Opinion Column

The price of libraries can not just be measured by dollars and cents 0

By Barry Kerton, Whitecourt Star

 I like books – real books, ones you can actually hold in your hand. Yet, books are by almost any measure, more impractical than the new digital ebook versions. 

Physical books are heavier, take up more room and are more expensive to make and purchase, but there is something to be said about having a book in your hand that the digital book can not duplicate.

That is why I have always thought books, libraries and yes, even newspapers, will continue on for generations to come.

Apparently the Federal government does not have the same affinity for books. By 2015, Fisheries and Oceans will be closing down seven of its 11 scientific libraries in an effort save more than $443,000 by consolidating the collections into the remaining four libraries.

It is a fate that is being shared by a number of government department libraries. The Fisheries and Oceans’ libraries are just one of the 14 government departments, including Health Canada and Environment Canada, which are shutting down their physical libraries in an effort to digitize and consolidate collections into closed book vaults.

And that is one of the arguments Gail Shea, Fisheries and Oceans Minister, is making. Shea says any material that is copyrighted has been digitized and the rest of the collections are in the process of being converted to an electronic version.

Unfortunately, the department does not have an accurate way of determining what and what has not been digitalized.

In a response to Lawrence MacAulay’s, a Liberal MP, inquiry of what was going to happen to the collections after libraries closed, Fisheries and Oceans said, “The Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ systems do not enable us to determine the number of items digitized by location and collection.”

What we do know is the department has disposed of in one way or another about 84,000 books or publications. 

There is some evidence that many of these books may have been simply thrown out. According to documents, the federal government has spent $22,816.17 discarding material from just four of the seven libraries.

In an effort to make sure some of its library materials did not suffer the same fate, some Health Canada (HC) scientists have taken upon themselves to start hiding materials in colleagues’ basements.

In a CBC interview, Dr. Rudi Mueller, a retired HC pathologist, said that before the library closed their main research library the government made it difficult for scientists to use thus lowering the amount the library was used, helping the government justify its closure.

He said the inter-library loan functions were outsourced to a private company called Infotrieve. Many HC scientists complained that accessing information through the inter-library loan program was expensive and time consuming with materials often arriving late. 

“If you want to justify closing a library, you make access difficult and then you say it is hardly used.” 

Even if all the material in every library could be digitized overnight having the hard copy available offers intangible a digital copy can’t duplicate.

Recently, I heard a Fisheries and Oceans scientist say that it is when he is not specifically looking for something when he has had his best break throughs. He was just paging through a book when he spotted something that caught his attention. How can a government put a price on that?

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