Hooray for the public library

I get all of my books from my local library. I have done this for years. The reasoning is that I am just too frugal (read that cheap) to buy a book that I know I will never open again after I have read it. Besides, as Zappa alludes to, you get a better education learning on your own.

I don’t need it cluttering up my shelf space collecting dust.

Did you know that the public library system that as we know it today is made possible by a very generous donation from Andrew Carnegie? Don’t know who he is? He lived from 1835-1911, and is considered to be one of the most famous "robber barons" of the last decades of the 1800s.

He thought libraries and books should be available to everyone. Interestingly, he was attacked by both the right, which called him a Communist for wanting to use taxes for libraries, and the left, which viewed taxes as a drain on the working man. By 1920, the Carnegie estate had donated $50 million to erect 2,500 library buildings, including 1,700 in the U.S.--by far the most sustained and widespread philanthropic enterprise ever devoted to libraries. Carnegie's donations got libraries started in small towns, not just big cities, throughout America. Some communities refused Carnegie's money because it was tainted, but basically we can thank Carnegie for the modern U.S. public library system.

Today there are roughly 9,000 public libraries in the U.S. plus another 8,000 if branch libraries are counted. Most of these (about 60%) are small public libraries serving communities of under 10,000 in population.

The modern library in the computer age is in a state of massive change (that is, crisis.) The question of "What belongs in a library?" is being revisited: What's worthless and what's worthy? Libraries must deal with lack of space and lack of funding even as more is being published than ever before.

Around 85% of library funding comes from taxes--federal, state, and local. The rationale behind government involvement is that libraries serve the public good. State law determines the autonomy and taxing power of local public libraries. Typically the law sets a ceiling on taxes; higher levels require a referendum.

So the next time we are faced with providing funding for our local libraries let’s give them what they want, just as we should with schools. Because as Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said libraries are “essential to the functioning of a democratic society" and "the great tools of scholarship, the great repositories of culture, and the great symbols of the freedom of the mind."

By the way, donations needn't be financial. Many libraries will accept DVDs, CDs, videos, books, etc.