Our friends in the US are celebrating National Library Week which leads to awesome posts like this one from HuffPo on that country's most amazing libraries.
Of course the news isn't all good south of the border (check out the fourth or fifth comment down from MJinCanada!), especially right now.
The troubles for US libraries really hit me when we were hosting the PLA Virtual Conference a few weeks ago and the “Introduce Yourself” posts in the chat room were almost universally variations of “Wish we could be there but our budget was cut this year” or “Would love to be there but we're limited to in-state travel only for the time being.”
I've written about this in the past in the form of a post on the subject of “If libraries didn't exist, could you star them today?” Except the question is being reversed – libraries do exist but are heavily under attack from various sectors that don't support them (ultra-capitalists who think nothing should be free, tax-cut fanatics like the Tea Baggers, other mouth breathers.)
And of course I can't find it now but there was a great comment in a Reddit thread recently [edit: found it] talking about this exact idea – how libraries are in danger because some powerful groups are aligning against libraries because they simply can't wrap their heads around something being free in this day and age.
Scary times. And definitely not fun on any day of the week. But I've had all those links floating around for awhile so my initial link featuring amazing libraries provided a nice jumping off point to talk about a world when many of those amazing libraries are in serious danger.