Our Temple of Democracy and Its Uncertain Future

For the Lancaster Public Library, the good news and the bad news have stacked up so close to one another it's almost a metaphor for urban living.  Faced with cuts in funding support earlier this year, the Library ditched $90,000 worth of database subscriptions that were among the most heavily used and useful for small business owners, entrepreneurs and start-ups.

At the same time the library management is cooking up big plans -- as in $8.5 million big -- for a major facility renovation and expansion.  A full-ahead capital campaign is being readied for launch and almost $3 million in pledges have already been secured, according to the Intel-New Era.

It's a great thing to think big, but the library's Janus-faced financial picture mirrors a larger existential debate currently being played out among library professionals in the board rooms and offices they occupy overlooking those hushed reading rooms. 

The question before the house runs something like this: in a resource-constrained time, should the public library hunker down and provide the basic services -- collections, lending, reference, reading and writing space -- that have served its patrons so well for generations; or, in an age of information abundance, should the library reinvent itself to become the public doorway to new tools and forms of collecting, portraying, analyzing and communicating the epochal expansion of knowledge and data?

The point and counterpoint have been playing out this month on the (digital) pages of the fine on-line publication, Next City.

As explained in an in-depth piece by Amanda Erikson of The Washington Post, proponents of tomorrow’s technology-driven library see the traditional library user aging out, while a new generation of patrons is appearing already tech savvy and conversant with digital modes of absorbing, manipulating and presenting information.

Erikson lays out the problem: “Only 48 percent of all Americans over 16 years old stepped foot into a library in 2013, down from 53 percent in 2012. Twenty-four percent of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2013. There are a lot of reasons for that decline — people are busier now, with television and movies and the Internet all vying for time and attention. In a digital age, when most people can download most books without even leaving the couch, what can libraries offer their patrons? A place to work? Computers? DVDs? Job training? In other words: What makes a library a library, anyway?”

One place she found her answer was North Carolina State University, which has looked to create the library of the future, after hearing from students that what they needed were “spaces to work together and opportunities to visualize data on some kind of grand scale.”  So rather than reading a book about a historic event, say D-Day, they’d be supplied advanced tools to actually build a digital model of the assault on Omaha Beach.

Another feature of tomorrow’s library is decentralization. In the suburbs around San Antonio, the Bexar County library system is installing connected terminals in all sorts of unexpected places: jury rooms, bus stations and hospitals, among them.

It’s a compelling vision, yet no more than two days passed after publication of Erikson’s article that Next City ran a ringing dissent by Adam Feldman, a music librarian at the Free Library of Philadelphia. “Books on a shelf arranged by the Dewey Decimal System are an essential and invaluable architecture of human discovery and understanding,” wrote Feldman.

Decrying what he believes to be the false promise of “digital evalgelism”, Feldman adds: “The digital-only library is far from a utopian information commons. Rather, that utopian commons is the traditional, well-resourced, urban library with several generations worth of collection expertise.”

Diametrically opposed though they may be, both camps recognize and embrace the core social justice role of the public library to provide universal opportunity to learn -- regardless of economic or social status -- and to do so at little or no cost to the user.  

They are striving to ensure the library remains, writes Erikson, “as Andrew Carnegie imagined: a place where the poor can go to better themselves, to find a job and to access the resources so easily accessible to the rich."


As Lancaster’s library mulls its future, the essential mission remains as it's always been, even if the methods are expanding at Big-Bang speed.