There didn’t seem to be anything remarkable about this particular volunteer assignment: two hours of packing & light lifting in Mounds View High School’s Information & Learning Center.  Maybe an ‘out with the old, in with the new’ textbook exchange, I thought.  Maybe the activity would help form a board candidate’s opinion on how much students enjoyed the newly-renovated space.

But true to Forrest Gump’s admonition about chocolates & life’s unpredictability, this small task turned out to provide a window into a phenomenon that is likely replicating itself in schools across the country– Mounds View High School included.

I regret to inform you, folks: history is passing from our school libraries, and perhaps you should know.

The books you see above were designated for removal as ones not having been checked out for 10 years or more, goes one of the criteria for putting a large swath of the MV collection on a plane to Africa, should a suitable district home not be found for them first.

While libraries have winnowed collections for years, and books are quite often bound for readers in different countries, I can tell you that this time it’s different.  The shrinkage of the materials footprint underway at Mounds View is substantial.  There will be no new poetic anthologies, no revised accounts of the Lewis & Clark expedition, no quick, encyclopedic volumes on Minnesota that come along to take these items’ places.

Changing technologies demand such a transformation some will say, and most of these works are likely digitized, it’s true.  But the question must be asked: If a prospective reader is not allowed the kind of browsing experience shelves of libraries afford, will she ever find one of these volumes electronically?

As a Ramsey County Library board member, I do understand.  Libraries everywhere are in a necessary phase of reinvention, part of which involves the quashing of traditional collections for new collaborative spaces and technology.  But as timeless classics and biographies on the human condition are ushered out and scores of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t apps are brought in …. I’m worried, and maybe you are, too.

I am not offering this assessment  to win votes– what candidate in his right mind would throw out so somber a message as this?  I am not singling out the Mounds View Schools for academic negligence here.  And I don’t anticipate there being any way to slow this trend.

What I would like you to take away from this is that I, as your Mounds View School Board member, would seek every opportunity to provide district students as well-rounded an education as possible from as many formats as are available.

And that includes poems like this one from Tennyson: