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The act of eating would earn you a scolding in the library of yesteryear; now, more and more, you can buy a scone and latte. The library used to feel like a museum; today it feels more like a mall. The circulation desk on the ground floor of the Seattle Central Library resembles the check-out counter of an Old Navy. There's a Microsoft Auditorium and a Starbucks Teen Center. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer raved that the library "is going to be a huge hit with the mass audience that is its principal customer."4

If that kind of talk is a departure from the public library's august heritage, the idealismPlace of Learning, Place of Dreams is the title of a book about the new Seattle library in the gift shopis not. Although the public library system, like the interstate highway system, is, when you think about it, one of the most socialist operations this nation maintains, it continues to be associated with our noblest civic principles. Conceived in the late 19th century in a fit of optimism about the plausibility of social progress through public discourse and mass literacy, public libraries appeared by the thousands across America by the turn of the 20th century.

Their proliferation owed a great deal to the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, who pronounced that the library "outranks any other one thing that a community can do to help its people." While the role of the library has changedit is no longer the sole ambassador of books to the public, but butts heads with bookstore chains and online retailersits reason for being, in the eyes of librarians, remains the same. "I think of libraries as the cornerstone of democracy," Carol Brey-Casiano, director of the El Paso Public Library and president of the American Library Association, told me. "You can't have an informed citizenry without access to the information that is available in the library." If Brey-Casiano is guilty of hyperbole, than so was T.S. Eliot. "The very existence of libraries," he once said, "affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for man."

Part of Brey-Casiano's job as ALA president, which she began last July, is convincing legislators of Eliot's belief at a time when many state and local governments are running budget deficits. An ALA report released in April 2004 found that 41 states had cut their library budgets over the past year, and over 600 staffers had been laid off. Many libraries were reducing hours, trimming programs, buying fewer new books, and relying more on "Friends of the Library" fundraising for operating expenses.5 Seattle's new library will be an achievement not only for its architecture but also by simply staying open year-round; in the past few years, Seattle saved nearly $1 million a year (and the jobs of over 20 people) by closing all city libraries for a week at a time, twice a year.6

The saddest symbol of the nation's library crisis may have been the public library in Franklin, Mass., founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1790 and touted by the town as the nation's oldest. Last year the town made national news by threatening to close the library for lack of funding, before it received a new infusion of state aid and was saved.7 (The situation is worse in Britain, where, in contrast to the United States, library visits are lagging. A publishing analysis firm called Libri has predicted all of Britain's public libraries could close by the year 2020.8) Although the latest news is encouragingCongress appears ready to increase federal library funding for its 2005 budgetBrey-Casiano has launched a "Save America's Libraries" campaign through ALA, distributing promotional materials on its web site that read, "The future is at your library, so make sure your library has a future."

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