Noted and Quoted

Advances in science and technology have improved the ability of the health care system to treat diseases, yet the sheer volume of new discoveries stresses the capabilities of the system to effectively generate and manage knowledge and apply it to regular care.

"Physical libraries need to model themselves on museums, galleries, and important cultural and historical institutions—a place to see real and beautiful books. Look how popular the British Library has become. There will always be a market for nostalgia. The history of libraries will be back on the curriculum, it will take the place of Second Life.

“Even though Spaulding’s name is not readily recognized, he was an American patriot who safeguarded the freedoms of US citizens by writing the Library Bill of Rights.”

“My heart’s with what we’re doing in Firestone. My stomach hurts when I think about NYPL, the first great library I ever worked in, turned into a vast internet cafe where people can read the same Google Books, body parts and all, that they could access at home or Starbucks. And my head tells me that I can’t predict a thing because we’re living through a great revolution, and we don’t yet know what lies on the other side.”

“Everyone should hire librarians. Every time you hear about budget cuts and cutbacks on hours, it seems like our libraries, and librarians, are the ones suffering. But these places, and these people, must be the most helpful, the most informed, and the most knowledgeable resources on the planet. If they hired librarians to be clerks at the DMV, everyone would get their license plates on time and walk out of the office looking forward to renewal time. If librarians ran health care, people might still get sick, but not tired.”

“Outside, I ducked out of the way of a beeping Book Robot that was performing no book-like functions I could see, and I slid down the wall. Beside me sat a young-ish librarian in shiny black flats, poking derisively at her phone. This was my last chance to get someone on the record saying the end is near. Has her New Jersey library suffered from the loss of grants and city budget cuts? ‘Actually, we’re working on expanding,’ she told me. ‘We desperately need more space.’ This was her first conference. ‘It’s been very interesting.’ God, I can’t even coax her into saying how the lack of natural light and recycled air is destroying her will to live.”

“Since the future is already here, we can see that many publishers are placing bets on a declining library market. I think that’s the prudent thing to do. The evidence for this is that librarians keep telling us that their budgets are shrinking. I sometimes wonder if librarians understand that they are making a strategic mistake: By talking about their money woes, they reduce their clout with publishers. Librarians tend to argue on moral grounds, publishers on economic grounds. Most of the time, the money wins.”

“This place is a treasure trove.”

“A library is not just a building full of books. It is a garden to cultivate individuals.”

“America’s librarians, in town for a big conference, had descended on the downtown cantina in force, and the waiting area was a dense sea of lovable nerd. The dining room was loud and packed, too, and the staff looked like they’d been hit by a really well-read tsunami.”

“I just wanted to find a place to feel safe. It is tough being a woman out there. Sometimes I read romance novels. Because they are telling stories about love and being wanted.”

“For as long as anyone can remember, Amelia wanted to be a librarian. Not a sexy choice because of those darned shoes, but Amelia loved to read, and later, to knit.”

"Today the Picture Collection remains open at the Mid-Manhattan branch nearby on 40th Street — and it’s still easy to find images of anything from abacus to zodiac — but the ravages of sustained use are apparent, and their eventual disintegration is inevitable. Fortunately, the library’s vast citywide collection of prints, maps, posters, dust jackets, sheet music, menus and cigarette cards (the latter of which, interestingly, comprises 10 percent of the entire collection) is now available to the public online at the NYPL Digital Gallery. For designers who had already migrated to other online sources anyway, this wellspring of cataloged riches may become one-shop sourcing for rare, unusual and exotic references."

So many American efforts to influence foreign countries have misfired — not least here in Vietnam a generation ago. We launch missiles, dispatch troops, rent foreign puppets and spend billions without accomplishing much. In contrast, schooling is cheap and revolutionary. The more money we spend on schools today, the less we’ll have to spend on missiles tomorrow.

“When that old robber baron Andrew Carnegie decided to plow his ill-gotten gains into building this library system ‘for the people,’ he had to have believed we would realize its value and support it in the years to come....

"Stately old buildings are expensive to heat, cool, modernize, and maintain. The information age has necessitated more and more computers, e-readers, and other technology, all of it essential for people who don’t have it at home, especially children whose future depends on multi-platform literacy.

"The library leadership has done a fine job of raising capital funds and using them to their best advantage. The result is a growing list of library redesigns, each one a jewel of form and function....

“Rejecting this small levy because it should have been more widespread would be like rejecting a diphtheria vaccination because it doesn’t cover measles. The money won’t do everything, but it will do something, and that something is well worth doing.”

“The internet is an accumulation; a library is order. I have nothing against the electronic library, it’s just not a replacement for the library of ink and paper.”

“You know how Occupy Chicago is talking about the 1% versus the 99%? Well, where the library is concerned, there’s only the 100%. Everyone is impacted.”

“I’ve caught stupidity. And he cured me.”

“We have the internet. We don’t need a library at all.”

All the time, you see, the council had been longing to improve the library service, and the only thing standing in the way was–the libraries”

But the libraries at the anti-Wall Street protests are not quite as novel as they first appear. They have a tradition going back the better part of two centuries. In a recent article, Matthew Battles, the author of Libraries: An Unquiet History (Norton, 2004), noted the similarity to the reading rooms that served the egalitarian Chartist movement in Britain.

Librarians and artists have an affinity for one another, perhaps because we’re both outlaws. We seek understanding rather than agreement. We are open to greater worlds than the day to day world we occupy. We are often left to stand alone from the first, to make our way toward conscience and morality at ages far younger than the average person. We seek solitude, in order to hear the thoughts in our heads—and to make room for the hope in our hearts.

"Does anyone here read?"

"Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up. A book brings the project inside school buildings. When a gay kid goes to his school library and this book is there, it's a message to him that he's accepted."

BOOKS. Keep them. Yes, e-readers are amazing, and yes, they will probably become a more dominant reading platform over time, but consider this about a book: It has a terrific, high-resolution display. It is pretty durable; you could get it a little wet and all would not be lost. It has tremendous battery life. It is often inexpensive enough that, if you misplaced it, you would not be too upset. You can even borrow them free at sites called libraries.

At the same time, the HarperCollins model now further calls into question just what it is that libraries do for what class of people and why so much of what they offer is free.  This question only used to come up when libraries purchased significant collections of Hollywood VHS tapes and major-label music CDs, but very few people would ask the same question about books, which were seen even by skeptics and grouches as core mission materials, grandfathered in.

“They’d probably be glad we’re still reading in this busy world.”

“I know the trend is to go towards e-books, which is great when you’re traveling, but when I sit in my library, I get comfort from books. Stores like Borders are comfortable—they’re user friendly, they have great titles. Even though shopping online is great, there’s nothing like shopping in a store with walls and paper.”

“The gap shows up in their obsessive use of social media. University hallways teem with cell phones; library windows glow with Facebook pages as students update legions of ‘friends’ about the latest party or Guitar Hero conquest.”

“As alluring as the river, the Dixon Public Library beckoned with countless volumes of adventure and derring-do.”

Anderson: “Probably misses her glasses because she’s a librarian.”

Henson: “That’s an ugly stereotype, John. Not all librarians wear glasses. Some wear contacts!”

One problem is obvious: the Vat's collection, which has been accreting since the mid-fourteen-hundreds, is so vast that even the people who run it haven't always known what they're sitting on top of.

“What we’ve got to do is create a stable environment. Right now, it’s on the fast road to falling apart.”

People don't care about books [or other packaging]. They care about ideas.

With too much unmediated information to choose from, people select what they wish to believe. These days a wild rumor in an e-mail from your distant cousin can trump The New York Times.

The last night of my father's life, I sat up late in hospice with him. He hadn't responded to us in almost two days, and I had run out of ways to say goodbye so I was reading the book I had shoved in my purse on the way to the airport — a copy of Agatha Christie's "N or M ?" But in between the words, the silence was just too full of what was going to happen next. So I read aloud, to my dying father, from a yellow-paged, dog-earred paperback that he had given me in a big red box one long ago Christmas.

With her makeover and the glasses, she also had the right look--one that said "hot librarian," perfect for a fake authority figure.

My paean of praise for the physical library included some of the familiar lines....You go also for the people, the other readers, and the librarians. And you go for the sheer pleasure of having space and quiet to think—not to mention the pleasures of transgression. And on this topic I had a little nostalgic reflection on all the things we used to do in libraries . . . eat, drink, smoke substances legal and illegal, have sex. I was tempted to ask for a show of hands from those who had ever made love in a library bookstack, a bibliophile’s Mile High club, but thought embarrassment might produce a misleadingly low score.

You see, as the CEO of Hartford (Conn.) Public Library, I have one of the best jobs in America, because I am participating in creating a sustainable 21st-century urban public library, one of the last remaining truly democratic institutions in our nation. And the quintessential public option. Who could ask for more?

The Supreme Court opens its new term Monday, and the justices will be quickly confronted with a potentially momentous question: Are offensive and hurtful words always protected as free speech, even when the speaker and the target are private people, not public figures?

I’ve learned that different [interview] questions work for different jobs. The manager of my picture-framing business, for example, hires people to do ‘pick-ups’—they retrieve finished framed pictures from a room full of racks for customers. She routinely asks interviewees if they have ever thought about becoming a librarian; those who say they have thought about it tend to do the job best and to stay around the longest.

"Probably no other group has fought harder against censorship or government snooping into citizens reading habits — or received less public credit for it — than librarians and the American Library Association. This is true, quiet patriotism — standing up for the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, often at the risk of their jobs. They are walking the walk, not just talking the talk. Librarians are high on my list of American heroines and heroes."

The best ally in the struggle against violent Islamism is moderate Islam. The unfounded attacks on the backers of Park51 and others, along with such sideshows as a pastor calling for the burning of Korans, give substance to the Al Qaeda argument that the U.S. is waging a war against Islam, rather than against the terrorists' misshapen effigy of the religion. Those stirring the pot in this debate are casting a spell that is far more dangerous than they may imagine.

Keeping libraries open, giving access to all children to all books is vital to our nation's sovereignty.

I’m starting to understand what my grandmother must feel when she heads to the library once a week to dutifully check the email account my uncle created for her. . . . I never thought my lack of interest in e-readers made me particularly unique—until recently, when Consumer Reports and national headlines started implying I was actually in a freakish minority. . . . Their bottom line was the same: Of course you need to buy an e-reader. What are you, a Mennonite?

Print is dead. Everybody says so. I checked it out and it’s true. Print is dead. I saw that on the internet.

Look, I would suggest you go from here directly to the library. Get a copy of the Bill of Rights and you’ll realize that everybody has a right to say what they want to say.

It is my identity as reader that shaped the type of writer that I am. And I owe that to an old Ford bookmobile, a summertime pleasure that changed the way I see the world. Rather than feeling alone and isolated in turmoil-ridden Mississippi, a cool, air-conditioned library on wheels connected me to a world beyond the limits of where I grew up. In my life, that has made all the difference.

There is nothing like a banned book to turn a teenager into a devoted reader.

This is an argument about the future—and whether this country will have one. The fact is, it cannot in a world where information is currency and American kids are broke.

I don't know how to read anymore. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.

The FCC and its supporters seem to think Americans desperately need government assistance to protect themselves and their children against an onslaught of filth.

“The people who welcome us to the library are idealists who believe that accurate information leads to good decisions and that exposure to the intellectual riches of civilization leads to a better world. The next Abraham Lincoln could be sitting in their library, teaching himself all he needs to know to save the country. While they help us get online, employed and informed, librarians don’t try to sell us anything. Nor do they turn around and broadcast our problems, send us spam, or keep a record of our interests and needs, because no matter how savvy this profession is at navigating the online world, it clings to that old-fashioned value, privacy. (A profession dedicated to privacy in charge of our public computers? That’s brilliant.) They represent the best civic value out there, an army of resourceful workers that can help us compete in the world.”

I loved the books but I needed the librarians.

This is how the world works: The lonely striver with bad hair and serious overbite who is scratching out her thoughts in the Omaha Public Library is facing a wall of sheer granite a thousand feet high and luckily for her she doesn't know it now but someday she will and my heart goes out to her.

Though I've spoken frequently during the 23 years since publishing my first book, I can honestly say that I've never felt better about a presentation . . . I'm sure my audience of forward-thinking, eco-friendly librarians played a part.

You drive for miles across a godforsaken Midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains when--like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen--there appears . . . a library!

It is pure hullabaloo, millions in advertising canceling itself out by sheeer overload, and one block away is beautiful Bryant Park and the serene reading rooms of the New York Public Library, where, for all you know, the scholarly gentleman across the table from you may be studying the art of explosives. It's a free country.

"The only time I’ve ever found a library fun was in the opening scene of Ghostbusters."

If you sit in the library after school, text-messaging to people across the room ("Hey, whassup? RUOK?:-) L8R), you've successfully eliminated 98% of the nuance of face-to-face dialogue, the delicious nuance and also the awkward stuff, like when you send a big textual hug ("((H))") to people you've never actually put your arms around--you've skipped some essential steps in gaining intimacy.

I monitor my spending: I don't travel much, my wardrobe is antiquated, and my library card has seen lots of action!"

SHHH! Keith Richards, the grizzled veteran of rock’n’roll excess, has confessed to a secret longing: to be a librarian.

All in all, the most ecologically virtuous way to read a book starts by walking to your local library.

There are no good guys in [Running with Scissors]. ’ said Jill Driver, outlining the Riverview High School panel’s concerns. ‘So we felt there was no reason to keep the book.’ ‘That’s exactly why we wanted to keep the book,’ said Paula Marczynski from Robinson High.

The nurse-midwives of literacy, public librarians are already loaning e-readers; a library that got 10 as gifts reported that within a half hour they had all been checked out.

It’s all too appropriate that our blue-haired librarian is wearing a pink scarf. Thanks for destroying everything that’s good in the world with your terrible library, Fidel Trotsky-Tsung!

We often forget that in totalitarian dictatorships, where media is tightly controlled, simply publishing a non–government approved book is an act of sedition.  . . . Instead of trying to protect the citizenry from these ideas, it is the librarian's duty to protect our resources from the machinations of paternalistic meddlers.

I just got back from the library; I reserved a cubicle for the semester.

I spent my entire childhood at the library!

Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete.

Heaven bless the long-suffering school librarians: the library was the one place I enjoyed in school.... It's a shame that the football team got a bigger budget than the Library.

Millennials are the first truly digital generation. Three quarters have created a profile on Facebook or some other social-networking site. Only half of Gen Xers and 30% of boomers have done so.

His goal was to make it not seem as competitive.

That these books are available for children--for a child like me--all these books!--leaves me dazed, dazzled.

I actually consider this library as a luxury, because you do not need it to live. People need to realize—especially in these economic times we're in right now—if you don't pay, you can't play.

I educated myself. I went to the library—the books are free.

“The library had everything I wanted: a bathroom, a Toronto telephone book, all the morning’s newspapers, warmth, and friendly staff. Frequently in this space we critique the things the City of Toronto does wrong, so I just want to take a second to praise something that this city does right: Maintain 99 branches of the library, the biggest borrowing library system on the continent. It’s a beautiful thing.”

“[Having this library card is] like you’re carrying a postcard in your wallet every day."

Sometime after that first miserable try, I did what I should have done to begin with. I went to the library and pulled out a few articles....

The library has the advantage simply for the reason their catalogs were organized by live human beings, and not some computer algorithm that guessed and failed—again. And again. And again.

I see the web and everything it stands for as being an immense improvement over our old arrangements. It’s absurd to sit around sentimentalizing about the decline of the book in the face of the kind of knowledge that the web now gives us, and the research it allows us to do.

We think of libraries as houses for books, but they’re so much more. They are full of discovery and adventure and beauty and delight. For me they’re full of memories. I dream of calm spaces and big chairs, and a time in the future, perhaps, when I can stand by my own daughter as she picks through the shelves, as my mother did for me. I will take her there not because I couldn’t go when I was a child, but because I could.

I envision librarians atop barricades, protecting our civil liberties, guarding our rights to privay, and unbanning books.

No other civilization, ever, has had anything comparable to our [U.S.] public library system.

Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money . . . . I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

Is screen the new paper? Will publishing houses go the way of the old-fashioned record store? Is digital delivery the new bookstore? Is Google the new library? Is the author the new musician, playing directly to the audience? Is the audience the  new author?

As for the intellectual property, I try not to get too worked up about it. . . . I like to get a little bit of perspective on it by remembering that back before the internet came along, we had a very special term for the people who buy a single copy of a book and then allow all their friends to read it for free. We called them librarians.

Look, if you want a safe job, work in a library.

I was studying to be a librarian . . . The next thing we knew, we were running into Jamie Foxx on talk shows.