Excerpt of the Day

"Habermas's ideal of unfettered communication is a natural fit for librarianship: By building diverse voices, perspectives, and arguments into our collections and services, we keep alive the means of realizing true democracy--by transcending our nation's historical shortcomings of exclusion and discrimination, and our profession's similar shortcomings, through the struggle to include censored works and underserved groups."


"Like education, our field has been called upon to play a so-called crucial role in bringing about the information society and the new economy, but without the public funding for that expanded economic mission."


"We are a society out of balance--tilted too much toward business and market solutions and too far from the ideals of a true public and a democratic society.  Perhaps more disturbing is our unawareness of the historical fact that we as a society used to regard our public institutions differently and managed them with the goal in mind of furthering the public good.  The new economic model of public philosophy has become both the reason and the method to reform and shape public policy for a generation now, directly shaping priorities that determine the spending for and mission of public cultural institutions."


"A private consulting firm suggested that the word "public" be dropped in describing schools because it 'has come to have negative connotations' with such entities as public libraries, public radio, and public assistance [...].  We should stand apart from--and even in opposition to--the shift to a democracy of consumers where the only voters are those who can afford the privilege."


"Our ideas about our profession and our institutions should be more expansive, more democratic, truer to our principles, and not merely limited to what is good for the economy."


All of these quotes are from the article "Staying Public: The Real Crisis in Librarianship" by John Buschman.