One of the great joys—indeed, the blessings—of having served as president of the New York Public Library and now, as president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, which was created by Andrew Carnegie, who founded over 2,500 libraries in the U.S. and abroad, is that I am often asked to help dedicate libraries all over the country. In the past, I’ve participated in library dedications and helped launch library campaigns in San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, and many other cities; as this magazine goes to press, I am soon scheduled to speak at the dedications of the James Buchanan Duke Library of Furman University in South Carolina and the Middlebury College Library in Vermont.

I am always pleased to be involved in these events because they celebrate the best instincts of our society: to promote literacy, enrich citizenship and provide opportunities for lifelong learning. Libraries are also one of the most critical foundations of our democracy, for as writer Anna Quindlen says, reading is the ultimate democratic act.

Library dedications are particularly meaningful for me now because so many of the more than 1,600 libraries that Andrew Carnegie founded in the U.S. alone are either celebrating or approaching their 100th anniversary; many others have already passed that mark. How many? The truth is, we don’t know what number of the original Carnegie libraries are still in existence, though I imagine many of them are, judging by the fact that hardly a day goes by without the Corporation receiving an announcement about yet another library centenary.

In terms of bricks and mortar, these are old buildings, but they must have ageless souls. Wherever they stand, on rural roads or on the avenues of large cities, they have served, literally, generations of Americans. And for many Americans, particularly new immigrants, what was true in the past remains true today: libraries, with their promise of free access to as much knowledge and education as a person can absorb, may represent the only door to social and economic progress that can be opened by someone with few resources. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption.”

Just about everyone makes use of a library. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, which recently surveyed over 55,000 households, 65 percent reported that individuals in the household had used the library in the last year; in the month prior to the survey 36 percent of all households reported borrowing from or dropping off a book to the public library and 18 percent reported visiting the library for some other purpose like a lecture or story hour.

Clearly, libraries are important to us, though perhaps we never truly realize their value until they’re somehow taken away. No recent incident brings this notion more clearly to mind than a recent tragedy: the destruction of the Ramsgate Library in Kent, England. Erected in 1904 with support from Andrew Carnegie, the library was burned to the ground this past August. Newscasts said that, “Local residents began selling photographs of the burning library within hours in an attempt to raise money to help fund the rebuilding” and reported that people had “volunteered to form a human chain” in order to rescue materials that had survived in the basement. Reading these accounts, you get a sense that the community views the destruction of the library as something akin to a death in the family, and I mourn with them. We all do.

I’m sure that eventually, another library will be built to replace the one that was lost. That has always been my experience: whether libraries are occasionally destroyed or torn down, or some pundit decides to sound their institutional death knell, they just seem to keep on becoming livelier and more relevant than ever—and their numbers keep growing. One of the newest libraries in the U.S. is the remarkable Seattle Central Library, which I had the honor of helping to dedicate. It opened in May 2004 and represents a sea change in the way libraries will be present in our lives from now on: a soaring, beautiful glass and steel building with sweeping views and surprising angles, it is an architectural gem as well as fully functioning and “wired” library. I was overwhelmed by it, delighted by it, awed by it—and grateful for it. This remarkable library—along with other extraordinary new library buildings and renovations, such as the Milton Freewater Public Library in Oregon and the Oak Park Public Library in Illinois—exemplify the idea that libraries are not simply utilitarian institutions serving prosaic purposes. Public libraries have become centers of civic life; university libraries are celebrated as essential to their institutions’ missions. As American Library Association President Carol Brey-Casiano has said, “Many new libraries also are challenging people’s ideas as a stuffy, slightly musty place. Cutting-edge architecture, innovative design and reinvention are bringing more light, more beauty and more personality to America’s libraries. As our communities grow and change, so do our nation’s libraries.”

Libraries, old and new, are also living testaments to the fact that human beings, who first scratched out the news of their existence on cave walls and wrote down their thoughts on papyrus scrolls so that those who followed after them could benefit from what they had learned, still believe in the importance of collecting, sharing and preserving knowledge. Within their walls they contain not only the heritage of humanity, but also a record of our civilization—indeed, they can probably help us understand how we became civilized and perhaps even how to avoid taking the road back to chaos and conflict, as much as we sometimes seem to be trying to nudge ourselves in that direction. That so many of the libraries Andrew Carnegie had the wisdom to help create continue to do their part to cherish and preserve this extraordinary heritage should give us great comfort; that they add to it every day—one reader, one learner, one dreamer at a time—should bring us joy.

So to all the Carnegie libraries: we wish you happy birthday! We celebrate you, appreciate you, honor you and applaud you, as will our descendents, on through the years.”

Vartan Gregorian
President

Copyright information | Masthead | Carnegie Corporation of New York web site