Libraries are Dead.

Why on earth in this age of the internet, Google, Kindles etc do we need libraries and librarians? They’re fusty and musty and only fit for the crusty trying to keep warm. On an iPad you can see everything you ever dreamt of and rotate it with a flick of your finger. This surely is the future of our information rich society. Then I read the information rich Guardian Guide. Page 1 took a satirical look at a Nescafe ad alluding to the need for coffee after a night of undergraduate three-summing. After briefly considering applying for yet another degree course having the requisite coffee already in the cupboard I considered the ‘information’ I was taking onboard. Yes it was words and sentences but it was illusory allusion not information. Being 67 going on 68 it probably wouldn’t work in my case. So how much of our burgeoning barrage of information is in fact information? Could it be our meandering clicks across the internet is only providing us with a torrent of misleading unstructured gossip?  Could it be we plaster it onto our brain cells in some meaningless fashion so we end up in a spin of fact-less emotional and prejudicial ignorance? Could it be the manipulative arts of our marketing industry have changed the fundamental colour of what we consider is information? Maybe now more than ever we need a calm reflective place where what we receive is structured to being useful, informative and accurate, a place where we can grow our understanding rather than simply acquire reams of information garbage. I know, we need a library.