There’s a place in town where you can find pirates, space aliens, cowboys, master chefs, scenic vistas, long lost tales of local history and even the occasional tax form. We think Michael Sawyer, the new director of the Pine Bluff/Jefferson County Library might like that characterization of the facilities for which he is now responsible.
At a recent meeting of the Pine Bluff Rotary Club, Sawyer spoke to the centrality of libraries in communal life: “The library is a community hub where people can gather and meet. Essentially, the library is the crown jewel of the community. When new businesses are looking at a potential city to locate in they look at three things first — schools, infrastructure and libraries.”
Interestingly, libraries and newspapers are two community institutions that each struggle to remain relevant in the age of instant electronic information. They both have one foot in the past and the other in the future. They represent a technological paradigm of a previous era, but they serve as portals to emergent information.
Sawyer admonished the audience to hold back from wholesale abandonment of print . He cited phone directories as an example. “Some cities are doing away with their phone directories with the excuse that people can look up what they want on the Internet,” Sawyer said. “That is not true. You usually have to pay a fee to access someone’s phone number if you try to look them up using the Internet.”
Just as most newspapers now have an online presence, a visitor to the PB/JC libraries will be greeted by information in many different formats. Yes, one can certainly find plenty of books, but printed pages are just the tip of their offerings.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Sawyer, pointing both toward past and present, lauded the library system’s genealogy holdings: “Our genealogy section is second to none. We just acquired the 1940 Arkansas Census. Not everything on the Internet is correct. The Internet is only as good as the information that is on there.” Even a cursory flip through old city directories is enough to validate his assertions. The dusty volumes tell a tale of the city that was… of residents long-departed and outmoded businesses lost to the sands of time. Even so, it’s not all about what’s lost. It’s about drawing lines between what was and what is. Libraries can do this in way that few institutions can.
Moreover, libraries embody the foundational sentiments of our republic. They are repositories of thought free from the provincial fetters of taste. You can find once-banned books and decide for yourself the merit of their erstwhile banishment. In this they represent freedom of speech. You can meet friends there. In this they represent the freedom of assembly. You can acquire the tools and information necessary to foment social and political change. In this they represent democracy.
Industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie once observed: “There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.”
Carnegie was right. The library is the great locus of equal opportunity in an otherwise divisive, critical and stratifying world. Beyond this, libraries are a place to refresh the spirit and free the mind. Perhaps this is why the great library at Thebes in ancient Egypt had inscribed above its door, “Libraries: The medicine chest of the soul.”
As Sawyer makes his way in our community, we wish him good luck and good books.