[Publib] Wall Street Journal Weighs In On Public Libraries

[KM Denny]

January 3, 2007



Should Libraries' Target Audience Be
Cheapskates With Mass-Market Tastes?
By JOHN J. MILLER
January 3, 2007; Page D9

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" may be one of Ernest Hemingway's best-known books, 
but it isn't exactly flying off the shelves in northern Virginia these days. 
Precisely nobody has checked out a copy from the Fairfax County Public 
Library system in the past two years, according to a front-page story in 
yesterday's Washington Post.

And now the bell may toll for Hemingway. A software program developed by 
SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians 
of which books are circulating and which ones aren't. If titles remain 
untouched for two years, they may be discarded -- permanently. "We're being 
very ruthless," boasts library director Sam Clay.

As it happens, the ruthlessness may not ultimately extend to Hemingway's 
classic. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" could win a special reprieve, and, in the 
future, copies might remain available at certain branches. Yet lots of other 
volumes may not fare as well. Books by Charlotte Brontë, William Faulkner, 
Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have recently been 
pulled.

Library officials explain, not unreasonably, that their shelf space is 
limited and that they want to satisfy the demands of the public. Every 
unpopular book that's removed from circulation, after all, creates room for 
a new page-turner by John Grisham, David Baldacci, or James Patterson -- the 
authors of the three most checked-out books in Fairfax County last month.

But this raises a fundamental question: What are libraries for? Are they 
cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been thought and said? 
Or are they more like actual stores, responding to whatever fickle taste or 
Mitch Albom tearjerker is all the rage at this very moment?

If the answer is the latter, then why must we have government-run libraries 
at all? There's a fine line between an institution that aims to edify the 
public and one that merely uses tax dollars to subsidize the recreational 
habits of bookworms.

Fairfax County may think that condemning a few dusty old tomes allows it to 
keep up with the times. But perhaps it's inadvertently highlighting the fact 
that libraries themselves are becoming outmoded.

There was a time when virtually every library was a cultural repository 
holding priceless volumes. Imagine how much richer our historical and 
literary record would be if a single library full of unique volumes -- the 
fabled Royal Library of Alexandria, in Egypt -- had survived to the present 
day.

As recently as a century ago, when Andrew Carnegie was opening thousands of 
libraries throughout the English-speaking world, books were considerably 
more expensive and harder to obtain than they are right now. Carnegie always 
credited his success in business to the fact that he could borrow books from 
private libraries while he was growing up. His philanthropy meant to provide 
similar opportunities to later generations.

Today, however, large bookstore chains such as Barnes & Noble and Borders 
bombard readers with an enormous range of inexpensive choices. An even 
greater selection is available online: Before it started selling mouthwash 
and power tools, Amazon.com used to advertise itself as "the world's biggest 
bookstore." It still probably deserves the label, even though there are now 
a wide variety of competing retailers. (Full disclosure: Years ago, I was a 
paid reviewer for Amazon.com.)

The reality is that readers have never enjoyed a bigger market for books. 
Shoppers can buy everything from hot-off-the-press titles in mint condition 
to out-of-print rarities from secondhand dealers. They can even download 
audiobooks to their MP3 players and listen to them while jogging or driving 
to work. Companies such as Google and Microsoft are promising to make 
enormous amounts of out-of-copyright material available to anyone with a 
computer and a browser.

The bottom line is that it has never been easier or cheaper to read a book, 
and the costs of reading probably will do nothing but drop further.

If public libraries attempt to compete in this environment, they will 
increasingly be seen for what Fairfax County apparently envisions them to 
be: welfare programs for middle-class readers who would rather borrow Nelson 
DeMille's newest potboiler than spend a few dollars for it at their local 
Wal-Mart.

Instead of embracing this doomed model, libraries might seek to 
differentiate themselves among the many options readers now have, using a 
good dictionary as the model. Such a dictionary doesn't merely describe the 
words of a language -- it provides proper spelling, pronunciation and usage. 
New words come in and old ones go out, but a reliable lexicon becomes a 
foundation of linguistic stability and coherence. Likewise, libraries should 
seek to shore up the culture against the eroding force of trends.

The particulars of this task will fall upon the shoulders of individual 
librarians, who should welcome the opportunity to discriminate between the 
good and the bad, the timeless and the ephemeral, as librarians 
traditionally have done. They ought to regard themselves as not just experts 
in the arcane ways of the Dewey Decimal System, but as teachers, advisers 
and guardians of an intellectual inheritance.

The alternative is for them to morph into clerks who fill their shelves with 
whatever their "customers" want, much as stock boys at grocery stores do. 
Both libraries and the public, however, would be ill-served by such a 
Faustian bargain.

That's a reference, by the way, to one of literature's great antiheroes. 
Good luck finding Christopher Marlowe's play about him in a Fairfax County 
library: "Doctor Faustus" has survived for more than four centuries, but it 
apparently hasn't been checked out in the past 24 months.

Mr. Miller writes for National Review and is the author of "A Gift of 
Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America" (Encounter Books).

  URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116778551807865463.html

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