Today's libraries: cauldrons of ideas

Some 15,000 librarians descend on Seattle today for the national convention of the American Library Association. We welcome them. This is a university town, a book-reading town, a film-festival town and a town with a downtown library like none other.

Even with all that, most of us are not as sophisticated about our libraries as we might be. A modern library is more than a repository of books, tapes, CDs and DVDs for check-out at no charge. A modern library is a cauldron of facts, help and know-how. Suppose you wanted to start a home photography business. There is a book on it in the Seattle Public Library. There is another on starting a clothing shop, and another on starting a brewpub.

Today's libraries offer the ability to find a book in other collections, some of them thousands of miles away, and fetch it for you at no charge.

There are some who think the computer will make the library obsolete, but so far it has made it more useful. With a computer, you can reserve books, music and movies from home. With one of the library's computers, you can surf the Internet or check commercial databases — on genealogy, for example — that are available at the library for free.

Librarians are the experts at Finding Things Out. Part of their job has been automated by the Internet search engine, but it was the easy part. Each year, humanity's heap of facts, ideas and records grows larger — and we grow more indebted to those who know how to reach into it and find what we need.

Finally, librarians perform a political role: When officials start banning books and looking over people's shoulders to see what they're reading, librarians raise hell.

They always do this. It is their job to defend the freedom to read, and it is a job that will never be put out of business by a machine.