It seems the BC Legislature library “is closing down indefinitely for a seismic upgrade, and there is widespread concern it won’t reopen,” according to the Victoria Times Colonist. The article explains that layoffs are expected but that jobs will be found for the folks who are in fact laid off — doesn’t sound like all 29 staff members are expected to come back to the new “upgraded” library…
It seems a bit shortsighted to close down a library of parliament. It’s parliament, not a corporation. MLAs need access to all the information that a parliamentary library provides, and the assumption that all relevant information is available online is made by those who don’t work in libraries or use them enough. Such assumptions undermine what we vote for: representatives who we count on to inform themselves adequately and then make decisions on our behalf. Hard to be informed without information, methinks.
Mind you, this is the same government that outsourced the management of British Columbians’ medical records to a Canadian subsidiary of an American corporation (Maximus, Inc.) and so made personal health information subject to the US PATRIOT Act. So I suppose this new lapse in information-handling judgement is hardly a surprise.
Gordon Campbell, the BC premier, would love to hear from you: premier *at* gov.bc.ca. Tell him, please, that people need information to make good decisions, and if librarians aren’t there to sift through the crap, MLAs are going to be wasting a heckuva lot of time either searching or missing the important bits. A search engine has never been a substitute for a librarian. Properly-funded parliamentary libraries are worth every penny they cost to run. And yes, they should be given seismic upgrades, but not if that upgrade is like turning a garden salad into a ceasar and then leaving the whole platter in the kitchen until closing. Bad metaphor? Sorry.
-SIO