Calladan wrote:After reviewing the proposal in more detail, I am getting more and more appalled by this proposal with every passing minute.
Given that I have always held to the belief that education is the silver bullet - that it can be the solution to almost every problem out there, and that every person deserves the best education they can have and the best education they want - it is a wonder that a proposal such as this, one that appears to have a sole purpose of increasing education across The WA, can make me despair so much and just make me recommend leaving The WA to My Tri-Arch and her executive council.
We are both very supportive of The ULC - spreading information by the most expedient means available, is something that both I and My Tri-Arch can be supportive of. And while we do occasionally take part in the ULEN part of the resolution, we do it so rarely and only for books that we consider to be of great importance.
However having a single, central library for the whole of The WA is just insane. And crazy. And insane. As I have said previously - shipping books off to some central location - potentially thousands of miles, maybe billions of miles, from Calladan - doesn't seem to serve the people of my nation all that well.
It's voluntary. You may DONATE them. You do not have to send them off.
Calladan wrote:First - it removes those books from our country, depriving our citizens of the chance to read them, and places them somewhere completely out of our control. So we are most likely to donate crappy books of which we have thousands of copies ("Trixie Goes To The Big City" - a riveting read about a sheep that goes to a big city to pursue an acting career) and never donate important, one of a kind books (one of the hand written records of the leader of The Blessed Order) because we don't want to risk them being destroyed or damaged.
On the contrary, Ambassador, it spreads the books. I assume, by looking at your "Industry: Book Publishing" that since you have a book publishing industry in the top 17%, you will have no problem printing books. In fact, as said before, it's VOLUNTARY. You do not have to participate, but it would be preferred if you did. You could scan the books (Trixie Goes to the Big City and Written Records) and send them off, or use microfiche. But without a central library, other nations would never read the riveting stories coming from your country. Illiteracy rates wouldn't go down.
Calladan wrote:Second - no matter what insurance you have against fire, flood and other damage, there is always the danger of it. And while you can compensate us for the loss of the books, IT DOESN'T BRING BACK THE BOOKS. Now I accept that the same thing can happen when the books are in Calladan, but we accept that, and we have faith in our own systems. We are not sending them off to be managed by people we don't know in a place we might never visit.
Yes, Ambassador, there is always a risk. Of course, there are precautions people take for them, like halon gas (now illegal), argon, or other automatic fire suppression. Now floods, we would know when they happen. We could ship them off to another place, or give them back. If you know the perfect system of book preservation, please. Tell us.
Now, book loss. Yes, it's tragic. But we can bring back the books. Unlike other systems that fail (OOC: Library of Alexandria) all texts are, these days, backed up electronically. Also, these books would be sold locally in member countries, just like regular libraries.
Calladan wrote:Third - we would be obligated to withdraw from our participation in the ULEN if this proposal goes through.
So? That's your decision, not ours.
Calladan wrote:Fourth - it's a backwards step. Information and the distribution of it is the single most powerful force for good in the known universe. You don't centralise it in one place - you distribute it and disseminate it as WIDELY as you can using the most expedient and best means possible. This is not it, and neither I nor my government will be a party to it.
You seem to forget, Ambassador, that we're not taking all the books from libraries and taking them all here. We just create a centralized system so as to accompany the local ones. It also serves to bail out local libraries, if they have damage of any kind, and vice versa.