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OUR OPINION: Groundbreaking starts new era for public library

By Chronicle Editor

When the Bozeman Public Library breaks ground for its new building Thursday morning, the ceremony will include all of the usual trappings - golden shovels, local civic leaders, applauding supporters and entertainment. Speeches will cite extraordinary efforts by fund-raisers and organizers who got the project to this point. And it all will fall in the middle of National Library Week.


 As with any large civic project, the new library has had to overcome monetary, political, sighting and other challenges. Those victories will be celebrated along with the traditional first scoop of dirt. Speakers will mention future challenges and remaining financial needs - and they will exhort the audience to keep up the fight.

Less obvious at the groundbreaking ceremony will be some of the bumps that libraries have had to negotiate in recent years. And those may say more than anything about the tenacity and heart that got Bozeman to groundbreaking day for its library.

In recent years, libraries have been under attack by those who would track and restrict what we read in the name of security or morality. Libraries resisted and will persevere, but not without expensive and politically charged debate that could threaten their very existence.

A decade ago the Internet threatened to make libraries obsolete. Why would a community invest in a book - much less a building - in an era when the ubiquitous 'net would put everything at our fingertips, for free?

Now we know that everything is not on the Internet. The American Library Association estimates that only 8 percent of journals are online and free. And with the proliferation of 'blogs and a billion (literally) Web pages, who knows what digital data can be trusted?

A library, on the other hand, is a community center. It fosters literacy. It educates and entertains. It nourishes creativity. It is many, many things that the Internet is not and cannot be.

The fact that Bozeman will break ground for a new library Thursday is testament to this community's ability to see past the naysayers and the threat du jour. It is evidence of generations of thought and effort, not just for a new building, but also to shore up a pillar of the community.

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