Thank you, thanks so much, I’m in Ohio and will contact every one of them. We have to have our libraries.

Many thanks. Please spread the word to FDL’ers and beyond.

The McKinley era political slogan, “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation” remains true.

Just an observation about the very possible linkages between libraries and economic prosperity — TOTALLY anecdotal, and not based on any studies, but just off the top of my head:

Paul Allen was a co-founder of Microsoft. Both his parents were librarians; his father was the Director of Univ of Washington (Seattle) system of libraries. This system includes one of the largest Fisheries libraries in the world, and one of the largest Forestries libraries in the world (or did, until some of these ‘branch’ libraries were closed down and their collections brought back to larger libraries in the system).

It’s an interesting observation that Allen has referred to himself as ‘the inventor of the backslash’ and that library collections are organized in much the same fashion as computer directories.

Many computer-based functions, features, and systems derive from “Information Sciences” — often called ‘librarianship’. If you think of your computer files as books on a shelf, you’ll probably be able to find things more easily and keep them in better order — for those who can’t quite grasp that analogy (or who keep both bookshelves and computer files in a fairly disorganized fashion), we now have powerful SEARCH features. The SEARCH feature on your computer originated as the ‘card catalog’ in a library.

The co-founders of Microsoft, Bill Gates III and Paul Allen, have both given large sums to libraries: both university libraries, and in the case of Gates, to public libraries.

Allen has been quoted as saying that he spent a lot of time swinging by his local library as a teenager to pick up sci-fi. I’ve seen that library, and it’s not a big place; but the fact that a kid can pick up a book within walking or biking distance of home is — in the information age — a huge factor in building the workforces of the future.

I don’t know the early reading habits of Steve Jobs, nor other software luminaries.

I do know a fair bit about reading.
You cannot have a 21st century economy without a lot of readers.
And the best way to have a lot of readers is to have easily accessible, convenient ways for people to get books they can read, return, and recommend.

Whether it’s a permanent library, or partly staffed by volunteers during cut-back hours, the activities involved in reading and accumulating knowledge over a period of years is critical in building a competent workforce. Reading offers benefits over and above formal education — and people who are ‘readers’ tend to excel across professions. Because reading is a form of ‘lifelong learning’ it is critical to have materials that are fresh, novel, and up-to-date.

It’s no coincidence that America has been economically powerful and innovative over and above what might have been expected for a nation with such rich natural resources.

The economic benefits of reading, because they are ‘hidden’ and hard to quantify, tend to get lost in the blur of today’s news, or government statistics.

But the economic benefits of reading — for individuals, companies, and cultures — is enormous. And it’s cumulative over time.

I think that’s right. Lending libraries were the first public schools, before those were common and before schooling was mandatory. Working men’s clubs sponsored them when “upward mobility” was as likely as winning the Irish Sweepstakes. Libraries were a primary beneficiary of Andrew Carnegie’s seminal, novel (and greatly resented among his heirs) retirement largesse. He used the largest fortune of his generation to endow public education, broadly defined, including founding libraries in small towns and colleges throughout America east of the Rockies.

That was a hundred years ago. Today, libraries bring information technology, video and music entertainment – in a safe environment – to poor and middle class Americans, the unemployed, the young out of school, those learning English and those learning to wrestle with retirement.

In Ohio, they are also bastions of union labor, which large library managers resent as much as any auto company executive. So I wouldn’t consider it coincidental if large library managers use this occasion the way Hollywood moguls use actors and technicians’ strikes – to clean house, to get out of good contracts for bad reaons, and to reduce the power of unions by taking people service out of the equation and making customers do their own customer service, including machine check-outs and self-searches.

That would be needlessly ruthless. Library staffs are often comprised of cooperative down to earth, empathetic helpers, not those competitive for power. The personal touch of an informed service person is what separates libraries from the impersonal Internet, and is why they are an institution in small towns and large. Governor Strickland’s move may be honest or cynical, but it is another threat to a way of life whose knock-on effects will do further harm to middle America.

In NJ our municipal libraries are are funded at a rate by state law. This year there were a couple of attempts by state legislators to cut the funds in half, but the outcry from the public was so great that they backed off. With the economy in the pits, the library fills an important place with providing a research resource for school kids, books, dvds, and audio books of various sorts, as well as computer time, musical entertainment, story time for little kids, and on and on. The worse the economy, the higher the pay back from a library.