Thank you, Martha Furman, for your leadership in guiding the library during these difficult times of budgetary cuts and micromanaging from several board members. A shout out to Sean Anderson and Tony Edmudson and all of the library staff for your commitment and enthusiasm to the vision of what a library is and the dedication to provide open and free access to materials that would inform our community in making informed decisions.
A library is an institution that is a mark of the free world in which we, in the U.S., live. Many governments around the world lock down access to information and therefore lock out people from engaging in informed discussions about the world around them. Our library here in the Flathead Valley, and indeed libraries across the U.S., are protected by First Amendment rights which include the Freedom of Speech. It is because of these protected freedoms that we are able to walk into a library, request materials and have it available to us without the worry of government interference.
Yet interference by Doug Adams and Dave Ingram, library board members, are doing just that. In a statement made by Doug Adams in a recent board meeting, Adams cited the tenets of the American Library Association as a “leftist agenda” and remarked that he would like our library not to be associated with those beliefs. Dave Ingram, in his pursuit to understand how the library works, has been hovering in back work rooms trying to oversee the professional librarian’s work. These individuals are not advocates of our library. They have overreached their position as board members and have not done due diligence in reading material that outlines what those duties are.
The next time you walk into the library, thank those people who are there helping you. They do it because of their commitment to strong beliefs of an open, equitable and free library.
Nancy Pensa
Somers