Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Do Libraries Still Matter?, page 2

Carnegie’s goal was one shared by many thinking people today: to empower working people to improve their lot, as he had improved his by using the personal library of Colonel Joseph Anderson of Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. Remember that in the days of Carnegie’s youth, public libraries were rare and their collections paltry. Without a library, moreover, it was hard for a person to get educated. Books were expensive and not many Americans attended secondary school. The world has changed a lot since then, and most of the libraries Carnegie would later pay for are no longer serving that function (more about this later). But the idea of universal, tax-supported library service turned out to be far more important than the buildings themselves.

And on that basis, libraries are thriving. Today America’s roughly 16,500 library outlets outnumber McDonald’s, and thanks in part to new and expanded facilities built to serve burgeoning suburban and Sunbelt populations, materials circulation and library visits are up sharply per capita since 1990. Indeed, the Internet boom notwithstanding, the past 15 years have been something like a golden age for new library construction, with a number of cities and suburban communities building modern new libraries, some of them designed by such big-name architects as Koolhaas (Seattle), Michael Graves (Denver) and Moshe Safdie (Vancouver). This is nothing new; people have always regarded libraries as important public buildings whose appearance ought to embody community aspirations. That aspect of library purpose emerged plainly a century ago, when Carnegie was funding libraries. American libraries have always made architectural statements.

Similar continuity is evident at libraries in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere that have found a new sense of purpose in serving the hugely varied immigrant populations that have come to those cities, even if libraries nowadays are less focused on assimilation. The Flushing branch of the library system in the New York borough of Queens—a shiny and hugely busy new building—has gained national renown for accommodating the many languages and cultures in the surrounding community. Newark’s public library runs a program to supply materials in 11 languages to all the libraries in New Jersey. The Chicago Public Library has materials in at least 45 languages. The San Antonio Public Library in Texas, which has a relatively new central building, created a large Latino collection. Libraries across the country also provide help with English, information on immigration and citizenship and a host of other resources to newcomers.

These are some of the many reasons people love their libraries in spite of the many alternative sources of information and entertainment we all have at hand. When people were asked, in a 2003 national survey conducted by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, “how valuable is having access to a public library in your community?” 67 percent said “very valuable” and another 27 percent said “valuable.” Although no politician would dream of running on a platform of higher taxes, a remarkable 63 percent of those surveyed said they would support tax hikes for library services in their community. The average annual tax increase they would support: $49, which was about twice the nation’s entire per capita library spending that year. Indeed, voters across the country have readily passed measures taxing themselves to pay for ever-bigger facilities and collections and more branches. In Seattle, for instance, a majority in 1998 approved a $196 million bond issue, at the time the largest library issue in American history, to pay for construction and renovation of libraries all over town (including part of the cost of the $159 million Central Library).

In a 2002 poll conducted for the American Library Association, fully 62 percent of adults in this supposedly aliterate nation reported having library cards—about equal to the proportion that regularly used the Internet. And despite the reputation of libraries as havens for children and the elderly, the adults who visited most were in the 25-34 age range, and they went twice a month. “Libraries are more than disseminators of community information or any other information per se,” write R. Kathleen Molz and Phyllis Dain, two of the most insightful commentators on the subject. “They serve communities as cultural and educational centers—as knowledge institutions—and by all accounts the public seems to expect them to go on doing so.”

Yet it’s probably also fair to say that, these days, when most people want to know something they turn to the Internet. Sherry Shariati, who was a 24-year-old senior at San Francisco State College in 2002, told the San Francisco Chronicle back then that she had not taken a book home from a library since elementary school: “We are in the new age. If I want to get information, I go to the computer.”

People turn to the Internet even when they are in a library. Most public libraries offer Internet access nowadays, and these terminals are heavily used. At the main branch of The New York Public Library recently, in its magnificently renovated reading room, I was one of many visitors—possibly even a majority—who had brought laptop computers. But something seemed odd about many of the others with laptops that day. Finally it dawned: we were sitting in one of the world’s largest libraries, and many of these people had no books. They had come to the library, in other words, only in order to plug in their computers, availing themselves of the high-speed Internet ports installed at each table.

I was plugged in too, and wearying of note-taking from the library’s copy of Molz and Dain’s Civic Space/Cyberspace (MIT Press, 1999), I decided to see if I could get a copy to own. I quickly logged onto amazon.com, where I discovered that a brand new copy was $87.50. Thank God for libraries! But then I looked again. A used copy, in mint condition, was $3.95. I ordered it on the spot—from the library, mind you—and it was delivered to my home 100 miles away just a few days later. Even before it arrived, the thought crossed my mind: what on earth am I doing here? Given what I had just done, given what I now realized I could do, what is the purpose of a library?

As it turns out, this is not a new question at all. On the contrary, “the problem of purpose,” as library historian Patrick Williams has called it, is as old as American libraries. From the very outset, American libraries have had multiple purposes, and throughout their history have undergone multiple crises of identity. The history of American libraries, in fact, can be seen as a grand tug of war between these utopian institutions and the people they would serve, with each struggling to recreate the other in its own image. In the long run, it’s fair to say that both sides got bigger muscles from the exercise.

With roots in the middle 19th century, America’s publicly supported libraries were intended by their founders as educational institutions that would extend the work of the new public primary schools. The architecture of libraries in those days—and for a long time to come—reflected these lofty intentions with impressive columns, pediments and masonry work. (Carnegie libraries were often the most imposing building in town by far.) Libraries would also offer a way for adults to educate themselves at a time when relatively few people attended secondary school. In addition, according to Molz and Dain, libraries were to be “civilizing agents and objects of civic pride in a raw new country.” Technology was making books and periodicals cheap and abundant, resulting in what would soon become an avalanche of materials for libraries to house, preserve and organize. By default, they would have the additional task of creating a record for posterity.

These are all worthy goals—libraries remain the physical and intellectual custodians of human memory—but problems arose almost immediately. In city after city, despite the best efforts (and most fervent aspirations) of the new class of professionals known as librarians, circulation tended heavily toward popular fiction. This “epidemic” of fiction reading, as one top librarian called it in 1883, elicited the kind of exasperated condemnation that is today reserved mainly for popular music and television, and it presented a quandary.

Next page: In 1896, there were 971 public libraries in America. In 1903, there were 2,283. Andrew Carnegie was responsible for much of the increase.

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