Library renewals: private citizens are remaking a public institution

Reason, March, 1994 by Elizabeth Larson

IN ARGUING THAT GOVERNMENT HAS A RESPONSIBILITY TO FUND libraries, defenders of the current system usually claim that libraries benefit society as a whole by promoting democracy, uplift, and literacy. They also maintain that only public operation can protect library patrons from censorship. But these high-minded goals have very little to do with how public libraries actually work or the reasons people use them.

Without public libraries, warn Anita and Herbert Schiller in a 1986 Nation article, "democratic governance itself is an endangered species." Free, government-run libraries provide equal access to information, they argue, thereby ensuring an informed electorate. More broadly, public libraries (unlike academic libraries) aim not so much to preserve man's wisdom as to improve him. The terminology has changed--in the 19th century it was called uplift, and today it's empowerment--but the goal remains the same. The problem is, you can't improve people without their cooperation. And for every town like Point Arena or Palm Springs, there are others where, despite a few vocal activists, most residents don't notice or care whether the local library is open or closed.

Libraries in Massachusetts have probably taken the most severe budget cuts in the country in recent years, but Bonnie O'Brien, president of the Massachusetts Public Library Association, told City & State, "For whatever reason, the municipalities and the public don't support libraries like they used to." Speaking on a local radio show in Los Angeles, library activist Mafia Stone said her group, Committee to Save Our Libraries, was sending letters to community members "so that we get rid of a little bit of the apathy that we see toward the libraries." Despite the millions of dollars spent on library-awareness campaigns, only a third of adult Americans have public-library cards.

Apathy toward libraries is not new. Historian D.W. Davies writes in Public Libraries as Culture and Social Centers that early librarians believed "there were vast numbers yearning to read and acquire culture." But "in the days of the voluntary |library~ societies there was a corrective to this notion. Uplift societies and libraries founded upon the misconception |often~ discovered that there was not a significant number of people interested to allow the institution to continue."

This was not the case everywhere, of course, as such centuries- old institutions as the Salem Athenaeum and the New York Society Library show. But today tax dollars provide equal support for popular and unpopular libraries alike.

Even when a library is popular, that doesn't mean it is improving people's minds or making them better citizens. As anyone who has worked in a suburban public library can attest, the most popular titles tend to be the least edifying: best sellers by Danielle Steele and Robert Ludlum, John Grisham and Stephen King. Commenting on a rise in the use of Los Angeles County's libraries during the recession, library marketing director Philip Fleming told the Los Angeles Times: "People are rediscovering the library, looking for free entertainment."