Gutting America’s Local Libraries: Informal Comments on "Building Earth’s Largest Library"  Walt Crawford I've long since realized that portions of G.A.L.L. were overstated, with a few portions being as sloppy and ill-considered as Coffman's proposal itself. The Web makes it easy to make those portions go away. "What? Go look at the article: I never said that. You have a printed copy? Maybe you inserted those paragraphs before you printed it--can you prove otherwise?" But I'm a library person, and that's a little too devious for my taste. At least 1,500 people have already read the rant as it was originally written; to pretend that I never wrote those words would be silly. Incidentally, I flat-out disagree with Coffman's dismissal of G.A.L.L. as being a "diatribe"--which is a lot easier to say than it would be to actually respond to what I wrote. However, there's no question that it was a rant: an angry, rapidly-written, sometimes hyperbolic essay that did not attempt to hide my anger. That's why I call it a rant here, and have typically used that term in referring to the piece--and is one of several reasons why I never intended to, and never intend to, submit G.A.L.L. for print publication. So: here's what I've done: Here's an edited version of G.A.L.L., with what turns out be surprisingly little text removed (and about a dozen words added). Here's the original G.A.L.L., unchanged since the separation of the background section in September 1999. Do note that neither one makes complete sense without referring to Coffman's original nonsense. I would just as soon archive this whole mess--but Coffman seems to have turned this into a road show, so I'll leave it "live" for now. Written and posted 26 August 2000. Return