OPINION: Playing a role

Institutions also fill roles, though roles in our community and in our culture — and as our newly expanded and renovated library gets ready for its debut, I have that fact very much in mind. I drive by it at dusk just to admire the way its lovely arched windows and brightly painted walls glow in the gathering darkness. What will it be to us, this new/old library, this latest rendition of a building whose original cornerstone was laid in 1968?

I was fascinated to see, when I traveled around Europe in the 1960s, that institutions had different roles in different countries. In Spain, I searched in vain for a public telephone until someone took me to the nearest post office, where I saw whole rows of pay phones. I was astonished! But of course it made sense: post offices are all about communication. I sometimes wonder whether those pay phones, or most of them, have now been replaced by computers.

The role of the library in America’s communities is a hot topic these days. The word ‘library’ means, literally, ‘place of books,’ but people seem to think that books might disappear— replaced by Kindles, Nooks, computers, or whatever.

The problem of replacing books with gizmos, though, is the way the technology keeps changing. I have 33 rpm vinyl records that I can no longer play, because they quit making the needles for my turntable. I also have “floppy disks” that no computer today can accept — so all the writing I stored on them was lost to me when my dinosaur computer crashed. But I can still read the books from my grandmother’s house that were published at the turn of the last century. And thanks to my Aunt Emily, I have the 1932 edition of the Methodist Hymnal, so my sister can sit down at the piano and play hymns that are no longer included in the current hymnal — beautiful old songs that I love and would hate to lose.

Some of today’s library professionals talk about shelf space for books as though it were real estate. They advocate “weeding out” any book that hasn’t been checked-out in the last five years. Sounds fine, until you find yourself getting rid of “The Sun Also Rises,” or — yes, it’s true — “Gone with the Wind.” But how else can we have room for plenty of copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey?”

The way our beautiful old/new library meets this and other challenges of life today will be up to you, because it’s your library. It opens on January 23, by the way, and I’ll be waiting outside the door at 9:59 a.m. See you there!

Susan Harper is retired, lives in Commerce and volunteers with the Commerce Public Library and the Jackson County Literacy Program.

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