Leave public libraries alone
The right-wing Spanish nationalist parties governing Palma City Council, the PP and Vox, have approved a "comprehensive study" of the book collections in the city's municipal libraries. Their stated reason is that they find "too few books in Spanish." The initiative to carry out this unusual audit of public libraries came from Vox, but the PP has joined in, once again, without hesitation. In reality, it's not that Vox and the PP find few books in Spanish in the public libraries, but rather that they believe there are too many in Catalan. Like everything these people say, this is also a lie, and it's easy to verify: Palma's municipal collections total 265,545 items, of which 150,004 are in Spanish and 86,945 in Catalan. as you can read in the information published by ARA Baleareswhich compiles the official data on this matter. Books in Spanish, therefore, constitute the overwhelming majority of Palma's municipal library catalog: 56.4% books in Spanish compared to 32.7% in Catalan (the rest are books in other languages).
If things are this way, how many books should be in Spanish so that Vox and the PP don't find them "too few"? The answer is easy to guess: all of them. But we must ask the question the other way around: how many books in Catalan should there be so that Vox and the PP don't consider them excessive? Exactly, the answer is none. It's not exactly that they want all the books in all of Palma's municipal libraries to be in Spanish: what they would really like is for there to be none in Catalan. The Spanish right (Vox, but also a good part of the PP) has its own ideas about Catalan. According to them, libraries shouldn't have books in Catalan, but they should have them in Mallorcan, Menorcan, Ibizan, Formentera, and any other languages they can invent based on any dialectal variation, to the point of exhaustion. Professionals in this field have, understandably, expressed their complaint and concern. In a statement, the Association of Librarians, Archivists, and Documentalists of the Balearic Islands (ABADIB) warned that "language cannot be used as an instrument of political confrontation against libraries" and reminded everyone that the segmentation of collections for ideological reasons violates the principles of equal access and pluralism that should govern libraries. Indeed, the service that public libraries provide to society is fundamental and irreplaceable, both in terms of the transmission of knowledge and their value as instruments of social cohesion and improvement. The work of these institutions is extremely delicate and cannot tolerate interference based on political prejudices.
Government officials should not be auditing public library funds, much less using them to act against Catalan, the Balearic Islands' own language. Instead, they should be working to address the library's needs in terms of staff, resources, and facilities. The PP and Vox parties, as denounced by the MÉS municipal group, are strangling neighborhood libraries, to the point that the Son Cladera library has already had to close, and those in Génova and Son Sardina are on the verge of doing so due to unpaid rent. Staff shortages, the halt in new book purchases, and the reduction and ideological control of activities have turned libraries, like schools and healthcare, into another target for an insatiable right wing in its crusade against all things public.
