Slate has just shared an extended article as part of its Future Tense partnership with Arizona State University and New America, detailing the contributions that libraries make to social services, greater equality, and global development. All this in the context of the decline of printed books.
Much of this draws on and echoes the findings of the September 2015 PEW Research Center report Libraries at the Crossroads. It also touches on the work of the the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s global libraries strategy. (The article writer’s mother directs the Foundation’s global libraries initiative.) The article also cites the findings of a report from the Aspen Institute that “the association between libraries and physical books will probably shrink in the years ahead.”
All this creates a powerful case for the benefits that libraries can deliver to communities in the developed and developing worlds alike. However, I do have a problem with its approach. If these benefits are used to sell the library proposition under false pretenses, there is still the danger of missing the fundamental function and benefit of libraries, and indeed, of books. A library as internet access point and social services center can be easily replaced by other similar facilities that don’t have book collections to maintain.
The article also misses out on the huge work being done to take libraries into the digital era through e-lending services and related facilities, such as loan of or access to e-reading devices. The proposition that libraries are there to lend you books that you can’t or don’t want to buy yourself hasn’t gone away with e-books, although where you borrow those books from may have changed. Big Publishing would probably be very upset if it had. Not least because if they can’t make money selling books to those too poor to buy more than a handful, they can make money selling the books to the libraries that lend to them. And the hard work of deciding what books to buy for your community, physical or digital, still goes on regardless of digital disruption.
So, two cheers for Jacob Brogan and his devotion to libraries. And a half cheer for his proposition that: “Libraries are powerful precisely because they’re spaces of potentiality.” No, they’re powerful because they contain, conserve, protect, and provide knowledge, and culture. Justifying them as platforms for enablement is missing their true, unique value.
