Yay Libraries!

Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message. Wrong. The message is the message and it has been since the beginning of time. It's the medium that has changed.

This is National Library Week, a good time to think about the message and the almost unbelievable change in the medium.

My favorite Information Store is still the best buy in town. You know it as the Mesa County Public Library. It has been serving our community for over a hundred years and is looking forward to another hundred. There is a long history behind it.

The urge to record events and preserve records is not a new one.

It started with the cave men. While the women were busy trying to cook dinosaur meat over the newly invented fire, the guys were chipping out pictures of themselves and their activities on the walls of the cave.

The earliest known library was a collection of clay tablets in Babylonia in the 21st century B. C. Thousands of inscribed tablets have been found in that region, recording such items as law, commercial transactions and even poetry.

I can't resist repeating the story of my favorite ancient library, that of the Persian vizier Abdul Kasem Ismael in the first millenium A. D. He traveled with 400 camels who carried his 117,000 volume library everywhere he went. The animals were trained to walk in an order that ensured the manuscripts were alphabetically arranged.

Alexander the Great had a great dream in the 5th century B. C. -- that of unifying the world. It sparked the idea of constructing a great library which would gather the cultures and civilizations of the whole world. Its location was Alexandria, Egypt, at the crossroads of the three continents of Asia, Africa and Europe. His enemies didn't think much of his dream, and the library was burned to the ground by marauding armies over the years.

Later the Egyptians discovered that you could write on papyrus, and eventually paper came into use. This does make modern libraries a bit less bulky, although shelvers are not completely out of danger. One day one of them reached for a copy of Canterbury Tales and got hit by a flying Chaucer.

Then came Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century and invented movable type. The BOOK was born.

The first public library in the United States was opened in Salisbury Connecticut in 1803 with a gift of 150 books from a resident of the town.

The concept of the free public library today is a far cry from a collection of clay tablets in Babylon. Andrew Carnegie wrote, "There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration." He donated money for 2800 libraries in this country, including the first library building in Grand Junction back in 1903.

Today there is another medium for the message -- the Internet, the World Wide Web. We now have at our fingertips a library that is many times the size of the largest libraries the world has ever known. Public libraries all over the world immediately welcomed this new information machine, knowing how much it could improve their service to the public.

The medium has gone from caves to cyberspace. Abdul Kasem Ismail had it easy. He only had 400 camels and 117,000 volumes to worry about. Our librarians today have to handle everything from Mother Goose to the World Wide Web and make the information available to us.

But one thing I think we can predict. No matter how human knowledge is stored-- in books or cyberspace -- people will come together in a place called a Library. The library is often referred to as the heart of the community. As social beings we want not only to access information, but to be with others engaged in doing the same thing.

Your library -- books and much more. Let's celebrate Library Week.