Do Libraries Still Matter?

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The Public Library Inquiry found that only one-in-ten adults and three-in-ten children used libraries, and of course much of this use was recreational, as it had always been. Most of the circulation was fiction, most of the reference questions were simple, and most of the users, rather than proletarians hungry for knowledge, were comfortably middle-class. Berelson stated bluntly that libraries simply weren’t suited to bringing political enlightenment to the masses, and that anyway, those most in need of such enlightenment were least likely to visit. And he suggested the library might leave popular entertainment to the commercial media. Indeed, one dispiriting message of the Inquiry, at least to the idealistic universalists of the library world, was that libraries might as well focus on providing “quality” material to “serious” readers.

But the Inquiry did not lay to rest the problem of purpose, and as times changed, libraries struggled to change with them. In the turbulent 1960s they launched aggressive “outreach” programs, and in the 1970s, with computers starting to have a broad impact, libraries sought to recast themselves as information delivery centers (or words to that effect); librarians were urged by their forward-looking colleagues to assess the “information needs” of their clients. A paper by seven librarians appointed by the president of the American Library Association (entitled Toward a Conceptual Foundation for a National Information Policy) said America must “reaffirm its mandate to its publicly supported libraries to seek out and deliver to all people the information they need or desire...All information must be available to all people in all formats purveyed through all communication channels and delivered at all levels of comprehension.” For good measure, the paper added: “All information means all information,” and “everyone means everyone.”

But between the near megalomania of some library professionals on the one hand and the seeming reductionism of the Public Library Inquiry on the other, there were—and are—the flesh and blood users, who select themselves and have motivations as varied as the books on the shelf. Famed author and critic Alfred Kazin is a good example. While inhaling an entire century of American literary culture (thanks to days and nights at the public library, where he read not just books but yellowing pamphlets and early magazines), he couldn’t help noticing the motley users who seem to come and go at libraries generally. Libraries, he wrote, were “that asylum and church of the unemployed; of crazy ideologists and equally crazy Bible students doggedly writing ‘you lie!’ in the reference books on the open shelves; of puzzle fans searching every encyclopedia; of commission salesmen secretly tearing address lists out of city directories.”

The base and the exalted have always maintained an uneasy coexistence in the nation’s public libraries, which is precisely the joy of these institutions and the culture they preserve. Even in the 19th century, people understood that libraries could help you both get educated and stay out of trouble. “A well-equipped library building would prove a genuine blessing,” the Fairhaven, Washington Board of Managers wrote to Carnegie in requesting funds, “not only in affording instruction, but to attract and save scores who otherwise might find their way to saloons, gambling dens, and other places of ill repute.” People who lament the decline of civic culture forget how often that culture involved alcohol. Theodore Jones, in his 1996 volume, Carnegie Libraries Across America: a Public Legacy (Wiley), notes that even tiny places like Berlin, Wisconsin “stressed to Carnegie that its well-intended population lived amid no less than twenty saloons.”

A century, more or less, after many of these libraries got going, relatively few are still serving their original purpose, at least physically. A recent national survey of Carnegie libraries is included in the Jones book. Of 1,689 U.S. Carnegie libraries, according to Jones, at least 772 were still functioning as public libraries. Another 350 survived to serve a variety of uses, often as a museum or home for the local historical society. A total of 377 had made it onto the National Register of Historic Places—more than any other type of building, while 276 are lost: demolished for various reasons, or destroyed by fire or some other disaster. Finally, at least one—the East End Library in Superior, Wisconsin—was bought by a local couple, Ron and Sally Miller, and turned into a home which, they report, is still often visited by former patrons who remember the library with great fondness.

We do have more up-to-date information about California, where Andrew Carnegie funded 144 libraries, more than in any state save Indiana. Pat Skehan, a retired librarian who, with her husband Bernie, has made Carnegie libraries a personal passion, reports that 87 of the original 144 libraries are still standing, but only 36 are still libraries. Another 20 are museums, with the rest serving a wide variety of uses. (The Skehans have shot or obtained a photograph of every Carnegie library built in the state, and with the help of historian Lucy Kortum have amassed a wealth of commentary and images on their web site at http://carnegie-libraries.org.)

It is perhaps fitting that the original Carnegie libraries should endure more as a concept—universal, publicly supported library service—and as lovely old buildings than as functioning libraries. People will always need the knowledge that libraries have to offer, and that knowledge is always expanding. People may need as well the sense of refuge libraries can offer. “The public library’s essential value as social space inheres in its being a public facility for private contemplation in company with others,” Molz and Dain write, characterizing libraries as “stable, welcoming, venerable, but also modern,” and “associated with education and culture and understood as communal property but not too associated with government.”

Libraries will have a crucial role for years to come no matter how much of recorded human knowledge makes its way onto the Internet. No one has yet come up with a proven method of preserving digital information for a century or more, and the explosion of knowledge and information abetted by the digital revolution makes the organizing and cataloging skills of librarians ever more valuable. Already more and more free reference services are available each day—some libraries are contracting for such services in other time zones to make this easier—and you can try out a pay version, called Google Answers, on the Web (although the answers are unlikely to come from actual librarians).

Michael Gorman, the learned dean of library services at California State University-Fresno and president-elect of the American Library Association, has argued that digital technology, for libraries at least, represents an evolutionary change instead of a revolution, and should be treated accordingly. On the other hand, William J. Mitchell, professor of architecture and media arts and sciences at MIT, predicted fully a decade ago that the facade of the library “is not to be constructed of stone and located on a street in Bloomsbury, but of pixels on thousands of screens scattered throughout the world.” As far as he was concerned, “there is nothing left to put a grand facade on.”

Vannevar Bush beat everyone to the punch. In 1945 he published an article in the Atlantic Monthly on what he called “memex,” an imaginary workstation that would easily store and retrieve troves of data. Now that memex is here, and as more and more of what we know is funneled into it, it’s conceivable that libraries someday will function more as secure archives, repositories of expertise and communal havens for Internet access rather than as physical dispensers of books and periodicals. And if that day comes, it means only that the library dream—of universal access to knowledge and information—has taken a giant leap toward becoming an every-day reality. Hallelujah.

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