Stacks of Freedom

The eighty-five per cent of West Tisbury residents who have a town library card know well that researchers can do some seriously satisfying Googling there. But they also know that some of the best finds come not from any search engine directing them — to the most popular or most likely, or the Wiki — but from tripping along and noticing a book they otherwise would not have sought. That surprise in the stacks.

As we turn to computer hardware and software for more and more of our life — including our reading — maybe it seems strange that a library would seek more space for classic hardcovers and softcovers. But that is what the West Tisbury and the Edgartown public libraries are seeking to do, spurred on by limited-time-only state grants that would allow them to leverage private donations.

Of course expanding the size of the library doesn’t just mean more space for more books. It means more space for restrooms — who knew that the library held perhaps the most used public powder room in West Tisbury? A bigger library means more gathering and meeting rooms, too, spaces especially vital in towns without community centers. And it means, yes, more computers — a critical way to bridge the digital divides, ensuring the benefits of technology can be accessible whether you can afford to own a snazzy computer or not.

It also does mean a little more space to stretch out away from the chaos. Asked if modern schools should have more screens than shelves in their libraries, one administrator replied poignantly, “The pages of a book shield us from the distractions that bombard us during most of our waking hours.” It’s not a sentiment considered fuddy-duddy by the next generation, either; one student had this to say about the prospect of a book-free library: “Reading remains one of the few activities that gives me a real break from being in front of a screen, be it computer or TV or iPod or cell phone or camera. If my best source of novels or textbooks or required reading was routed through an electronic device, my entire life would literally be spent in front of a screen.”

So we applaud and support the intentions of the fund-raising friends of the Island libraries, be they for expansion plans such as those in Edgartown and in West Tisbury, or the year-in, year-out support for ongoing programs and operations at libraries across the Island.

At the festive kickoff to the West Tisbury Public Library’s capital campaign on Sunday — with town chefs, town musicians, town authors and readers all gathered in hope — it was none other than historian and man about Music street David McCullough who put the endeavor into perspective: “Our library system is one of the greatest accomplishments of our country. Free to the people. Free. To walk through the portals of a library . . . is to walk through the portals of freedom. Libraries are an inexhaustible storehouse of ideas, and everybody is welcome, free.”

Kicking in a little money, though, could give Islanders a bigger storehouse.