Last week the American Library Association, the world’s oldest library organization, held its annual meeting in California. The theme of the meeting? “Transforming our Libraries. Ourselves.”
Reminiscent of the 1970s feminist bible Our Bodies, Ourselves, it was not surprising that the association chose as its keynote speaker feminist Gloria Steinem. Steinem addressed patriarchal power and the misguided study of Christopher Columbus, as well as identifying the roots of “nongender” in Native American languages. She declared the ALA meeting to be post-racist, post-monotheist, and post-nationalist. Another featured speaker focused on marriage equality.
These speeches highlight the problem libraries face in an age of funding crunches: Too little focus, too much activism. Or, as Sari Feldman, the newly appointed president of the ALA, announced at the conference, the first goal of libraries today “is to increase awareness about how different libraries are today.” Should this be their goal?
The library association apparently believes that libraries should offer a range of services to stay relevant: Libraries now offer coding classes, internet access, printing services, career centers, business incubators, and schools (some libraries in New York are even opening Kindergarten programs).
Perhaps this is why in the ALA’s “National Policy Agenda for Libraries,” the word “books” appears once in the summary and only three times more in the next sixteen pages. “Libraries today are less about what we have for people, and more about what we do for and with people,” Feldman said.
No one argues that contemporary digital technology has a place within libraries. Many (if not most) of the people using public libraries on any given day are really using the library’s free wireless network on their iPhones, iPads, and laptops. But books, both in digital or hard copy form, and a contemplative environment in which to enjoy them, should remain the heart of libraries.
After all, contrary to the notion that libraries today are radically different institutions from those first endowed by Andrew Carnegie’s fortunes more than a century ago, most public libraries in America are still repositories for physical books. And in between the stacks are quiet places where you can self-educate, if you choose.
Tony Marx, president of the New York Public Library, recently noted that Carnegie’s gift created a “safe oasis” with free access to knowledge and information. That sensibility, that feeling of refuge, is on display every time I work from my local library alongside countless other patrons.
The books and digital archives that fill libraries offer us tools to create better versions of ourselves—our professional selves, our creative selves. They can also serve as a place to enhance community. Libraries do not actually lessen inequality. Libraries allow people the chance to acquire education and erase knowledge disparities themselves.
We can take coding classes at the library, but until we delve into books about computer science programming and theory, our coding skills will be marginal at best.
We can send our kids to library programs after school, but until we read hundreds of books to them and they read hundreds more themselves they will not become proficient readers.
We can offer job courses and skills programs but unless potential employees acquire deeper education and mastery of business and science and languages, these programs are likely to offer only false promises.
Long before he became the founder of one of America’s earliest libraries, Ben Franklin didn’t have enough money to become a member of the Library Company in Philadelphia. So he devised a clever way to do the one thing he knew he needed to broaden his education: Earn more money to buy books, which were rare and expensive in early America.
Franklin had read a book about a “vegetable diet”—what we would call vegetarian—and began feeding himself on meals of boiled potatoes, rice, and pudding. Then he asked his brother, for whom he was an apprentice in a printing company, to give Franklin the money that Franklin was paying for his board.
“He instantly agreed to it,” Franklin wrote in his autobiography. “And I presently found that I could save half what he paid me. This was an additional fund for buying books.” As well, instead of returning each night to the noise of the boarding house, “I remained there alone, and dispatching presently my light repast . . . had the rest of the time till their return for study.”
Without access to a real library, Franklin created the atmosphere of one during the off-hours in a quiet printing house. There he practiced arithmetic (which he had twice failed in school) and read books about navigation, geometry, science, philosophy, grammar, and rhetoric.
On a recent visit to my public library, as I worked at a table near a dedicated teen section, I listened to a librarian repeatedly scold a group of children for being too loud. The focus of his ire: A group of teenage boys sitting on a couch with game consoles playing video games on a large flat screen television. Behind them were shelves and shelves of books. If this was part of the library’s effort to erase the “digital divide,” it didn’t seem like one that was likely to encourage the kind of dedicated commitment to learning that will earn you a spot in a top university today.
Libraries need to keep giving us one essential thing, the same thing Franklin struggled to create for himself many years ago: A refuge for books and people, and a place to focus and learn in an age of distraction.
The post Why Libraries Need Focus More than Change appeared first on Acculturated.