Cursed Cities Counties Created No Libraries Poem by Terence George Craddock (Spectral Images and Images Of Light)

Quotes from ‘Community Libraries in Indonesia: A Survey of Government-Supported and Independent Reading Gardens' by Stian Håklev, MA Student, Higher Education and Comparative, International and Development Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
Indonesia is a country with over 240 million inhabitants and 16,000 islands,8,000 of which are inhabited... To promote equitable development and democracy in such a large and variegated country, spreading literacy and access to information is crucial. Uniquely, this is achieved through a combination of public libraries, private renting libraries, and a variety of free informal lending libraries or community libraries, also called reading gardens (Taman Bacaan) . (But not libraries and government programs to create libraries has repeatedly fail.)
Beginning in 1992, the government wanted to provide reading material for new literates to help them keep and improve their literacy, and avoid relapse. To achieve this, it began creating village 'community reading gardens' (Direktori TBM Tahun 2007,2007) . Numbers are unclear, but they might have created as many as 7,000 of these centers, which mainly offered access to government propaganda, and were never properly embraced by the communities....
In 2005, the government once again decided to get involved with community reading gardens. They observed that there was much enthusiasm around autonomous reading gardens, but believed that 'community reading gardens are still not successful in carrying out their function as places to increase reading interest and reading culture in the community, especially for new literates, because of several factors. The causes are amongst others: the managers of reading gardens are not creative enough, they are not skilled enough, not dedicated enough, with the result that the community's desire to read, and to utilize the reading garden is still not strong enough'
Public libraries in Indonesia today are still underdeveloped. In 2003, there were 26 provincial libraries,452 public libraries in cities, sub districts and villages, and 346 libraries in places of worship. There were 12,618 school libraries, but there is reason to believe that many of these consist of a shelf in a mostly locked room (Perpustakaan Nasional,2003) . These are extremely low numbers for a large country with a population of almost 240 million people. Apart from the numbers themselves, the quality and services offered are not sufficient. Finally, large groups in the population do not see the public library as an attractive or available resource. The main branch of the public library in Jakarta [Perpumda - Perpustakaan Umum Daerah Jakarta] is located on the 7th floor of a government building. Getting a library card requires identification, a fee, sometimes a letter from your work unit or neighborhood unit (RT/RW) , and takes two weeks.