A Conflict of Visions: Public Library Edition

Investigating Competing Discourses on the Role of Public Libraries

Thomas Sowell in a library; photo by Mikkel Aaland

I.

The modern public library operates according to a service mission that has become more user-focused with every generation. Ever-expanding access to library services - collections, programming, and spaces - is perhaps taken for granted. We know it was not always this way. Closed stacks, restricted items, and limited collection development have been justified at various times as being in the best interests of the user and the library. Not so much now, especially in larger metropolitan library systems.

Still, libraries of yesteryear nevertheless had the power to awe with their abundance, even when that abundance was circumscribed. As a young immigrant girl in late nineteenth-century Boston, Mary Antin wrote evocatively about her rapturous experiences at the public library:

The stretch of weeks from June to September, when the schools were closed, would have been hard to fill in had it not been for the public library. At first I made myself a calendar of the vacation months, and every morning I tore off a day, and comforted myself with the decreasing number of vacation days. But after I discovered the public library I was not impatient for the reopening of school. The library did not open till one o'clock in the afternoon, and each reader was allowed to take out only one book at a time. Long before one o'clock I was to be seen on the library steps, waiting for the door of paradise to open. I spent hours in the reading-room, pleased with the atmosphere of books, with the order and quiet of the place…

A city library not opening until the afternoon while limiting users to one book at a time may seem unfathomable now. Users can enjoy access to multiple books in a variety of formats, digital reference sources, periodicals, audio visual recordings, and video games; not to mention toys, board games, musical instruments (I have played a theremin thanks to public libraries!), tools, fishing rods, puzzles, and even wall art. Users can request new items for purchase and track the request. They may reserve rooms for private study or public events. They may attend career workshops, hone their genealogical skills, or leisurely browse the web. Visitors to a public library may while away the hours from morning til night doing all or none of these things.

The author plays a theremin at the Ann Arbor District Library in 2015

And then there is the space itself. Public libraries have long served as monuments to culture, and building design trends attest to the enduring role of the library as temple of knowledge. For so many people, libraries represent hope and possibility. I myself am not immune to the sway of this grandeur. I believe the community-subsidized public library to be one of the greatest of American inventions.

II.

On the whole, I think library staff are right to be proud of this ever-expanding access. Librarians and para-professionals are generally passionate about providing users with more options at greater ease. At the same time, library staff remain mindful of differing barriers to access, and, crucially, how community needs differ among and between populations. Some library users visit for purely recreational purposes, while others are there for the access to something they need and otherwise lack. Thus, public libraries seek to accommodate the needs of diverse communities, though it remains to be seen if these needs can be met equally for all users, or if expansion of access in certain areas inevitably restricts access in others.

It will be obvious to anyone reading professional journals or popular media that competing discourses have emerged on the role of the public library, particularly in response to crisis situations in the communities they serve. On the one side, you will find a plethora of arguments that due to the lack of a social safety net, libraries are the last indoor, public space available to people who have no other place to dwell. A coffee shop will want someone to make a purchase. A city park will not be comfortable in inclement weather, and indoor facilities may restrict access to members. There are few places where someone can simply go or be for hours without being a paying customer. And even if a coffee shop or a park is hospitable, they are not typically in the business of connecting visitors to services. On the other side of this argument, library users and staff have expressed concern that libraries are straining to meet the needs of users in crisis, and are ultimately failing all of its users.

Not everyone visits a library for the collections, and there is not necessarily any objection to someone spending a long block of hours at the public library. The issue tends to come down to how they spend it. A graduate student sitting at a table all day on her laptop quietly revising a paper is going to be seen as a good and proper use of library facilities, because such a person is being “productive”. Or a retiree playing online games may not be productive, but this isn’t really a concern either provided they aren’t bothering anyone. But what about library users whose behavior is perceived as being disruptive or dangerous? People using drugs in the bathrooms, threatening other patrons with violence, or otherwise engaging in anti-social behavior? What about the people experiencing a serious mental health crisis? What about energetic minor children who have no aftercare options and cannot be alone? Depending on who you ask, these are vulnerable groups for whom the public library is duty-bound to provide direct services, or these are serious problems beyond the reasonable scope of library work. The question remains: what should be done?

To riff off Thomas Sowell here, these can perhaps be understood as the unconstrained vision versus the constrained vision of libraries. The unconstrained vision in library operations would go something like this: libraries exist to serve communities and should therefore be responsive to community needs, which are diverse and constantly changing. With dwindling public options available, it is right and necessary for public libraries as public institutions to fill gaps in services. Libraries will of course require increased funding that is commensurate with meeting this enlarged scope: funding to provide staff with better support, funding for better material resources, funding for adequate spaces. They will need social workers on staff or even librarians trained as social workers. I suspect that what is generally unspoken but implicit in the unconstrained vision is that these are temporary solutions until the social safety net and adequate forms of mutual aid are sufficiently available. Until then, refusing to help would be cruel or even deadly. If that means training the staff on how to administer Narcan or setting up daycare options, so be it. The unconstrained vision is inherently optimistic about the ability of people, using the correct framework, to solve any social problem. The unconstrained vision may see the constrained vision as selfish and pessimistic.

The constrained vision is, if not pessimistic, more skeptical. This perspective on library services would say: libraries cannot and should not be all things to all people. To attempt to do so would be at best ineffective and at worst catastrophic for its longevity. Libraries should focus on the traditional services it has done well, continue to enhance access in those areas, but not get consumed by mission creep. Fundamentally, some social problems are intractable due to ineradicable aspects of human nature. Some amount of anti-social behavior is inevitable in any community, and therefore the pragmatic response is to deter and control the behavior, not reason with it. The constrained vision may find the outlook of the unconstrained to be foolish, and the stuff catastrophes are made of.

A useful example of the unconstrained vision versus constrained vision in libraries can be found in the Berninghausen debates of the 1970s. David Berninghausen was an avatar of the constrained vision, who was wary of libraries becoming too prescriptive about social issues that he perceived as outside the public library’s control and would undermine librarians’ ability to perform core functions well. The members of the Social Responsibilities Round Table are perhaps representative of the unconstrained vision. Progressive factions in librarianship tend to believe that libraries are social institutions and inextricably linked to the conditions that produce social inequalities; and moreover are poised to redress these inequalities directly in myriad, meaningful ways.

It would be easy to reduce Sowell’s framework to that of liberal (unconstrained) and conservative (constrained) perspectives, and to some extent the visions map onto conventional political axes. People on the left tend to argue that institutions have an obligation to reduce or eliminate inequalities, whereas people on the right tend to emphasize the rights and responsibilities of individuals. That being said, the framework is meant to be understood as a more dynamic one. Sowell stresses that affinity for either vision is context-dependent, and that it is possible to adhere to some aspects of both. It is unlikely that, barring extreme cases, any one person operates entirely and consistently from either a constrained or unconstrained vision. Finally, neither vision is inherently more liberal or tolerant, and both visions have the potential to be applied in an illiberal or authoritarian fashion.

III.

This notion of a conflict of visions in libraries took shape in my mind as I read this recent article by Nicholas Hune-Brown in The Walrus: Have You Been to the Library Lately? Although the article focuses on libraries in Canadian cities, the issues described would be familiar to any urban library user in the United States as well: evidence of deep poverty and human suffering have become as synonymous with public libraries as Dewey call numbers. The author treaded carefully in exploring the role of libraries as all-purposes service providers, though he seemed skeptical that current arrangements are sustainable. He is sympathetic to the difficult position from which metropolitan libraries operate. He also comes across as a true library lover. Like Mary Antin in Boston over a century ago, he describes the awe he feels in Toronto:

I walked into the soaring atrium of the Toronto Reference Library, probably my favourite building in the city, and was hit with the feeling, so rare in modern life, of being in a beautiful, thoughtful place created and maintained for my benefit—a place that wanted nothing from me other than to make my life marginally better. A public place.

At another point he observes that in celebratory profiles of the public library’s “transformation from book repository to social services hub” this is usually presented “as an uncomplicated triumph.” Hume-Brown argues that while the expansion of library services may be impressive, it is far from uncomplicated, and not without costs. He concludes the piece on a somewhat hopeful note:

There are few other institutions that take as their constituency everyone. Democracy, of course, is messy. None of that work is magical. It’s grinding, difficult, always compromised. But watching a library function—doing the mundane, day-to-day work of accommodating an entire city within its walls—is also remarkable.

I will state that I disagreed with some of the characterizations of professional librarianship. No, the profession did not spring up around a need for shelving books. No, the proliferation of the internet did not mean “that one of the reference librarian’s main functions could now be done with the click of a mouse”. Those criticisms aside, however, this was a needed, clear-eyed examination of the scope and purpose of urban libraries. Consider this passage:

Libraries have proven themselves to be incredibly adaptative, contorting themselves into various shapes to serve the needs of their communities. That’s another favourite librarian saying: “A good library reflects its community.” But that goes both ways. A troubled community is reflected in its libraries. And if the social problems of twenty-first-century life continue to grow with little restraint, they will inevitably find their way into the city’s last public places.

Hune-Brown does not offer an exact prescription, though in chronicling how Canadian libraries have responded to various crises, the article signals alarm. What can libraries do, and what should libraries do? How shall libraries meet the complex and at times conflicting needs of diverse user groups? When users visit not for traditional library services, but just services?

Importantly, librarianship is not just dealing with the humanitarian crises of their user communities. The profession is wrestling with an internal crisis, its own version of a conflict of visions. Librarians disagree over definitions of neutrality and the application of intellectual freedom. As political partisanship becomes more divisive, library user communities likewise demonstrate intense ideological antipathy, and use the library as a form of proxy war. Of course, librarians have been debating versions of these issues for decades: as I recounted in a previous post, clarifying the mission and purpose of the library was the focus of the Public Library Inquiry reports released in 1950. Again, the concerns are not new. They just seem more urgent.

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References and further reading

American Library Association, “American Library Association Reports Record Number of Demands to Censor Library Books and Materials in 2022,” March 22, 2023.

Mary Antin, The Promised Land, Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1912.

Kelly Clark, “Keep Library Workers Safe,” American Libraries, April 23, 2019.

A Conflict of Visions, Wikipedia, last updated January 15, 2023.

Dominican University, MLIS and Master of Social Work Dual Degree.

Alastair Gee, “Homeless People Have Found Safety in a Library - But Locals Want Them Gone,” The Guardian, February 24, 2017.

Nicholas Hune-Brown, “Have You Been to the Library Lately?” The Walrus, June 12, 2023.

Steven Joyce, “A Few Gates: An Examination of the Social Responsibilities Debate in the Early 1970s & '90s,” Progressive Librarian 15 (Winter 1998/1999): 1-13.

Jean Kuo Lee, “How Libraries Are Helping the Unhoused,” Book Riot, November 17, 2021.

Mike Newall, “For These Philadelphia Librarians, Drug Tourists and Overdose Drills Are Part of the Job,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 2017.

MacKenzie Ryan, “Why US Libraries Are on the Frontlines of the Homelessness Crisis,” The Guardian, January 24, 2023.

Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, New York: William Morrow, 1987.

Chip Ward, “How the Public Library Became Heartbreak Hotel,” Tomdispatch, April 1, 2007.