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Libraries Are Information Repositories

Posted on: November 23, 2009 | SCLMBC | Comments Off | Print Article | Rate Post:

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This piece, written by Greg Hill is Fairbanks North Star Borough Library Director, ran in the Sunday edition of the FDNM.  (Fairbanks Daily New Minor)

OPINION ARTICLE

By Greg Hill, FNSB Library Services Director, 459-1027

Last Sunday’s Anchorage Daily News ran a front page article, the online version is titled “Are Local Libraries In Process of Checking out?”, about the severe budget cuts threatening their public library system’s existence.  The article stated that “The budget cuts come at a time when libraries around the country are rethinking their role in the 21st century” and goes on to say that, besides being print repositories, “libraries also are digital centers where information is exchanged and Internet is available to those who don’t have it at home.”

This is true as far as it goes.  Modern public libraries do provide a lot of digital information and connectivity, but that’s just a reflection of one of the fundamental duties of libraries throughout history.

Libraries have appeared wherever writing has been invented, and they’ve been doing the same core functions from the clay tablets days right up to silicon:  They acquire information, organize and store it safely, and provide it to those allowed to use it.  Today it’s exactly the same; the only differences are in the forms information comes in.

Print remains an extremely cost-effective and reliable form of long-term data storage, and more books are being published and read than ever before, but that’s not why I’m unconcerned about libraries becoming less useful.  Libraries are information repositories, and they’ll be around as long as information is needed.  America’s public libraries, including Anchorage’s, are being used more now than ever before because we live in the Information Age, and, as libraries have adapted themselves, the use of library webpages, database downloads, and Internet connections has soared.

Computers and the Internet are important tools, but they are merely informational conduits, not ends in and of themselves.  As the flood of information continues to mount, modern people finds themselves needing knowledge navigators, like those found at their public libraries: experienced, objective guides to get through the jungles of data that grow denser by the day to find specific bits of information.

Americans need education all their lives, and no institution is more educational in nature than the Free Public Library, an open and democratic institution created in this country.  The public library is truly an equal opportunity educator, from the “Mother Moose” classes offered to infants and their parents, to “the school years” when homework is due tomorrow and school libraries close at the end of the school day, through the various stages and needs of adulthood (resume writing, tax assistance, Consumer Reports, repairing chainsaws, medical procedure background, investment news, etc.).  Well-rounded humans are knowledgeable about music, art, and politics and need stimulation for cultural growth, too.  The public library fills all those needs.

No institution is more innately educational than the public library, and no other educational body serves all of society at all points of their lives.  The Daily News article ends with an Anchorage librarian saying, “We have to weigh things … What is our core?  What’s our purpose?”  I submit that libraries’ core purpose hasn’t changed in five millennia: they educate.  Libraries have always gathered and organized the best information available, and gotten it to people so they can become educated.

I see two great emerging needs, however: providing a community commons, and delivering more types of information remotely.  There are precious few places for groups of people to meet to plan, study, confer, and make presentations.  There are few places for people to simply sit and be around other people without having to buy something, or buy into something.

Supporting public libraries goes far beyond aesthetic niceties.  Numerous studies, including a major one conducted in Anchorage last year, [“Growing Minds and Strengthening Communities: An Economic Valuation Study of the Anchorage Public Library” http://www.muni.org/Departments/library/Documents/APLValuationReport.pdf] have consistently shown that every dollar spent on public libraries comes back to the community in services worth double that or more.  This doesn’t begin to estimate the long-term value to any community of having a well-read, learning-capable workforce that has a reliable source of sophisticated, up-to-date, and reliable information.  Just look at the country’s burgeoning prison populations.  The majority of inmates are functional illiterates and can’t read well-enough to understand a job manual, and housing them siphons over $60 billion dollars annually from the national pocketbook.

Public libraries certainly aren’t perfect; there is plenty of room for improvement.  But never in history have there been libraries as useful and powerful as the average modern public library.  And never in history has a whole people had at their full disposal the incredible educational power that is our public library.  Libraries aren’t just nice; they’re an educational force that’s a major component of our community’s wealth.

Greg Hill has been the FNSB Library Services Director since 1990.  He is a past president of the Alaska Library Association and has been a degreed librarian (University of Texas Austin) since 1982.

Category: Alaska, Education, Opinion, Technology

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