Henrietta Hay's Column

The Local Information Store contains almost everything you ever knew but have forgotten, most of the stuff you wanted to knows but never got around to finding out, most of the stuff you have no idea exists, and the answers to most of the questions you are asking right now.

It also contains the material for hours and days and years of entertainment. All of this costs you, on a nationwide average, $18.73 a year in taxes, which is a lot less than the price of one hard back book. It is perhaps the best bargain left in this highly commercialized country. It is also known as the Public Library.

This is National Library Week, a good time to stop in with a kind word for our friendly, local librarians.

The urge to record events and preserve records is not a new one. The earliest known library was a collection of clay tablets in Babylonia in the 21st century BC. Thousands of inscribed tablets have been found in that region, recording such items as law, commercial transactions and poetry. Later the Egyptians discovered that you could write on papyrus and eventually paper came into use. That does make modern libraries a bit less bulky. 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. But whether ancient or modern, libraries protect and defend the principle of intellectual freedom, the freedom of thought -- everybody's thought. They are based on the thesis that dialog is always possible -- political, social, religious -- dialog between past and present, old and young, sophisticated and ingénue, professional and amateur.

Libraries make democracy work. They provide the information that promotes civil debate and fosters good citizenship. The public library is the only institution in American society whose purpose is to guard against the tyrannies of ignorance and conformity. Without libraries true democracy cannot exist.

There is a growing income inequity in America, with the gap between rich and poor becoming wider each year. Libraries do not require a means test. They are there for everybody. By making their resources available to entire communities, libraries help to level the playing field.

It's easy to wax poetic over the cultural and entertainment value of libraries, but they have very practical aspects, too. Gallo Wines, I Can't Believe It's Yogurt, Metromedia would seem to have little in common. But libraries made millionaires out the grateful owners of each of these companies by providing crucial start-up information when they were still struggling wannabes.

Libraries nourish creativity. They are repositories, not only of books, but of images, of objects, of ideas. Politicians, scientists, teachers need to discover new ways of looking at the problems that confront them. For a society that wants to adapt and evolve the library is a necessity.

The electronic information explosion will change libraries in ways we can only imagine. Already we can call up information from our home computers, but the public library with all its services is still the Local Information Store. And books are far from obsolete. I would rather curl up in bed with a good mystery printed on paper than either a clay tablet or a computer.

We live in an age of divisiveness. Because libraries have information on just about everything, including both sides of controversial subjects, it sometimes looks as though they are taking sides on an issue. It is this inclusive approach that can get them in trouble with people who don't understand that a library does not take sides. A library is neutral. A library is for everyone. U. S. Poet Laureate, Rita Dove, recently said, speaking to the American Library Association, "You are meant to be the gatekeepers of possibility, not the watchdogs of the status quo."

Locked into the library classification system exist rebels and revolutionaries, poets and crackpots, philosophers and extremists, statesmen and schemers, theologians and atheists, paupers, presidents and kings, women and men of all races and colors -- and their ideas are clamoring to get out.

The local Information Store - after 4000 years still the best bargain around.