The Pennsylvania legislature has passed a bill that funds the Philadelphia Free Library to stay open. News on their blog.

I’m glad but frankly still really disturbed by the whole thing.

Philadelphia has announced that they are closing all branches of the Philadelphia Free Library. I thought it must be some kind of a prank when I first read the news, because of the massiveness of the closure – all branches, not just reduced hours, not just some locations. Cities, counties, and states are in such huge trouble from the financial crisis, despite the tentative recovery, that Philadelphia’s closure will probably be the first of quite a few big closures.

It’s a disaster that may end up being a sad turning point in American library history, I am afraid.

CLOSED EPA LIBRARIES TO RETURN IN LAVATORY-SIZED SPACES; Political Appointee Asserts Control over All Libraries, Repeals 30-Year-Old Manual

“Ordered by Congress to re-open its shuttered libraries, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is grudgingly allocating only minimal space and resources, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).”…

Thanks to Jonathan Betz-Zall for sending this info to the ALA Council list.

I have not seen this and make no endorsement:

Arthur and Esther, A Dark Comedy about Libraries, Lakes, and Lost Love…

I will simply refer you to the ALA blog District Dispatch and let you read it there…

This isn’t an analysis of a military action after the fact, as with last July’s reports of the destruction of a public documents archive in Nablus.

What is happening now is that Israeli authorities have issued a warrant to the owner of the building housing an important Palestinian library in Jerusalem, ordering him to evacuate the building so that it can be demolished to make way for the construction of a train station. The Al-Ansari Library on Saint George St. is one of the most important libraries in Jerusalem, and its destruction would mean a great blow to the cultural survival of the Palestinian people.

Thanks to Tom Twiss for sharing this news with the SRRT list.

Arch Conservative Bush advisor Grover Norquist has been pushing the “Starve the Beast” strategy for a long time. This is the strategy that says run up a huge budget debt and then a future Congress will be unable to support government spending. The “War on Terror” is obviously the great implementation of the starve the beast strategy.

So as the “beast” is starved, little by little, services that exist for the public good die off.

That’s the way to think about the threatened closure of the Savanna River Ecology Laboratory and closures of many other facilities, including federal libraries. In this particular situation, it has to do with the Department of Energy running out of money, and the guidance of Bush appointees on how to use what is left.

I hate to be pessimistic, but considering everything, what we are up against now, in terms of the survival of librarianship as an institution for the public good, seems overwhelming.

Bernadine Abbott Hoduski shared this information with ALA Council today…

The ALA Washington Office and ALA Council’s Committee on Legislation have started a wiki on federal libraries. The wiki says:

The purpose of this wiki is to share and track information on federal library threats, re-organizations, and closings. Based on discussions with members, the main focus is to facilitate reporting of threats or closings that will enable users to make comments about that specific library’s situation.

Not much is there yet, but it may turn out to be a very important resource for protecting these important information resources.

I’ve been tardy in blogging this…

The Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service has issued a report on the EPA library closures. That link goes to a PDF of the document hosted by the Federation of American Scientists.

Thanks to ALA’s Don Wood for distributing this info.

As you may have noticed throughout the EPA library closure situation, the government’s big justification for closing the libraries has been that it is a digital age, meaning that physical libraries have lost their relevance. We know that that is hardly true, but aside from that, shouldn’t this argument mean that we will see EPA library services shifting to the web?

The opposite is what’s actually happening. A news release from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says that the EPA library is purging electronic records and reports and making them unavailable from the EPA library website, as a part of the library closure process.

This is proof that what is really going on is not a shift to the digital era but a large scale loss of access to important environmental information.

ALA Council’s Bernadine Abbott Hoduski, who has been Council’s leader on the EPA library closure issue, has sent us this article from Yubanet, which begins:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is frantically dispersing its library collections to preempt Congressional intervention, according to internal emails released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Contrary to promises by EPA Deputy Administrator Marcus Peacock that all of the former library materials will be made available electronically, vast troves of unique technical reports and analyses will remain indefinitely inaccessible.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility have announced that the EPA has begun the process of closing its libraries, in advance of Congress’s decisions on Bush’s budget recommendations. See the news release. This is very bad news.

Libraries in the UK have been in a state of crisis for the last decade or more far beyond the degree of troubles we’ve seen in the U.S. Library use is way down and so are budgets, and the cutbacks in hours and the closures of branches have been much worse than here. Part of the reason is the stronger tradition of public library service in the U.S.; that is, public libraries are more integrated into normal social life in the U.S. than in the U.K. Librarians in the U.K. are responding to the crisis in interesting ways, and we can probably learn how to deal with some of our own library issues a little better by observing them deal with theirs. So, to that end, here’s a link to a U.K. campaign to promote libraries to the public, called, “Love Libraries”.

Issue 154/155 of the SRRT Newsletter is just published. It has a report from the Midwinter meeting, a message from the Coordinator, updates on Task Force and member activities, and a feature article by Fred Stoss on the situation facing the EPA Library Network.

Fred Stoss of the SRRT Task Force on the Environment has an editorial in the Spring 2006 issue of Electronic Green Journal on the threatened defunding of the EPA National Library Network. It’s an informative article with a useful webliography at the end.