When the pillaging of fisheries libraries is over, the Institute of Ocean Sciences on Patricia Bay will be one of only two refuges for irreplaceable documents.
The federal government has chopped 11 Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries down to two. The other is in Dartmouth, N.S. Although the government says the important information is being saved digitally, staff at the libraries say much of it is being lost.
The libraries held journals and other conventional scholarly works, but they were also repositories for original data dating back to the middle of the 1800s. Old reports and observations of conditions were valuable for scientists who wanted baseline information.
To save $443,000 a year, the department is closing nine of the libraries and giving away much of the contents. Officials were offended at the suggestion that the leftovers were burned. In fact, anything that couldn’t find a home was recycled, the department said.
It’s a difference that doesn’t matter much. While recycling avoids the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by burning, both methods are effective in making the knowledge on the pages disappear forever.
The government said that only a handful of people from outside used the libraries each year, but that’s hardly surprising. The material is primarily for use by government scientists and academic researchers.
Scientists and others say the closures are further evidence of the Conservative government’s war on science. Whether or not it is making war, it is certainly putting science well down its list of priorities, which makes it a target for budget cuts.
Islanders have seen the effects of these priorities already. The closure of the Centre of Universe at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory was one of the more public ones.
But of more significance to scientific knowledge were the layoffs in 2012 of 75 people who monitored the health of our oceans, including two research scientists, a chemist and six support staff at the Institute for Ocean Sciences in North Saanich. They specialized in the study of contaminants in the sea, an important field as human activity on the coast increasingly puts the ocean at risk.
If Prime Minister Stephen Harper is worried about the portrayals of him as a Philistine who holds science in contempt, he is not showing it. The cuts continue. As with Fisheries and Oceans, Environment Canada is closing and consolidating 12 libraries and reading rooms across the country; similar troves of documents are likely to be lost.
A lot of what ended up in the recycling bin was “grey literature,” books and reports of which only a few copies existed. Others were accurate translations of foreign studies, which now will be available only in their original languages.
The older documents are of particular interest to scientists trying to understand climate change and the effects of human activity on the environment. Observations from 150 years ago can help them identify what has changed.
The information must have had some value because staff, other libraries and individuals snapped up what they could. In Winnipeg, scientists at the Freshwater Institute said a private consulting company took documents by the truck load.
Asked by reporters how much of the material had been saved digitally, the department didn’t have an answer. Officials did say the process is continuing, but despite their assurances, much material is obviously gone.
Those who value the contents of the libraries compare the savings to other government expenditures: $3 billion for Arctic patrol vessels, $5 million a year for the new Office of Religious Freedom, $30 million to commemorate the War of 1812.
The government has to keep its budget in line, but it is far too ready to do that by cutting science.
