"Right now, the library is the last place you can seek information without being spied on," ;-) [View all]

[Democrats Ramshield]

(Cross posted by the author from the Daily Kos).

(This diary is written by an American expat living in the European Union who is a male business librarian who holds a graduate library degree (MLS) and a Master's degree in business administration in marketing).

As an American librarian I am glad to be living in the European Union where library funding isn't under attack to the extent that it is back home in the United States, because readership, literacy and an open based knowledge system that is publicly funded is still valued. Therefore closing libraries isn't under threat due to budget cuts as it is in America, where recently the entire state of Louisiana stopped funding libraries.

In my previous online diary entitled "Libraries is the last best socialized institution, you're about to lose it." That fact does not seem to bother people with money at all however they seem to forget that. "Right now, the library is the last place you can seek information without being spied on," That truth seems to bother even people with money. Because they know what it means, which is a loss of intellectual freedom. The library you see has long been a sanctuary for readers, so this is nothing new. But the library may also be thought of as a collective memory. It is simply a repository of everyone who has ever lived, who has thought and who has written, and not to have access to it due to censorship, budget cuts is an issue that in the end will diminish us all and as such must be resisted. Surely this generation of Americans cannot go down in history as the generation that lost the freedom of information, and indeed intellectual freedom.

At this point I'd like to give a brief introduction to the quote below made by Jaron Lanier, who is a rather famous Silicon Valley computer scientist, who was a co-developer in various start up companies that went on to form parts of Adobe, Oracle and Google to name but a few.

(To continue reading & watch the video please click on the link below.)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/22/1286538/--Right-now-the-library-is-the-last-place-you-can-seek-information-without-being-spied-on

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