This knowing has been valued throughout human history. It has always been known that information is power. Because we are a democracy, we distributed that power by moving knowledge out to the public through our educational system, our libraries, and our free press. One of the greatest democratic acts of our culture was to recognize information and knowledge as public goods. Libraries are the only institutions that attempt to provide a view of the whole of our society's information resources without bias.
Libraries carry the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the proven and the dubious.
And they've generally had little competition - until recently, information wasn't a hot product. There is a frightening amount of financial activity taking place around non-existant products and a rather vague promise of future markets. And I see it manifested in the proposed changes to the copyright law. At the hearings held last fall for public testimony on the proposed changes, emphasis was clearly on intellectual property as product. Only a handful out of the dozens who testified even mentioned our obligations to the public, and not surprisingly, most of those were librarians.