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Nunberg's "Will Libraries Survive?"



I pass this one as it may interest those of you in the LS track and also
those of you in the IS track in a different way perhaps. It's not required
reading for our class, but it is a good and thought provoking article. It
could relate to one of your topics.

"WILL LIBRARIES SURVIVE?" by Dr. Geoffrey Nunberg of Xerox PARC, who also
edited "Future of the Book" (1994) in the SILS Library
http://unclib.lib.unc.edu:5555/MARION/AUE-6350

from the American Prospect 
ISSUE 41 November - December 1998
http://www.prospect.org/archives/41/41nunb.html

{..Excerpts from the article..}

In a Washington Post interview a couple of years ago, Bill Gates discussed
his plans to give away the bulk of his fortune and suggested he already
had in mind doing with the personal computer "something like what Carnegie
did with libraries where he said, Okay, books are this empowering thing
that people . . . should have access to.' " That was presumably the
impetus for the announcement in late 1997 of two grants programs for
public libraries, one consisting of $200 million worth of software from
the Microsoft Corporation, the other of $200 million from the personal
fortunes of Bill and Melinda Gates, directed at providing digital
technology and internet access to underserved libraries.

The period between 1850 and the First World War was the golden age of the
American public library. The number of public libraries went from around
50 in 1850, to 300 by 1875, to several thousand by the turn of the
century. A lot of this growth was the direct result of Carnegie's largess,
but he was responding to a very general conviction that libraries were
essential institutions for social progress, to the point where he could
say the public library "outranks any other one thing that a community can
do to help its people." The library movement battened on the
late-nineteenth-century ideology that saw literacy both as crucial for
social advancement and as ensuring an enlightened civic discourse. As J.
P. Quincy wrote in 1876, "[To the free library] we may hopefully look for
the gradual deliverance of the people from the wiles of the rhetorician
and stump orator. . . . As the varied intelligence which books can supply
shall be more and more widely assimilated, the essential elements of every
political and social question may be confidently submitted to that
instructed common sense upon which the founders of our government relied."

The founders of the library movement envisioned the public library as an
equal partner of the public school in achieving these goals. It was a
time, after all, when schooling was more limited than it is today-in 1890
only a quarter of American students finished high school-and when the
curriculum was mired in rote learning that had little relevance to the
forms of literacy that reformers wanted to establish. (Charles Eliot
estimated in 1890 that it would take a Massachusetts high school graduate
only 46 hours to read aloud all of the books that were assigned in the
last six years of schooling.) The public library, by contrast, seemed to
offer a venue that was accessible to everyone, one that "appeals to and
nurtures every idiosyncrasy," as one enthusiast put it. And as the
libraries went up, they were staffed by cadres of "apostles of culture,"
as the historian Dee Garrison describes them, many of them graduated from
the newly established library schools, the first of which was founded by
Melvil Dewey (of Dewey decimal system fame) at Columbia University in
1887.

http://www.prospect.org/archives/41/41nunb.html