Keeping the doors open

(Originally published on OnTheCommon.com - Keeping the doors open)
You'd think that a kid going off to college in the 60s would have been worried about war, drugs, rock-and-roll, 'n other stuff. There was all that, for sure, but there was one additional fault line. Colleges, you see, typically use the Library of Congress cataloging system. I was a small-town boy who only knew the Dewey Decimal System. How was a kid like me supposed to find a book?
My mother worked at the Westminster library when I was a kid. My library card number was 1018. I was a bit disappointed when they introduced the numbered library cards. They used to write the names of the previous borrowers on the slip pasted in the book. I could see who'd been interested in the same book. I guess that's why they went to a numbered system. It really is no one's business what anyone else reads, as interesting as that information might be.
Later, when Sandra and I married, I learned that she'd helped her mother put books away at the small Chaffins branch. (The branch was in the former Chaffins school, now the light department building.) Sandra's mother drove the bookmobile, bringing books to the bookless around town.
Libraries have changed. They've always changed. The latest changes - increased use of electronic resources, reduced funding - are just as profound as the challenges they've encountered in the past.
This notion that we as a public should make sure that we have free access to the universe of ideas is so wonderfully democratic, so wonderfully subversive, that, of course, it's always going to be threatened. It's threatened because the universe of ideas is expanding; libraries must keep pace. It's threatened because the free flow of ideas is expensive.
Nevertheless, libraries endure. Jane Dutton, Holden's library director, encourages us. In the recent Friends of the Gale Free Library newsletter, she writes, "It seems to me that every year the news and talk gets more depressing and dramatic. I am always asked about Gale Free Library and how it will survive the current economic struggles." She remains optimistic. The history of the Holden library shows its evolution from a school building to a library to a renovated library to a town center for reading and celebrating ideas.
It's during these times hard times that the library is needed most. Dutton reminds us that the library's history is an affirmation of the value that town sees in its library.
It requires smart, hard-working people to keep a library thriving. We're fortunate to have Jane Dutton, along with staff, friends, and townspeople, keeping the doors open.
Dutton closes her article with this reminder.

I have always loved this quote from Mr.Gale and believe in his words. This is your palace, this is your library: "Let this be your palace royal; keep always the door wide open, the feast spread and the lights burning, this till these rugged stones shall crumble and be as dust." (Samuel Chester Gale, at the opening of the Damon Memorial Building, 1888.)