12.03.2004

The Library As a Social and Democratic Force

What a difference 70 or so years can make. Consider this argument on behalf of public libraries made in 1936 by Frank Graham of the University of North Carolina:

"We might consider the German youth who went to the British Museum Library, gathered the facts of the industrial history of England, and packed them away with their dynamic power into his book, Das Kapital, which became the source of the socialist movement of the nineteenth century and the foundation of the Soviet Republics of this century."
Bulletin of the American Library Association (December 1936).
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