goblin cartoons

As I leave 2005 behind in a cloud of candy-colored dust, I thought–in the spirit of being reflective–I would repost an entry from my other blog about one important reason why I am a librarian.

So, here ’tis:

* * *

I’ve been interested in copyright and intellectual property issues for a while now, but I’ve become increasingly interested and concerned with them. Julie has been half-teasing me lately about going to law school. “Are you sure you don’t want to study the law on this formally?” she asks. “You could become a lawyer and really fight for this.”

Well, yeah, I could–except I wouldn’t make it through my first semester of law school. But there’s a bigger reason why I feel I’m going down the right path. Lawyers may fight for a free culture, but there are plenty of lawyers fighting against it, on behalf of controlling corporations and oligarchical governments. Librarians? They embody free culture. Libraries are all about universal access and free information. That is the life I want to lead.

And now, I quote from Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Anarchist in the Library:

Librarians should be our heroes. The library is not just functionally important to communities all over the world; it embodies Enlightenment values in the best sense. A library is a temple devoted to the antielitist notion that knowledge should be cheap if not free–doors should be open.

That is why I want to be a librarian.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 31st, 2005 at 9:34 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.