The  Department of Fisheries and Oceans has announced that it will close 7 of it 11 regional libraries to save an annual cost of $430,000 by consolidating these resources into two locations.

Dr. Peter Wells, an adjunct at SIM, is quoted in this article that discusses the closure of seven regional libraries by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Below is a summary of some of the impact statements that have been made in the news media:

Peter Wells: I see this situation as a national tragedy, done under the pretext of cost savings, which, when examined closely, will prove to be a false motive… A modern democratic society should value its information resources, not reduce, or worse, trash them.

Burton Ayles: It’s a loss of historic material, it’s a loss of the grey [not widely published] literature.

Tom Siddon: I call it [closing libraries] Orwellian, because some might suspect that it’s driven by a notion to exterminate all unpopular scientific findings that interfere with the government’s economic objectives …You do not extinguish national libraries of knowledge or history in an arbitrary way any more than the government would be allowed to extinguish the record of cabinet deliberations or to burn the books of Hansard.

David Schindler: Paranoid ideologues have burned books and records throughout human history to try to squelch dissenting visions that they view as heretical, and to anyone who worships the great God Economy monotheistically, environmental science is heresy.

We at SIM welcome an open discussion about these closures and their impact.