Do We Really Need Libraries?

[Commentary] In New York City, supporters of public libraries say that respect for -- and repair of -- the libraries is long, well, overdue. A new campaign, Invest in Libraries, puts forth that in the past 10 years, the city government has reduced funding for public libraries by nearly 20 percent and 1,000 workers or so have been trimmed from the payroll. The campaign calls on the city to increase its support in various ways, such as restoring $65 million in operating funds. But with a world of information at our fingertips -- virtually anytime, anywhere -- do we still need physical book-and-mortar libraries? After all, as New York City is reminding us, upkeep and operation costs can be expensive. And as a 1983 British conference on libraries observed, "we are a long way off producing true cost benefit data where you can assign a credible cash figure to the value of using any type of library." The answer seems self-evident. We are asking the same question more than 30 years later and many libraries are teeming with people.

As the British study pointed out, there is a lot of opportunity when reckoning with naysayers "for developing costs per benefits but we do need to spend more time establishing exactly what these benefits are." The proceedings of the 1983 conference, by the way, were titled: "" What are the benefits of libraries in this day and age? Like a good librarian, Tony Marx of the New York Public Library has some answers. Today's libraries still lend books, he says. But they also provide other services to communities, such as free access to computers and Wi-Fi, story times to children, language classes to immigrants and technology training to everyone. "Public libraries are arguably more important today than ever before," Marx says. "Their mission is still the same -- to provide free access to information to all people. The way people access information has changed, but they still need the information to succeed, and libraries are providing that." Or as Andrew Carnegie said many years ago: "A library outranks any other thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert."