The Internet Cannot Replace Libraries

* On behalf of the entire board of the Costa Mesa Library Foundation, I wish to commend The Times for the Nov. 9 article “Local ‘Cybraries’ Power Up.”

For once somebody has gotten it right. The Internet is not a substitute for libraries. In fact, the Internet is a dangerous problem for librarians and teachers whose concern is accuracy and honesty.

Much that is on the Internet is nothing but propaganda and often factually misleading if not malicious in its bias. Nobody is going to read a whole book off a computer screen. No one can do adequate research using one page on a computer screen at a time. Better to spread those books and magazines, along with notes, on a table at home or in the library.

Robert Berring, the law librarian at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, has become a spokesman for traditional librarianship compared to computers, virtual reality and the Internet. The reason is the university’s decade-long retreat from adequately funding its main library. Berring decries the lack of scholarly and editorial authority in computerized information sources.

The Costa Mesa Library Foundation has been created to privately fund a new city library so that our students and adults won’t have to leave town to find an adequate public library for research and academic purposes.

Our political leaders have short-changed us with their ideas of financial economies by sparing us the burden of a large public library, referring to such as nothing but bureaucracy. Yet Costa Mesa can’t afford to leave the Orange County Library system, because its branch libraries are too small to stand on their own.

KENTON WHITE

Chair, Library Foundation

Costa Mesa