Digital libraries and the problem of purpose

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Aug/Sep 2000 by Levy, David M

This article is based on a keynote address given at the ACM Digital Libraries '99 conference, held in Berkeley, CA, in August 1999. It is reprinted with slight modifications by the kind permission of the author and the publisher from D-Lib Magazine, v. 6, no. 1 (January 2000).

Introduction: The Problem of Purpose

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" Alice asks the Cheshire Cat who is perched on the bough of a tree. "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," is the cat's saucy reply.

Which way ought we to go in digital library research and development? This too depends on where we want to get to. But in this case who is we? Where are we trying to get to? And how have we come to decide that this where (whatever it is) is where we ought to be? These are the millennial, the big picture questions I want to pose to the digital library community as the calendar turns. My hope, as the title of these remarks suggests, is to introduce and reflect on the problem of purpose in digital libraries. The term is due to Patrick Williams, who in The American Public Library and the Problem of Purpose [4], documents the various attempts of American public libraries over the past nearly 150 years to identify and solidify their purpose to figure out where they were trying to get to. I'll start by reviewing the problem of purpose in American public libraries and American academic/research libraries before turning to digital libraries.

Public Libraries and the Problem of Purpose

The first American public library, in Boston, was inaugurated in 1854 with a strong statement of purpose: "Why should not this prosperous and liberal city extend some reasonable amount of aid to the foundation and support of a noble public library, to which the young people of both sexes, when they leave the schools, can resort for those works which pertain to general culture, or which are needful for research into any branch of knowledge?... We consider that a large public library is of the utmost importance as the means of completing our system of public education . . ." Other public libraries were soon created in this image; by 1875 nearly 200 public libraries had been established and even more were being planned. Their mission was clear: to serve as a new kind of educational institution, an adjunct to the public school, which would provide citizens with ongoing opportunities to learn after they had completed their formal schooling.

There was just one problem with this noble purpose: patrons of the libraries seemed more interested in reading popular literature (mainly fiction) than the "serious" works (history, biography, science) that educators of the time thought would lead to moral and intellectual growth. Librarians comforted themselves by inventing a "taste-elevation theory." Even if patrons came to the library in search of fiction, they would eventually move on to works of greater merit.

But by the 1890s the taste-elevation theory had been largely abandoned. People still wanted popular fiction, and there was no evidence that they were cultivating a taste for more cultured works. As the taste-elevation theory lost adherents, the debate grew about what to do: Exclude inferior fiction? Accept entertainment as having social value? Permit whatever the public wanted? It came to be accepted that public libraries should supply readers with what they wanted, entertainment mostly. But this meant that the original stated purpose of the public library, to be an educational institution on a par with the public schools, to provide "self-culture through books," would have to be abandoned.

This was only the first in a series of discouragements as public libraries invented or discovered new purposes only to abandon them once they were found to be wrong or inadequate. Around the turn of the century, a time of rapidly changing social conditions, librarians re-envisioned themselves as "missionaries of literature," teaching the American way of life. Enlivened by "the library spirit," a faith in the transformative potential of reading, librarians set forth to "evangelize, reform, and save." The outbreak of World War I put an end to this vision. "Librarians cannot prevent the breakdown of civilization," one prominent librarian said in 1913.

Other missions followed, some of them seeming like vaguely recycled versions of previous attempts: the public library as an all-purpose information center, as a community center, as a center for adult education, as the guardian of free speech - all with limited success. It wasn't until the 1980s, Williams claims, that public libraries finally began to come to terms with their more limited but realistic purpose: to be suppliers of books to the middle class and a symbol of culture in the community. Williams' book was published in 1988, however, too early to see that the Internet would once again challenge the public library's sense of purpose-or to see libraries trying to fashion themselves into portals onto the information superhighway.