Tag Archives: library

Benjamin Franklin and the Library Company of Philadelphia

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We think of a public library as one operated by a town or county. It serves the general public without charge. Peterborough, New Hampshire started the first one in America in 1833. It is not, however, the first American circulating library. That honor belongs to the Library Company of Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin founded it in 1831. Franklin’s library was a subscription library. Its members pooled their resources to purchase books for their own use. At the time, books were rare and expensive in the American colonies. Only the most wealthy citizens could afford to buy very many books. Harvard University and other educational institutions had libraries, but they generally protected their books from the public. Open limited hours, they offered access to only a few people. Until Franklin decided to establish his library, the very idea of a library people could actually use hardly existed.

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What they say about the library: provocative quotations

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When I graduated from library school, I went on a lot of informational interviews. One librarian told me, “Libraries have changed a lot since you were in library school.” When I reminded her that I had graduated only two weeks earlier, she replied, “Like I said, libraries have changed a lot since you were in library school.” Few modern institutions are more ancient than the library, and few are as consistently on the cutting edge of change. So naturally people have talked and written a lot about libraries over the centuries. Cicero, the Roman orator, said, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” But what about now?

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Treasure trove: New York Public Library Digital Collection

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The New York Public library holds many rare and valuable materials. The new New York Public Library Digital Collection makes them easily available. Before the Internet, if you wanted to use them, provided you knew they existed, you would have had to travel to the library and consult them in person. When the library first began to digitize them and put them online, you could have seen and downloaded a low-resolution images. You would have had to pay for, and wait for, a high-resolution image. Discovery and access were still difficult. Perhaps its description of one of its major collection is representative of the library’s own concerns:

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Raucous good times at the library

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I hope the stereotype of a librarian as a frumpy woman with no friends and a fetish for quiet had a decent burial long ago. Librarians are very creative people who enjoy having fun as much as anyone else. A few years ago, I presented some videos of library book cart drill teams! You might find similar shenanigans at a parade. Some librarian conferences have regular drill team competitions. But what about singing, dancing, running, riding book carts, and even laughing aloud in the library itself? At the reference desk and circulation desk! Even in the stacks!! Librarians do all that and more in parody videos of popular songs.

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What do librarians do?

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It never ceases to amaze me how many newspaper and magazine articles I see almost every month proclaiming that “the library is more than books.” That’s public libraries. Newspapers and magazines don’t seem to acknowledge academic libraries, special libraries, or school libraries very much. I don’t see nearly as many articles that acknowledge that librarians do more than sit around reading books all day, but that’s another long-standing misconception. Library collections have been more than books for more than a century. Every new technology in information or entertainment becomes a new part of library collections. But libraries have always been more than their collections, too. There are plenty of bookless libraries. The only requirement for something to be a library is that it has librarians. 

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