Read it and weep: "Closed."

Someday this will be all that's left in communities that permit the once most-revered of institutions in their midst to be chipped, chiseled and shortchanged to death.

Think libraries are forever? Only with a fight.

Attleboro, as you know from Sun Chronicle articles, took a major hit this year and still needs $100,000 to bring back everything that was cut from its budget.

Thousands of dollars in restored city money and private donations are helping to salve the wound, staunch the bleeding; many people deserve great credit for stepping up with everything from salaries to ideas for raising funds. These are the fighters.

But a sea change is needed in the way municipalities view public libraries or each year the battles will become tougher, more disheartening as the public is asked to bridge wider and wider gaps between what's required and what's being accorded.

The beginning of the end will arrive, as it has elsewhere, in the guise of far fewer hours each year, long seasonal closures, increasingly pared-down staff, consuming worries about fuel costs and air-conditioning, insurance, upkeep.

Eventually, if public libraries keep getting the short end of the stick, administrations pressed to accommodate hundreds of demands for services - schools, emergency crews, public works - will come to see them as expendable luxuries.

No kidding.

Scan the news. Public library certifications are being stripped as the direct result of budget cuts; libraries are being shuttered by broken furnaces or toilets, insufficient funds for tape to repair books, ribbons for printers and typewriters, toner for copiers; libraries in some instances are closing off entire floors or sections to conserve, to stay alive.

In Hartford, Conn., a Superior Court lawsuit filed by neighborhood residents seeking to halt the closing of two city branch libraries has just been withdrawn in hopes that talks with library officials will reopen.

But weeks leading up this this have not been a pretty. Tempers have flared, charges exchanged as residents fought to save beloved facilities.

Watch out.

What happens to one of us can happen to any one of us. This truth has been deftly captured in an art installation, "Bibliotheca Publicus: An Endangered Species," on display through Aug. 10 at Tufts University Art Gallery. Its creator, Medford artist Mindy Nierenberg, has patched together library memorabilia with quotations implying the fragility of the future for this institution.

Attleboro might want to invite her to display her creation here once she wraps up the Tufts run. Among her political statements is the bank of library drawers locked shut, a frightening icon of what's going on through the country.

Little by little or sometimes with alarming alacrity, budget cuts are retiring facilities that inform and transform, offering equality of access to everything under the sun from mystery, history to politics and scholarship. Free.

Each community must decide for itself how and why it will fight for its libraries. In El Paso, Texas, residents simply said "No" to a threatened closure. City council members decided to keep the little Westside Branch Library open, reports the El Paso Times, because hundreds of people contacted their offices in protest.

They fought the big fight.

Here in Attleboro there's one thing you can do immediately to show your support. Shell out $25 for one of the 200 t-shirts donated by South Attleboro business owner John Brederson with the words "I helped support the Attleboro Public Library." All proceeds go to the library. Then wear the shirt everywhere you go and talk up its message.

Libraries can be viewed as a luxury or a necessity. Therein lies the future of these repositories of nourishment for mind and spirit.

Is your library as important as plowed streets, the high school football team?

Or should it be the first thing to go when the going gets tough?

And how soon will that happen?

BETSY SHEA-TAYLOR, a former editor and writer for The Sun Chronicle, is now a freelance writer.