Letters

As a public librarian for more than 45 years, I have struggled with wringing sufficient funds from my municipality, along with a pitiful pro-rated stipend from my province, to keep my small-town library operational. Not once throughout my career did we ever get a penny of support from our federal government [“Institutions React to Federal Cuts to Institute of Museum and Library Services,” 27east.com, April 3].

After I retired, I do believe some of my staff, working in collaboration with librarians across Canada, may have been given stipends to further develop the groundbreaking and inexpensive software they created, enabling them to help other local and regional networks in order to share resources.

We also had provincial and national library associations that, as far as I know, were sustained only by the membership fees.

The greatest boons to developing information/library professionalism have been the few universities from Atlantic Canada to the Pacific Coast who have invested in their library faculties, turning those faculties into learning hubs for archivists, librarians, museum administrators and other institutions charged with the management of information.

This revolution, three decades in the making, pushed by handfuls of dedicated and visionary people suddenly liberated by computers and internet capability, is still struggling to make the internet a useful, reliable, enabling instrument of education, of sharing knowledge, of academic and scientific rigor.

Many people — profit-driven plutocrats, politicians and entrepreneurs — have far different uses for the internet, blinded as they are by their paltry ideas.

Which in no way alters the credit due to those who labored in the trenches, writing code and always pushing for a network representing integrity. It may take decades to shunt the profiteers into their own ignoble channels to clear the way for the true creatives, the thinkers, the helpers, the dreamers, the valuable people on whom this planet depends, to preserve life on Earth.

True to the greed of the great party of destruction, Donald Trump and his sad satraps are seeking avidly to destroy those who support and preserve knowledge, who try to make it accessible to those striving to self-educate, to sustain democracy.

What will he do next? Close the Library of Congress? Burn it down like the great library of Alexandria?

Far too often dictators and tyrants try to prolong their imperial rule by erasing all memory/knowledge of the civilization preceding them. Thus, by fits and starts, humanity loses all contact with its own history, having to reinvent the wheel many times over.

Betsy Cornwell

Shelter Island