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Cities and libraries came into history together. Each represents an extension of human experience through time. Each is based on community, shared values, memory of the past, hope for the future.
Great cities, such as Los Angeles has managed to become (sometimes in spite of itself!), require equally great public library systems. In fact, no city that neglects its library can claim greatness. Like transportation, schools, police and fire protection, library service is not a luxury. It is basic to the urban formula.
In modern times, the relationship between a flourishing library and information system, accessible to the general public, and the well-being of a democratically run city, is no mere piety. Democracies require an informed citizenry. People must be informed to remain autonomous, hence free.
Knowledge is wealth and power. Knowledge is also economic survival, especially in times of economic scarcity. And when a recession, like the current one, is coinciding with an era in which jobs are being transformed in their structure and content from year to year, access to information-to new knowledge, to re-tooling, to retrofitting for jobs that didn't exist five years ago-becomes a necessity.
Los Angeles has many problems. We see them in the news and experience them on the street. But the story of the Los Angeles Public Library offers genuine cause for optimism. Whether we look at the new immigrant learning about our our common culture by visiting one of the library's 63 branches, or at the dynamic and eccentric librarians who have made the overall system arguably the finest in the nation, the LAPL offers proof positive that things can work in Los Angeles; that Los Angeles has a past, present and future worth fighting for; that Los Angeles-as all great cities must be-is not just part of the problem, but part of the solution.
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Long before Los Angeles had colleges or universities or an art museum, or a water system, or a deep-water port, even before it had a direct railroad connection to the east, Los Angeles had a library. As early as 1844, when the city was still a Mexican pueblo, a group of citizens calling themselves Los Amigos del Pais, the Friends of the Country, secured a small lot from the ayuntamiento,...