How the World Sees Us
A collection of quotations from the media about libraries, librarians, and librarianship. Upload a quotation.
I don’t understand why people would work so intensely in a noisy environment. My mother said people work best in a quiet place, free of distractions. One day I told a table of industrious students, ‘I have to ask you not to use your computers so that others can sit. I pointed to a big sign that said the same thing. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said brightly, ‘We have talked to people at MIT and they have created something they call a library.’ All the other customers laughed—but none of the people who were working.
—GUS RANCATORE, co-founder of the coffee house Toscanini’s in Cambridge Massachusetts, on studious customers who overstay their welcome, “Those Dastardly Coffee Campers,” Atlantic, Sept. 1, 2010.
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Print is dead. Everybody says so. I checked it out and it’s true. Print is dead. I saw that on the internet.
—“Native Son” columnist Carl Nolte, on the irony of predictions about the death throes of print even as library circulation and brick-and-mortar bookstore sales rise in San Francisco, San Francisco Chronicle, August 15, 2010.
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What worries [me] is that a load of shit has been talked about digitization as being the new Gutenberg, but that fact is that the Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitization is taking books off shelves. If you start taking books off shelves, then you are only going to find what you are looking for—which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.
Jeanette Winterson, expressing her dismay at the 25th-anniversary celebration in Edinburgh of the publication of her novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit that her childhood library’s DVD collection is growing at the expense of its book collection, “New Libraries Will Deny Children Access to Classics, Fears Winterson,” Glasgow (Scotland) Herald, August 17, 2010.
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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.
—New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, responding to a journalist asking why he supports the construction of an Islamic center several blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan, “The Mayor, the Mosque, and Public Response,” New York Times: City Room Blog, August 18, 2010.
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The nonfiction and reference section has an answer center with dedicated phone lines and live-chat librarians.
Reporter Robert Duffer, on how the Arlington Heights (Ill.) Public Library is “adapting to the changing needs of its community,” Chicago Tribune, August 7, 2010.
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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.
—W. Ralph Eubanks, director of publishing at the Library of Congress, “Escaping the Summer Heat in a Bookmobile,” National Public Radio, August 6, 2010.
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Walking to the library is still the most ecofriendly way to read.
“Books vs E-Books: Does One Have to Win?” Newsweek, August 9,2010.
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There is nothing like a banned book to turn a teenager into a devoted reader.
Malcolm Jones on the “lucky” adolescents who live in a school district that has banned Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Newsweek, August 9, 2010.
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