Tom Peters Quotes

Many flagship state universities have wonderful digital libraries that are accessed by people around the world. In future, if not current, budget crises, trustees, board members, and administrators may wonder why these state institutions - with an articulated primary clientele of students, faculty, and staff members and a secondary clientele of all citizens of the state - should be spending resources on a digital library that is used by many people beyond the primary and secondary service populations.

I'd be happy if I could think that the role of the library was sustained and even enhanced in the age of the computer.

Today, if you have an Internet connection, you have at your fingertips an amount of information previously available only to those with access to the world's greatest libraries - indeed, in most respects what is available through the Internet dwarfs those libraries, and it is incomparably easier to find what you need.

This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.

The Internet is one of the most revolutionary technologies the world has ever known. It has given us an entire universe of information in our pockets.

A completely free library is as rare as a truly free lunch.

Usage tends to be global, while funding tends tobe local. When we allow it to happen, usage of a digital library is remarkably diverse and widespread.

I am confident that for the foreseeable future (barring some catastrophic event affecting economic, energy, electrical, and communications systems), many subpopulations that use information intensively (e.g., students, academics, library patrons, white collar workers) will be using some sort of portal information appliance.

With enough libraries, all content is free.

The Internet is a big boon to academic research. Gone are the days spent in dusty library stacks digging for journal articles. Many articles are available free to the public in open-access journal or as preprints on the authors' website.

One potential long-term problem with many current digital libraries is that they grew out of and aresupported by bricks-and-mortar libraries. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with that arrangement, inreality it creates a potentially dangerous situation that I call "the other digital divide."

I am a public library

Most young dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Old Timers on the West Coast seem to retain a fondness for reference books that goes beyond the practical. Everything there is to know about a given volume may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who'd rather have the book than the click. A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.

Throughout my formal education I spent many, many hours in public and school libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were. The current definitive answer to almost any question can be found within the four walls of most libraries.

Libraries are a hallmark of a civilized culture, and librarians represent that culture to all facets of society.

If you cut funding to libraries, you cut the lifeblood of our communities.

It's a fascinating time, I think. I do believe that with all the qualifications I've said - [such as] the uncertain accuracy of the web - nonetheless the access to speeches, documents is unparalleled with the ease of gathering information. If I had had that access when I was an editor or coming up, it would have made my life so much easier. As it was, everything took so much longer.

Public libraries are the last vestige of public free space.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it.

It may be primarily property taxes in the case of a public library, or state taxes and tuition in the case of an academic library at a public university, but the funding sources of most libraries continue to have a strong geographic component.

Without the library, you have no civilization.

I mean the Internet is like the luckiest thing - we have everything at our fingertips right now.

The Internet is merely a new means of communication, that's all it is. It serves the purpose of getting information, which it is fantastic at. I mean, I live by the Internet in terms of research and it's incredible - there's nothing that you can't find out about. It's not stopped me going to bookshops but I must say that I don't go into as many because any book I want.

I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.

If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.