Private libraries are subversive.
The more dispersed knowledge becomes, the harder it is for those in power, or those who want to be in power, to stamp out knowledge with which they disagree or to which they do not want the general public to become privy.
It is for this reason that many governments, past and present, frown on private libraries, make every effort to discourage the formation of such libraries, and make every effort to track down and destroy any such libraries of which they become aware.
But governments also have other ways of controlling knowledge. Oftentimes they simply refuse to disseminate knowledge about matters of which they are aware. They stamp such knowledge Top Secret, or use some similar classificatory scheme to deny knowledge to their citizenry. They throw all kinds of bureaucratic roadblocks in the paths of access even to information that is not so classified, a good example in the USA being the Freedom of Information Act and its attendant obfuscatory procedures.
Even for items that are not classified at all, it is possible for governments to make knowledge all but unobtainable by means apparently benign. One recent example of this particularly invidious method of shutting out the public is to claim budget cutbacks and propose digitization as a solution. We refer to the National Archives of Britain, and its proposal to bury original documents relating to British history in salt mines, making only digital copies available to scholars and the public:
Actually, this proposal is already well advanced, as roughly one-third of these original documents of British history already have been buried. And the National Archives at Kew has publicly admitted that only a small portion of such documents can possibly be digitized. Regrettably, due to layoffs of many of the Archives' most senior staff (the people most qualified to provide guidance to such materials), what is made available to scholars and the public rests now with digitization technicians who have neither the training nor the historical understanding to properly evaluate the importance of these original documents for future generations.
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'....
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