http://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/if-you-wa...
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Though the library may appear to be free, the truth is quite different; it is not that the library borrower is getting things for free, it is that they have already paid. Libraries are the result of a community pooling resources (often gathered through taxes) for the funding and purchasing of materials that are then made available to all members of that community.
... Just as a community invests in infrastructure like roads, bridges and water management systems – a community invests in a library. Libraries, if you will, represent educational and intellectual infrastructure. A recognition that just as a road makes it easier to reach your destination, so too does access to information enable one to complete a journey of another sort.
... what occurs in a library is the development and maintenance through the economy of a genuine structure for sharing. Numerous people contribute a little and from this are able to get a lot, but the value they extract from their investment is not in the form of a sack of money with a dollar sign on it, but a larger social value. It is a value that would be diminished by turning it simply into a profit-generating scheme.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/arts/design/public-library...
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In a striking about-face, the New York Public Library has abandoned its much-disputed renovation plan to turn part of its research flagship on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street into a circulating library and instead will refurbish the nearby Mid-Manhattan Library, several library trustees said
.. This shift is something of a defeat for the library, which had already paid the British architect Norman Foster $9 million in private funds for his firm’s work on the plan for the flagship, a 1911 Beaux-Arts landmark.
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