At one time or another you may have heard someone comment that “we don’t need libraries anymore,” or that “libraries are dying out.” There are no statistics to support these opinions, including here at APL, where circulation has increase 220% over last year. However, for those who are not swayed by evidence, I’d like to offer a more theoretical argument (stay with me, readers-it won’t be painful, I promise.)
Public libraries became popular in the mid-19th century, largely due to growth in public education: more people became literate and sought out material to read at the library. This is likely what happened in Allenstown, as the first library was started in 1894 in the home of a local resident. At this time in history, information was scarce: books were expensive and a luxury that not everyone could afford. Therefore, people came to the library because it was one of their only opportunities to access information (at that time the most popular form of information was physical books).
Fast forward to today: information is free and available everywhere: we are now faced with information overload rather than information scarcity. Therefore, the role of the library in the community changes: instead of being a place where people come to access scarce information (via only physical books), people utilize the library to wade through the information overload. We may hold the information in the form of a book or audiobook, or we can help you access good information that you can trust to be true. In addition, the library is a place where you can learn to use information efficiently, whether it be a physical book or a webpage (most people think they can use Google just fine, but studies show that most people aren’t very efficient at finding information on the Internet; librarians are experts at this). Even though books are much cheaper than they were a hundred years ago, people still use the library to access free information, which is also a popular use of our library in Allenstown.
This little history lesson has a significant impact on funding: if you only understand libraries as they existed 100 years ago, as keepers of scarce information, one could potentially make the argument that the library needs less funding to survive than it did previously. However, using the appropriate 21st century understanding of libraries as tools for helping one wade through the onslaught of information to get to the good stuff, this argument that libraries can survive on less funding becomes moot. For example: one hundred years ago we didn’t have computers or Internet access; today they are an essential part of the library. All these things cost money.
Recap: Modern libraries exist for a different reason than they did 100 years ago; we also have different bills than we did 100 years ago. This does not mean that things cost less money, it means that we now must spend money on much more than just books.
