In rural Australia in the 1940s, my mother had rocks thrown at her and was branded a 'communist' because her father, a school headmaster, advocated for establishing a public library.

In the Canadian province where I now reside, the Catholic Church controlled libraries -- and thus access to information -- until the 1960s.

We forget how recent the democratisation of knowledge is -- how transformative such institutions were and how hard-won.

We should not part with them easily.