Subscribe to SLJ
Practically Paradise
Inside Practically Paradise

first they came for – working draft

First they came for the school librarians,
but that was a teacher issue at a local level and they have public libraries, right?

Then they came for the military library budgets,
but we thought the troops were too busy and someone else would donate and deliver books, right?

Then they came for the special scientific libraries,
but the government said they could google everything they needed, right?

Then they came for the depository libraries of free government information,
but the government said they had digitized everything fairly and given us complete access online, right?

Then they came for the medical libraries,
but we knew all the research to protect us was available somewhere for free on the internet, right?

Then they came for the college library budgets,
but we heard everything was available for free online or at the public library, right?

Then they seized exclusive rights to online magazine content,
but we knew someone could afford to purchase access for all the public libraries, right?

Then they came for the public library budgets,
but we were so busy helping the homeless, the jobless, the people without access to resources, the school children, the scientists, the inventors, the college students, the professors, the researchers, the senior citizens, and the preschoolers that no one was left to help us, right?

Wrong! We are a library eco-system. We depend upon each other. 

Please help me clean this up and make it a stronger piece of writing to share.

Comments

  1. I was reminded of this very same rhetoric structure when Michigan school librarians started announcing their cuts. As a corollary: when a union member loses her job and is replaced by a para, and no one else in the union complains … who will be next?

  2. teacherninja says:

    Good one! Thanks for that.

  3. April Halprin Wayland says:

    Hi Diane ~ Love your posts. Please contact me asap.

    Thanks!
http://blogs.slj.com/practicallyparadise/2010/01/23/first-they-came-for-working-draft/
blogs.slj.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-22
27013
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:MK2APXKFOLZRH7EOPJ5JRLDNFA3XTK4K
<urn:uuid:7727d642-f122-4cf4-ba12-f2c1d13f1e99>
2018-05-27T22:57:00Z
64.207.177.145
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:EZTMG3X26TLRTR2TYREGBH4S7MIDTQRF
<urn:uuid:5a029eaf-67ca-44ec-b1c3-b6e7e88f10a2>
http://blogs.slj.com/practicallyparadise/2010/01/23/first-they-came-for-working-draft/
length
response
<urn:uuid:c4a3bfdb-f777-4326-b6e3-14eb57a48158>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-79-222-162.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-22
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf