“The public library is one of the great strongholds of democracy. Who doesn’t love a library? It is a place you can go in any town and discover the world.”*
My grandmother was a librarian.
She didn’t have a degree in Library Science, and at the end of her career, those who did had been hired and placed in supervisory positions over her. The final days of her working life (at the age of 89, by the way) were spent entering new acquisitions and affixing the cards to them in the back room of the headquarters branch of the county library system for which she was the earliest employee. Along the way, she had run a library on a Naval base, opened the first library in Clay County, FL, shelved countless books, traveled miles of country road in a bookmobile, shushed I don’t know how many children, and provided me with most of the books that are in my personal library today.
She didn’t have a degree or, in the end, the official title, but my grandmother was a librarian.
Today’s Friday Find is devoted to something about which I suspect she never knew, even though it began nearly 20 years before her death, but of which I know–know–she would have heartily approved.
Not much of a find, you say, since it’s been around since 1971?
Okay. But how many of you have really looked at it? How many of you have really thought about what it means?
For those of you who haven’t heard of Project Gutenberg, it’s a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works–i.e., books. As of July 2012, there were over 40,000 items in its collection with about fifty new eBooks being added every week. (More history here.)
All of the works are available on the Project Gutenberg website for reading and/or download, usually in multiple formats. Most are in English, although they do have some works in other languages. They are all, also, all free to users in the United States where their copyrights have expired. International users should check the laws of their own country before downloading.
The project is named after Johannes Gutenberg, who invented movable type and launched a revolution in 1439 by making knowledge and learning available to the masses.
That’s what a library does, and the heritage that Project Gutenberg, as the next logical extension of the library system, carries forward.
It’s been said, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Show him how to catch a fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
I say: Give people a library and you not only show them how to catch fish but how to clean it, cook it, sell it, paint a picture of it, mount it, raise it and do seventy million other things having nothing to do with fish!
A library should be the last funding cut in a free society.
Meanwhile. . .Project Gutenberg! Discover the world.
* Pat MacEnulty
