Our Main Purpose

From Chapter 3 “Human Rights, Democracy and Librarians” by Kathleen de la Pena McCook & Katharine Phenix in The Portable MLIS:

If librarians don’t keep touching base, looking back, remembering the big picture of our main purpose, which is to keep information freely flowing, take tax dollars, and give our communities (in the broadest sense) what they want and what they need, we will lose it all. We will overdue fine our public until they don’t dare come in, buy books the loudest patrons clamor for until we have created a library just for the few and the loudest. We will purchase the titles vendors tell us to(who are in turn told what to publish by their corporate HQs), accept only the Web sites our corporate controlled filters filter and hire the library staff that gets along with us.

This passage, which I read aloud in my class last night as we closed, knocks me out. Well said. Poetry.