Pic-A-Flic has made it nearly 40 years, but on May 23 the store's owner, Kent Bendall, announced he can't keep it open any longer.

This was an inevitable move in a business climate that has seen the vast majority of video rental stores close in the past decade, and Bendall should be applauded for Pic-A-Flic's success in holding out this long. 

Bendall said in a social media post that the store will sell off its stock in September. While he is free to do whatever he has to do to make ends meet, we are asking the Greater Victoria Public Library board and UVic to offer him another option: sell the entire collection to the library so it can continue to circulate.

There is precedent for this. In 2016, the Halifax Public Libraries and Dalhousie University bought large parts of the collection of Video Difference as it went under — a collection the CBC called "a treasure trove." In Vancouver, UBC and SFU purchased the Videomatica collection in 2014, and it continues to circulate today from three different libraries.

UVic's strategic directions include a mandate to "embrace its role as an access point to the university for the broader community." What better way to bring people in from the broader community than to absorb the city's best movie collection?

The Greater Victoria Public Library's current bridging plan lists seven values on its front page, among them Collaboration, Inclusiveness, Service Excellence, Sustainability, and Intellectual Freedom.

Buying the Pic-A-Flic collection would be a move to reinforce each of these values. It would be a collaboration between GVPL and a beloved part of the community to preserve this collection for the future; it would fight back against the growing cost of ever-shrinking streaming services, which are increasingly unavailable to low-income members of our community; it would be setting a new standard in library service by offering what is effectively a complete collection of the most important films of the past century; it would carry none of the forgotten but significant carbon footprint of streaming services; and it would enable access to a greater variety of intellectual viewpoints with none of the baked-in surveillance and targeting of streaming services.

Pic-A-Flic offers 10 times the titles that Netflix offers. This is not a quaint anachronism; it's a trove that's too important to lose.

We cannot allow this collection to be scattered to the winds without having a serious conversation about how it could be permanently housed by UVic and the Greater Victoria Public Library.