from advocating universal literacy, Voltaire insisted that peasants should till the soil. But the most progressive thinkers, notably Condorcet and his friend Thomas Jefferson, identified Enlightenment with the diffusion of books and understood the printed word as the most powerful force for the liberation of humanity.
Page 92.
Books were shipped in sheets, not bound in volumes.
Page 94.
Capitalism was cruel in the early modern period, when limited liability did not exit.
Page 96.
Copyright was established in England by the statue of Anne in 1710, but id did not exist on the Continent, where the rights to books were usually determined by royal "privileges" valid only within the territory of the sovereign who granted them.
Page 97.
*
The subscription library's roots evidently lie in rather earlier and simpler organizations. The key ancestor is what contemporaries knew as the "book club" (or occasionally "book society" or even "reading society").
Page 105.
A crucial characteristic, however, was the principle that, once an individual text had been read, it would be sold, usually to a member, and the proceeds used to facilitate new purchases. In short, a boo club, at least in theory, had no permanent book collection.
Page 106.
Many subscription libraries nevertheless did coalesce out of pre-existing book clubs.
Page 106.
Rule making can of course, all too easily become a habit of mind. At its most extreme the increasing officiousness led some libraries to legislate about the most unexpected things: for example, domestic animals.
Page 107.
Much the most important consequence of owning a growing permanent collection was, however, the need for a permanent home.
Page 108.
In certain cases ... constructing dedicated premises was the solution of choice wherever feasible, since only this could provide full and exclusive control over access to the building in which a library's increasingly valuable property was housed. ... Many of the resulting edifices often prominently positioned in the townscape, reflected the towering ambitions as well as the considerable self-regard of those involved: these were articulate statements about the importance of the institution, and, perhaps, of its proprietors, rendered unmistakably in fine masonry.
Page 109.
Taking into account the perceived need for a suitably high-quality finish - Corinthian capitals, false ceilings, balconies, even grand pediments and gazed domes were often regarded as essential - it is hard to appreciate how the costs could often mount.
Page 109.
It was very common indeed for one member of a household to subscribe and for this to confer borrowing privileges on the entire family.
Page 111.
Broadly speaking the books acquired by subscription libraries tended to be the outcome of two conflicting impulses. On the one had there was the freedom of reads who were also owners and member to decide, by some combination of individual proposal and collective approval, the books that the library would buy ... On the other hand there was the strong desire for order imposed by prevailing notions of taste, decency, and propriety.
Page 113.
A further concern when shaping a burgeoning institutional collection was the whole thorny question of dubious literature.
Page 114.
The issue with novels was, or was usually held to be, twofold. One concern was that narrative fiction seemed to be so constructed by manipulative and morally bankrupt authors as to sensationalize or whitewash bad behavior and encourage emotional incontinence among readers through blatant titillation. The other worry, closely related to the first, was that such literature was also simultaneously much more likely to appeal to and therefore to lead astray those vulnerable readers with the weakest constitutions, specifically women, the young, and - a fascinating Georgian perception - servants, as a consequence threatening not just public morality but also the social and political order.
Page 114.
Between the right of members to choose, however, and the fear of what might happen when they did, libraries continually struggled to negotiate.
Page 114.
There was, in other words, an invariable emphasis on more serious forms of literature, the kinds of things with which a knowledgeable person needed to be familiar.
Page 115.
These libraries were also convivial organizations that provided plentiful opportunities for sociability - for meeting and interacting with others.
Page 116.
Involvement was a way in which local dignitaries could transfer patronage and acknowledge their social obligations.
Page 116.
Social interaction in the libraries could also involve attending instructive lectures or taking part in enlightening debates.
Page 117.
Sociability, then, mattered intensely to the participants in subscription libraries. But it was generally properly structured and intentional in character, not random and accidental. In particular it was organized and given coherence by conversations on reading-related questions, by discussion of the library's own internal affairs, by debates on appropriate topics, and by regular dinners and periodic dances.
Page 117.
This was in fact ... a golden age of British associationalism [sic], and we miss something vital about the subscription library phenomenon if we view it in isolation, merely as a question of people wanting to read more books, and if we divorce it form this broader cultural and ideological context peculiar to Georgian Britain, which was positively obsessed with organized sociability, structured interaction, and the pursuit of politeness.
Page 118.
The problem for the subscription library by the second half of the nineteenth century was one of rival attractions, above all the result of parliamentary legislation that, in concert with Mr. Carnegie's good works, provided late Victorian and Edwardian Britons with a compelling alternative to the relatively expensive private subscription library model: which is to say, true public libraries, run by local government, ratepayer-funded, and free at the point of use, which may usually have lacked dances and drinking sessions and, one presumes, venison feats ....
Page 118.
*
The traditional book lore is that of five books three lose money, one breaks even and one makes profit.
Page 124.
Uncertainty stimulates a reluctance to innovate until innovation becomes absolutely essential for survival.
Page 124.
Wherever congregations of human beings form (in churches, schools, universities, cities, clubs), libraries - centralized pools of books - form alongside them as surely as barnacles on the hulls of ships.
Page 128.
Fiction, particularly new fiction ... was regarded by the Free Library's custodians as something dangerous to the working-class mind - too exciting.
Page 131.
Whatever their shortcomings, the public libraries served to raise into literacy the other side of the equation, a mass reading public.
Pages 132-133.
Railway termini created the most fluid congeries of reader in the Victorian period and fostered two distinct kinds of library. ... Routledge's one-shilling "Railway Library."
Page 134.
It was necessary for books to leap out and catch the passing eye. Rail travellers do not browse - they snatch, pay, and run.
Page 134.
Unaccompanied women never felt entirely comfortable at railway stations - hence the "ladies only" carriage and similarly protective waiting rooms.
Page 135.
Card catalogues were not in universal use until the 1870s, although they would thereafter rationalize library book organization and access until the end of the twentieth century.
Page 137.
Private collections have flavors as individual as their collectors. For some, they are intimate parts of themselves.
Page 141.
Bibliophilia, like other kinds of love, will appear preposterous to those not in thrall to it.
Page 142.
Knowing when a writer acquired a book is as important as the fact that it was owned.
Pages 143-144.
Faustus's forlorn shriek as he's carried off to Hell - "I'll burn my books" - makes clear that they are second only in value to his immortal soul. For most authors, no igniting match is necessary. The auctioneer's hammer will do it. The effect of the public library auction is uniquely pulverizing. Very seldom are libraries, in their entirety, bought by institutions. They are, in bulk, too expensive. Souvenir hunters, ravenous for "association copies," tear the years-long collection to fragments like vultures.
Pages 144-145.
The Alexandran fate is the ultimate destiny of all libraries.
Page 145.
*
The tablets on which the Epic of Gilgamesh is written lay in the Assyrian library of Ashurbanipal for millennia. They were unearthed, millions of scattered, battered, and chipped clay pages, between 1850 and 1853, during the excavations of Nineveh (today, near Mosul).
Page 154.
The Epic of Gilgamesh holds a pivotal position in the history of libraries and works of the fictive imagination. Most distant from us in time, the poem draws very close to us again through its concerns - with love, sex, friendship, the responsibility of rulers, the relation to nature and growing things, and above all, the knowledge it unfolds about the grief of loss, the costs of violence, and the inevitability of death.
Page 155.
Without the library to preserve its creations, the imagination is mortal, like its protagonists.
Page 155.
What we know as the Epic of Gilgamesh does not have a fixed form; the numerous, very different translators work from different textual arrangements.
Page 156.
Every collection of human beings gathered for a long time in one place codifies itself, arranges rules of conduct, and makes a calendar for its celebrations of harvest, of the shapes of the moon, with tribal melodies, and preserves its fables and its history in the archives of the shaman and the griot and the bard's memory.
Page 162.
The voice of the storyteller was many and the stories created were all different and the same at one and the same time. Immutable inscription - writing - was used for tallies, the law, and other reckonings intended to be solid and permanent. But narration belonged to the different order of time - flowing time, mutability, chromatic harmony. Every listener became - and becomes - a potential new storyteller.
Page 163.
The book was a kind of early phonograph, which would preserve the dead and bring them back, living and audible, into time present. When books established canonical, fixed texts, they turned into death masks, entombing the once living beings that made the sounds of the words.
Page 164.
The underlying principle, that words can operate effectively to do things in the word, remains.
Page 170.
The word is a coil in the battery of a book, and the library a huge generator.
Page 171.
*
Libraries can be sites of conflict and devastation.
Page 176.
Poets love libraries as temples of books ... these buildings have been designed to invoke the sacred.
Page 176.
To be a poet or a libraries should be a calling: libraries often signal as much in their physical as well as their intellectual design.
Page 177.
Libraries are to be revered; but they are also places of transformational opportunity.
Page 177.
The library is not just a temple of books; it is heaven with shelving.
Page 178.
The library is a sacred space, a place of resurrection; yet as a location of learning it is also a site of transformational opportunity.
Page 180.
On the whole the library emerges as a place of mainly heterosexual encounters.
Page 180.
It is later in the eighteenth century, around the time when women first become librarians and when libraries become social s paces that admit both sexes, that the library becomes more prominent in Anglophone poetry.
Page 181.
Though many women worked as librarians in mid-nineteenth-century America, it was not until the later nineteenth century that female librarians became common in Britain, making libraries among the relatively few social intellectual institutions other than schools in which women might hold positions of authority and so challenge unthinking assumptions about gender roles, education, and professionalism.
Page 181.
Throughout mid-nineteenth-century America, `Cuture and libraries` ... certainly went together; and so, increasingly, did libraries and women.
Page 189.
For male poets the increasing success of female librarians can spur unmitigated lust.
Page 193.
In many modern poems the library ... signifies a sometimes awkwardly eroticized space. However, it remains, too, a place of death.
Page 193.
*
Fundamental to representations of the library is the contrast between the ordered rationality of the library as system and the hidden spaces of the library, including its undergorund stacks, which are frequently represented as the repositories of secret or occulted knowledge.
Page 199.
If the library is the site of memory, it is the province of film to preserve memory most completely.
Page 203.
Every librarian is, up to a certain point, an architect ... . He builds up his collection as an ensemble through which the reader must find a path, discover his own self, and live.
Page 205.
There is rarely any sense given in science fiction films that the futuristic technologies around which the films revolve have in any meaningful way replaced the book, or the library that held it, as the repository of knowledge.
Page 213.
In Hollywood film, as in other national cinemas, the small-town library frequently becomes a synecdoche for the town itself, and beyond that for the nation. The library (like the schoolhouse) is at the heart of the concept of community.
Pages 214-215.
*
With the growth of university English departments in America, the collecting of authors' papers became an institutional activity.
Page 224.
The dramatic expansion of special collections in America, however, got underway with the postwar growth of higher education in America and, more specifically, the growth of English literature programs in universities across the country.
Page 224.
The notion of a "complete archive" may, in fact, be as illusory as the notion of an author's "Original intent." Archives come to rest where there is a momentary convergence of vision, opportunity, and money.
Page 231.
*
The library throughout time has actually had a sort of constancy in its role and function a commitment to sustaining culture despite, and perhaps because of, changes occurring all around.
Page 236.
The core function of libraries is to do more than preserve the cultural record: it is also to provide access to and ensure use of that record and, increasingly, to be involved in the creation of the cultural record s well.
Page 236.
We can create truly effective spaces only by paying attention to the geographic, disciplinary, and cultural elements that define them.
Page 237.
A library's collection is not owned solely by the library, but by the society or culture that has collected it and put it in the library in the first place. We own the collection as a culture, and we must attend to it as a culture.
Page 237.
The curatorial aspect of the missions and functions of archives and libraries are roughly the same.
Page 238.
Words remain the basis of all scholarship, and formal communication through words in books and journals is at the core of the scholarly process.
Page 238.
There are more than a billion volumes stored in North American academic libraries. Emerging research at OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center, Inc.) suggests that roughly fifty million unique titles make up the corpus represented in these billion volumes.
Pages 238-239.
The museum and the library are neither teaching nor research centres. They are tool rooms for instruments of research.
Page 240.
In an era of constrained resources, a flat budget and increased demand is, I would argue, a vote of confidence.
Page 242.
We cannot succeed as libraries with flat or diminishing resources without also adapting or changing the way we do our work.
Page 243.
As libraries, our response to the resource problem should not be to do less, but to do things differently, and particularly to do them more efficiently.
Page 244.
Work at scale involves the consolidation of efforts in a sphere that cuts across institutions ... . By using scale-enhanced strategies, we shift resources and methods to a larger collaborative space.
Page 244.
The introduction of digital technologies has not changed the essential nature of the library but has created a path for increased vitality and long-term viability.
Page 249.
The digital promises to make the cultural work of libraries easier and more sustainable.
Page 250.
Technologically enhanced curation and publishing activities should allow libraries to shift resources to support more reflective engagement with users in research and learning.
Page 250.
Scholarly publishing is a significant core responsibility of libraries. Much scholarly book publishing is not sustainable as a business and has not been for a very long time.
Page 250.
A shared publishing platform, with ties to individual institutions, is the next great library frontier.
Page 250.
We are no longer able to afford to do in isolation what we can do more cost-effectively together.
Page 251.
*
Libraries are places for the pursuit of truth. … This pursuit differs from others in life, because it is inherently noncompetititve [sic] and communal. One person’s discovery enriches another’s search; and the ongoing pursuit of truth helps keep us from the pursuit of each other.
Page 255.
The college community built around the catechism and the classroom was largely superseded by the new university community built around the library and the laboratory.
Page 256.
Everyone in a democracy has a right to inject his or her opinion into the public dialogue.
Page 257.
The great twentieth-century Christian theologian Karl Barth quietly suggested that even contemporary talk about God tends to be only talk about man in a loud voice.
Page 257.
So far at least, the exploding virtual world has helped accelerate three kinds of human loss in the real world: of memory, of community, and of language.
The new technology proudly advertises its own capacity for memory, but it fosters a memory-free present-mindedness in its users. …
Communities are held together by communication; and the new online culture threatens to destroy reading among its younger addicts and, as a result, to dumb down the use of langue. You cannot write if you do not read. … The once elastic and rich English language is being replaced by a mushy mélange of abbreviations, acronyms, and the universalized pidgin English of air traffic controllers and computer programmers.
Page 260.
Libraries have historically been unifying, gathering places for disparate people and interests in a given locality. The very inundation of unfiltered online information makes it urgent that every community have its own objective human guide to online information and knowledge that is reliable and relevant for their local concerns.
Page 262.
There are many reasons for believing that the digital world will never fully replace the world of books. New technologies tend to supplement rather than supplant old ones. Movies did not obliterate plays; television did not destroy radio.
Page 262.
Online materials are perishable and manipulable [sic] in ways that are not yet generally understood; and digitization is still more a vehicle for communication than for preservation.
Page 262.
Books convince rather than coerce. They are oases of coherence where things are put together rather than just taken apart. Good books take us away from the bumper cars of emotion and polemics in the media into trains of thought that can lead us into places we might not otherwise ever discover.
Page 263.
Libraries are antidotes to fanaticism. They are temples of pluralism.
Page 263.
Reading can balance our noisy, hurry-up, present-minded world.
Page 265.