20100520.1700

Below is the text of a letter I sent to my city representative concerning the looming cuts to New York Public Library funding.

Access to information and the ablility to communicate is a necessity if the people of New York City are to exercise the rights to free speech and association guaranteed them by the United States Constitution and the federal, state, and local laws that support it. The New York Public Library, in all of its many local branches, provides that access to a great many of the residents of the city and its surrounding metroplex. And it does much, much more.

For me, it permits access to scholarly materials that are difficult, if not impossible, to come by in other venues. I work in Arthurian literature, and copies of the oldest editions of the texts are not exactly common; it is through the New York Public Library that I can examine them. And without such examination, my decade of work towards earning a PhD would be forcibly ended and the years spent in vain.

I am not the only one in such a situation. New York is not exactly short on colleges, and every student at every one of those colleges--the students who will become the workforce of the city in the future, who will grow into those who operate the many services to make the city as great as it is--profits from having access to the materials of the Library, either in themselves or vicariously through those who teach them.

And aside from those of us engaged in scholarship in various fields, the Library's programs for children, the disadvantaged, and many others offer to many of the members of those groups the only or dominant hope of self-improvement that they have. Cutting funds to the Library will affect them most deeply, denying to them the opoprtunity to fully engage with the culture of New York and denying to the city the talents and skills that they would otherwise be able to develop.

I understand that the current economic situation is strenuous. I understand that there are sacrifices to be made. But I also understand that the library is the embodiment of the knowledge, culture, and perhaps the very soul of the city and its people, and to take away its support demeans us all.