A New Utility: The Library as Critical Infrastructure

Everyone who plays the board game Monopoly knows that the real power properties to own are the utilities. If you have Water Works, the Electric Company and all four railroads in your pile, you’ve got a solid chance of winning, because while all the other players will eventually go bankrupt on some Park Place housing scheme, you can sit back and collect rent, because everyone at some point in the game lands on one of the utilities. I haven’t played this game in years and may never again, as the thought of playing a real estate game fills me with existential dread on a level of something out of Lovecraft. But as a child, the game taught me two very important lessons: 1) that real estate is an arbitrary mess that three times out of four leads to bankruptcy, and 2) the importance of well maintained and managed public utilities.

This isn’t one of those articles where I tell you what’s wrong with the library and how to fix it. I’m sure you’ve read enough of those. Over the last ten years or so, they’ve become ubiquitous, almost a sub-genre unto themselves. They all say the same thing: that the way to win hearts and minds and bring warm bodies into the library is to run the place like a business. We have to compete with Google, after all. You would think, what with recent events in the business world, this idea would have fallen out of favor. But you’d be wrong. A number of librarians still seem to think that the way to revitalize the library industry is to be even more like a business. It worked so well for AIG and General Motors, why not the library? Maybe when we go bankrupt, the federal government will step in and bail us out too, though I doubt it, since ALA doesn’t pull nearly the weight on Capitol Hill that the banking or auto industry does. Chrysler may be too big to fail, but the Library of Congress is just right.

If you keep trying to run a library like a business, someone, usually in the institution’s administration, gets it in their head that the library should perform as a business. They of course become disappointed when the library fails to generate any revenue. The esteem of the library in the administration’s eyes goes down, which effects budgets, which effects personal and acquisitions, and after ten years or more, we end up at the bottom of this downward spiral, wondering why every librarian in the country is doing the job of two (or sometimes three) people and no one like us and we’re short, our bellybuttons stick out too far, and we’re a terrible burden on our poor mothers.

And I lied. Now I’m going to tell you what the problem with the library is and how to fix it. The problem is that we’ve spent the last decade or more trying to run a library like a business. The way to fix it is to stop doing this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing.

The library is not a business. It is a piece of our cultural infrastructure. More than that: it is a critical piece of our country’s infrastructure. And like the bridges and roads and power grid, it’s falling apart, due to decades of neglect by shortsighted bureaucrats who were too timid to say the T word (Taxes! Boo!) and by ordinary voters, too shortsighted to recognize that some things in this country are worth paying for, even if it means poor people and minorities and immigrants (you know, freeloaders) might get to use them too. More than that, we the voting people of this nation have overlooked the ugly truth: sometimes, the government is good at running things. Or at least subsidizing those who do run them as a not-for-profit enterprise, simply because water and heat and light and information are an intrinsic good in and of themselves that perversely (to the ears of the die hard capitalists among us) lose value when treated like commodities.

When I say that the library is a critical piece of infrastructure, I mean this plainly. It is not hyperbole or a metaphor. The library’s purpose is to provide access to information, just as the water company’s purpose is to provide potable water and the electric company’s is to provide electricity. And while they charge for these services, they are nominal fees incurred to offset the operational costs, underwritten by the local and state governments. They do this through taxes, which unfortunately, sometimes must go up in order to make sure that the roads get built (except in Louisiana) and the bridges get repaired (offer void in Minnesota) and the power stays on (unless you live in California in 2000, or anywhere in the south east during a summer thunderstorm).

Libraries, likewise, charge fees, paid for by property taxes in the case of your local public library, or paid for through tuition at any state or private school. This idea of our taxes going to pay for critical infrastructure is an important one, and so universal, that the founding fathers didn’t even bother to write it into the Constitution. They figured no citizen would mind paying for something that helps everyone, and that the states would figure out th ebest way to delegate the use of that revenue. And they were right, up until the people decided to elect a former body builder and actor as their Governor. Once you decide that celebrity is Good Enough for politics and taxes are intrinsically evil, all bets are off. Keep it up long enough, and the whole country starts to look like post-Katrina New Orleans.

For 3000 years, libraries have provided access to information. The format and structure of that information (and who had access to it) has changed but the library’s role as the steward of reliable information has not. According to the ALA, “Almost all Americans (92 percent) say they view their local library as an important education resource. Seven of 10 agreed their local library is a pillar of the community (72 percent), a community center (71 percent), a family destination (70 percent) and a cultural center (69 percent).” Access to reliable information is no longer a privilege, it’s a right. And with the economy hitting people hard, treating libraries the same as bookstores makes even less sense than it did in financially solvent times (when it still made zero sense). Now in our Google powered days, when people need to access information that may or may not be inside a book but probably is on the internet, providing free and open access is even more important. You can’t do that in a for profit way, at least not effectively.

Librarians like to gripe about Google and what it (always it, as if Google were an inhuman monster rather than a company run by fallible humans) has done to the way people treat information. Some of these complaints are even valid. Not everything is on Google (yet). But one thing Google has gotten right is their attitude about accessing information. Google’s mission has always been to help people find what they are looking for, faster, and easier than anyone else. Anyway you slice it, that’s a good goal. It’s so good, that libraries should steal it and make it their own goal.

In a lot of ways, librarians have been wedded to our traditional methods of searching and delivering information. These are still valid. (Most of them anyway. Maybe we shouldn’t chain books to benches anymore but that’s just a suggestion). One of the things I figured out as early as grad school was that librarians don’t have to know everything, they just have to know where everything is and how to find it. Simple, I know.

Another thing I learned was that librarians need to embrace changing technology. We’ve been told this so often, it’s practically a mantra. Say it a thousand times while starring at the OCLC logo and you’ll achieve enlightenment. Or a headache.

We get it. We’ve gotten it. We’ve embraced technology, even when what we really want is just stuff that works.[1]

We hip and modern librarians use Google Apps and Facebook and Twitter and all the other Web 2.0 doodads, and some of them even work. But it’s been a reluctant embrace. More of an uncomfortable hug between new acquaintances who aren’t sure the other isn’t going to stab them with a needle full of tranquilizer and steel their kidney while they’re unconscious. The hardest part is coming to terms with the fact that not everyone who sits down at the reference desk or searches the library catalog is working on their doctoral thesis on symbolism in Ulysses. Sometimes they’re just looking for the name of that author their sister likes or, Borges help us, the new book in the Twilight series. Sometimes they’re just looking for the bathroom. Or what passes for a bathroom in Malaysia, because they’d really like to know how much toilet paper to bring with them on vacation.

Not all users are doing hardcore research. Some are, and by golly, if we don’t love those people like our own put upon mothers. But most people are just looking for a quick answer and they’ve learned that Google is Good Enough and Good Enough will do just fine.

The other problem with libraries are the librarians. We were trained to do two things: go beyond Good Enough and find The Best and hoard information resources. Both were at one time admirable (and the first still is), but not always what the patron wants. Handing our international traveler the complete history of Malaysian sanitation isn’t necessary when what all he wants is to know if he should stock up on two-ply before heading to the airport. Sometimes, Good Enough should works for librarians, too. And sneering at questions about toilet paper and Twilight isn’t going to win friends and influence people, either. Any kind of question is all right. Knowing where to find it is better. Sometimes the necessary information is in the collection and sometimes it’s just out there on Google or even on Wikipedia. Knowing when and where to go looking for Good Enough is just as important as mastering the intricacies of searching Ebsco databases and being able to tell at a glance the difference between an article on Homer and an article on Joyce. The library can and should be the place to do both. Google isn’t the enemy, it’s part of us. Literally. Most people –librarians and patrons– forget that many catalogs are searchable on Google and that all of the books in Google Scholar come from the collections of libraries around the world. It’s not just a matter of embracing technology but knowing how to use it to find what patrons want and need, not just what we think they should want or need. Learning to let go of owning information resources is another hurdle, but one that, in our cash-strapped times, we’re startig to live with. We can’t afford to buy every reliable source of information in the world. But that’s OK, because thanks to the internet and yes, in large part, thanks to Google, we don’t have to own everything. Just knowing it exists and what the url is Good Enough.

My coworker, Michael Farris summed it up in a motto, “If you want the best, come to the library. If you want good enough, we’ve got that too.”

The hard part is making sure our patrons (you now, everyone) know that the library is the place to go for any and all their information needs. 92% may value libraries but only one third to one half use them on a regular basis. The rest may have alternate methods of getting information but most people simply don’t bother, because they don’t know they can or they feel intimidated by the environment.

A hundred years ago, people didn’t know that you had to call up the electric company to get the lights to work. But they learned. Now, it’s such common knowledge, that we don’t even think about the role the electric company plays in our everyday life. It’s just there. Convincing people that the library is a utility will take time. But eventually, future editions of Monopoly will come with a new utility that every player will covet alongside Waterworks and the railroads: the Library, because that’s where you learn how to play the game.

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1. I’m paraphrasing Douglas Addams. What he said in full was, “We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” which is far more telling and truthful but also a topic for another discussion.