Why a Web Site

My own earliest days of using computers was in a room housing a floor-mounted IBM machine and computer card-punching station. We punched cards for each data set input; the calculating program was contained within a thick deck of cards to which the data cards were added. My son knows nothing of that. I know nothing of building web sites, but he does. I just write this weekly column, on a modern laptop computer.

So that is why we have children. We have diversity in our family. And one day my son said, “Let’s put The Magic Library Card! articles into a web site.” And so we have, but clearly I could not have done so without him.

The site is up now in beta form and can be accessed at magiclibrarycard.com. It contains, selectively, articles from this column since its inception on August 5, 2020. “Selectively” means that some articles that are too dated or too personal have been set aside and not included. And, only those for which author permission was sought and gained are included.

It was not easy to group the topics, but they have been linked as shown, at least for this beta format. The group categories are Literature, Science & Technology, History, Sports & Leisure, and Library Stories. At some later time these main categories may be segmented into sub-categories.

Why did we decide to do this now? First, the Penn-Franklin News does not have its own archive for past articles, and we simply wanted to have a web site archive for these articles. More importantly, the collection of articles that make up The Magic Library Card! column may be unique in that they consistently speak to the importance of reading whole books, not snippets, both fiction and non-fiction. They speak to how reading books is necessary to building capacity for understanding life itself, for understanding the world in which we live in present time. They speak to how reading takes us back in time, and forward, to gain that understanding. They speak to the understanding gained from authors’ different ways of viewing life and the world around us. They speak to us about serious matters and with humor.

All of that is necessary to living happily in an often uncompromising world. All of that is necessary to preserving the democracy in which we as Americans hope to continue to live. And, whether we can afford to buy books or not, it is public Libraries and other types of Libraries, which are also written about, that provide the resources for public and nonpublic use that remain essential to our lives, to advancing the quality of our lives, to assuring that we continue, indeed, to live in freedom. To live in freedom as the torchbearer, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty, that our Founding Fathers envisioned and our Constitution promises.

As Thomas Jefferson put it, and I often quote this: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." To which I might add Andrew Carnegie’s words: “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people.” Theirs is the case for this new web site. It is our hope that you find it as promised.