[jrichardshaw]

The same happened to the Toronto Public Library around the same time, probably coincidence rather than connected. It has made me reflect on the breadth of non-traditional public services provided by libraries. I noticed because I was looking for practice questions for the Canadian citizenship test, and one of two non-profit sets is from the TPL (the other is from Richmond Public Library), and now it's no longer available anywhere.

It's not clear to me whether moving this role to the lowest level of government is a good idea or not: citizenship is one of the key responsibilities of the federal government, but it probably is better facilitated via new immigrant welcoming programmes which are usually community based. However, it seems pretty clear that if that is being done then we need to provide the resources to do so properly.

Also libraries are great.

[eternauta3k]

I think we need a finer model than just centralized vs decentralized. You can have the federal government define standards and provide quality software options for the local administrations.

[asalahli]

Ah, all I remember was printers not working at the time. I didn't know they lost stuff. That sucks.