The Mission of Public Libraries
Evidence has been steadily mounting of Americans' declining interest in reading. A 2025 study from researchers at the University of Florida and University College London reported that daily reading for pleasure in the United States dropped by more than 40% in the last two decades, with pronounced declines among black, low-income, and rural Americans. This trend has led some to say that America is becoming a "post-literate society," which could lead to the "death of democracy." The question is what to do about it.
Despite being one of the few public institutions in a position to promote reading culture, public libraries have largely gone unmentioned in this debate. No one would blame libraries exclusively for Americans' giving up on reading; our society is saturated with smartphones and other potent distractions. But when the reading crisis became evident, libraries had one job — and thus far, they've let us down.
Although libraries have shied away from the decline-of-reading debate, they've staked out a more prominent role in culture-war controversies, including the fracas over "banned books," the meaning of free speech, and the types of reading material appropriate for children. Librarians, one of the most progressive professional groups in America, picked those fights. Their politicization of libraries in the 21st century has been lamentable. A depoliticized public library would be an improvement on the current model, but that alone would not be enough to revive America's reading culture.
Today's libraries have embraced an agenda of redundancy, taking on functions — technology center, daytime homeless shelter, blank-canvas community center, bulwark of democracy — that are either unnecessary or already performed by other public agencies or private groups. These identities have gained too much influence in recent years, all at the expense of libraries' traditional role as a modest cultural institution dedicated to serious books and quiet study. By undermining any sense of institutional integrity, librarians have done far more than the conservative cultural warriors they denounce to erode public libraries' justification for existence.
Libraries have taken for granted their traditional patrons — book readers. We know now that this cohort cannot be neglected.
WHAT IS A "PUBLIC" LIBRARY?
Thanks to his famous philanthropic program, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie is the most important figure in the history of the public library in America. Before Carnegie, local library services were often makeshift affairs, as historian George Bobinski explains:
Few public libraries had buildings of their own. Many had undesirable or cramped quarters in the local city hall or in former residences converted for library use. Some contemporary libraries were located in rather unusual places. A millinery shop in Clay Centre, Nebraska; a decrepit wooden shack in Dillon, Montana; the hospital in Dunkirk, New York; a printing shop at Grandview, Indiana; the balcony office of a drugstore in Malta, Montana; a building housing the horses of the fire department at Marysville, Ohio; a physician's reception room in Olathe, Kansas; an old, abandoned church at Onawa, Iowa; a room in the opera house of Sanborn, Iowa; three small rooms over a meat market at Vienna, Illinois....There was also the case of Chatfield, Minnesota, where the matron of a rest room doubled as librarian.
From the 1880s through roughly 1920, Carnegie funded close to 1,700 public libraries across the nation. These libraries were housed in stand-alone buildings, usually in communities' most prominent civic locations. After Carnegie's investment, no city or town, no matter how small, seemed complete if it lacked its own library.
Carnegie's vision for the public library was organized around five principles, the first of which was open access. Libraries operated by public universities and subscription-based libraries requiring user fees are not "public" libraries: The collections at truly public libraries are accessible to anyone at no cost. Carnegie-era libraries' embrace of the open-stacks model symbolized this novel commitment to access.
Second, public libraries were meant to be community oriented. The Carnegie program offered localities a straightforward deal: one-time capital funds to build the library in exchange for a commitment for operating support. To this day, libraries derive most of their funding from local sources and are locally administered.
The third principle was that libraries should offer public enlightenment. Libraries' collections try to encompass the world. No branch of the Washington, D.C., public-library system, for example, would consider its stacks adequate if it only contained books about the nation's capital and none about China, the French Revolution, or psychology. Carnegie believed that libraries could ennoble American democracy by elevating the common man. In an era before both mass higher-education enrollment and universal high-school completion, he viewed libraries' function as cultural finishing schools.
The fourth principle was voluntary use. Too often, Carnegie believed, philanthropists failed to apply to their charity the same tough-mindedness that enabled them to amass their fortunes. He saw the public library as a unique social program in that it only helped those determined to help themselves. The library cause enabled him to donate massive sums to strangers with little oversight during his lifetime, all while minimizing the potential for adverse consequences like dependency that would plague later government programs.
Fifth, and most obvious, libraries are about books. Of all the public library's original principles, this was the least novel, but also the one that anchored all the others. To what do libraries provide open access and voluntary use? How do they enlighten the public?
America's public-library system was founded amid a historically contingent set of circumstances. A massive library-building campaign would not have been reasonable or even desirable if not for mass literacy, a legacy of the 19th-century progressive movement. New printing technologies of the era dramatically changed the economics of publishing, enabling the mass production of cheap reading material. Deterministic factors aside, though, animating the public-library movement was an agenda of cultural redistribution.
Take the New York Public Library's main building, which opened in 1911. Its first patron was David Shub, a 23-year-old immigrant from the Bronx, who selected Nikolai Grot's Moral Ideas of Our Time: Friedrich Nietzsche and Leo Tolstoy, in Russian, from the stacks. This was a great moment in American cultural history. Though the occasion was never (to the best of my knowledge) memorialized in a statue, Daniel Chester French's monument to Colonel James Anderson, which stands outside the Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, is dedicated to the man who mentored Andrew Carnegie and gave him access to his personal library. It features a brawny laborer sitting on an anvil reading a book.
Throughout American history, much social reform has had this character: Identify a good, such as home ownership or a college degree, to which only elites once had access, and distribute it at scale. That was what the public library aimed to do with what Matthew Arnold famously described as "the best that has been thought and said in the world."
Since ancient times, democracy's critics have doubted its compatibility with high culture. These doubts became, if anything, more acute as the mass-scale democracy of modern times emerged. But Carnegie and his colleagues marshaled all the resources they could to forestall the leveling of American culture — democracy's eternal temptation. We don't honor their vision as much as we should.
THE TECHNOLOGY CHALLENGE
Change came to public libraries slowly, then rapidly, thanks in large part to developments in mass media and educational institutions.
The Carnegie program ended in the late 1910s, and by 1930, over 40% of American households had a radio. Around that same time, more than three-fifths of the population went to the movies every week. By the middle of the 1960s, 90% of households had a television set, and families spent more than five hours a day watching it. Libraries adapted to these new cultural offerings to a degree by, for example, increasing their audiovisual holdings. But the expansion of mass media dealt a grievous blow to libraries' vision of universal working-class uplift.
One constant theme throughout cultural debates about television and media, up through the current discussion of the effects of digital culture, has been how low-income and working-class Americans have always been more avid consumers of less-edifying forms of pop culture than the more educated. This is obvious on public transit. On suburban-commuter systems, while physical books are less in evidence than 50 years ago, they are not totally absent, nor is smartphones' empire totally complete. On subways traveling through poor neighborhoods, by contrast, the doom-scrolling rate among riders often appears to reach nearly 100%.
Carnegie believed in a division of labor between the public library — referred to by some as "A People's University" — and formal educational institutions. The former would provide mass "higher" learning in the sense of education beyond secondary school and pursued not for a strictly vocational purpose. In the three decades after the Carnegie program ended, the percentage of adults with a high-school degree more than doubled; three decades after that, the percentage of Americans with a college degree had quintupled, and has continued to rise through the present day. Because educated people read more, rising levels of average educational attainment did stoke demand for library services. But a more educated population also meant that libraries had to adjust to a different role — still valued, but less indispensable — in the nation's cultural life.
Libraries were also diminished by technological and educational changes. Librarians traditionally aspired to serve as gatekeepers, guiding patrons' pursuits of culture, knowledge, and information. This self-conception still shapes the profession, as can be seen through book displays, reader recommendations, and librarians' sense of protectiveness about programming and what goes into and is taken out of collections. Librarians' robust gatekeeper role could not be maintained, however, in the face of rising levels of educational attainment — a college graduate will need less way-finding with a collection than someone with only a middle-school education — and computerized search engines. Technology's user friendliness, essential to that industry's business model, has enabled patrons to navigate collections independently, and to a degree that would have amazed librarians in the early 20th century.
The replacement of card catalogues with internal-network search engines did prove to be a boon for libraries, especially in how it facilitated more inter-library loaning among branches. In The Library Book, published in 2018, Susan Orlean quotes a long-serving librarian from Los Angeles's system: "After the Internet came in, shipping just blew up....We used to be able to use vans to deliver the books. Now we have so many books that we need trucks." But those internal search engines also made librarians' higher skills less necessary. Circa the late 1990s, librarians believed that the internet might reinvigorate their role as "information scientists." Google rendered such aspirations quaint. ChatGPT has dealt the mercy blow.
Librarians' responses to these technological developments and threats to their profession have often been misguided. Consider their campaign against "digital deserts." The putative problem with digital deserts lies in low-income households' deficient access to broadband internet. Libraries seek to meet this perceived need by offering "digital literacy" programming and making internet hotspots and laptops available for checkout. Anxiety about poor Americans' lack of internet access has been ramping up even as elites themselves, including technology executives, take measures to limit their children's exposure to digital devices and media.
For decades, excessive screen time has been a preoccupation of many of the most informed experts on urban pathology, such as economist Ronald Ferguson and social entrepreneur Geoffrey Canada. The latter explained in the 2009 book Whatever It Takes:
There are 10 million people reading Harry Potter in this country. I will tell you maybe 9.85 million of them are white kids. So now there's a whole group of Americans who have an ability to either read or listen to 800 pages of information as part of a story. And then there's this whole other group of kids...who have to be stimulated every fifteen or twenty seconds or they lose their focus.
And yet, public libraries today operate on the premise that more not less screen time is the surer way to fight poverty.
A striver may be poor, but as long as he is not blind, is current on his library fines, and knows English, he does not need libraries to tell him how to search for information on the internet. His issue isn't access. As a result, libraries don't offer him much.
MISSION CREEP
Public libraries have not only changed in response to external developments like new technology and educational achievements; they have also actively expanded their mission beyond their traditional role of cultural enrichment for ordinary Americans. For decades, the default attitude has embraced using libraries for whatever new good work librarians and local officials devise: warming and cooling centers, health education, connecting prisoners with family through video conferencing, "food justice" programs, blood drives, all manner of employment services, recreational programming for seniors, distribution of fentanyl testing strips and Covid-19 tests, disaster-relief operations, low-cost printing services, and more.
Such mission creep is especially visible in libraries' heightened politicization. The frustration of librarians' gatekeeper ambitions coincided with a striking lurch leftward: In the 2020 presidential election, over 90% of librarians' campaign donations went to Joe Biden, while voter-registration data also reveal a more than 75% tilt in favor of the Democratic Party. On questions of high culture, librarians tend to take a populist pose, insisting on the importance of staying anchored in mainstream tastes and values. But on political questions, librarians openly stand outside the mainstream. Drag-queen story hour, to take one example, is a radical, non-mainstream program; opinion surveys consistently show Americans to be most sensitive about progressive gender ideology in the case of children.
Disputes about "banned books" often concern titles featuring sexually explicit imagery or text targeted at children. Browsing is the bibliophile's delight, and it is to be encouraged among youth if we want to cultivate the next generation of ardent readers. But many parents understandably don't want their kids to browse a collection librarians have, with pride, stocked with pornographic material. Such parents are implicitly likened to Nazis through "banned books week," an annual ritual organized by the progressive American Library Association consisting of book displays featuring titles that someone, somewhere, registered some kind of complaint about, along with grand professions about librarians' commitment to "free speech."
If the higher-education reform movement has made one thing clear about modern American intellectual life, it's to never accept claims of support for free speech at face value. Those who want to improve campus culture understand that authentic free speech requires people who like to argue, or at least people who start arguments as a gesture of respect, even at risk of losing their jobs or funding. It requires people who, when a guest-speaker invitation prompts a storm of angry emails and phone calls, consider this evidence that the event in question was a success. Public librarians are, as noted above, overwhelmingly progressive. That profile is not exactly one that fits the idea of a workforce defined by its passion for authentic free-speech culture.
The local public-library branch in America is not, and does not need to be, a free-speech center. The principle of free speech, rooted distantly in the Carnegie-era principle of public enlightenment, stands in tension with libraries' commitment to being a community institution — another founding principle. A community institution, when asked by a community member to remove pornographic materials from the children's section, should honor that request, instead of engaging in dubious posturing about "free speech."
The modern history of public libraries reflects historian Robert Conquest's rule that any institution not explicitly right wing will eventually become left wing. Only an institution with a strong sense of integrity could resist that trend. The public library lacks a strong sense of institutional integrity — indeed, that is its most fundamental problem.
Libraries' politicization can also be detected in their persistent commitment to "access," another founding principle. Carnegie libraries, of course, proudly declared themselves "open to all." But today, librarians' single-minded focus on access has shifted from a means to an end. Librarians could have, after a certain point, declared the war on lack of access won and shifted their focus elsewhere. Instead, they have been busily identifying other supposedly onerous barriers to access and attempting to remedy them.
One recent example is the campaign for fine amnesty. Traditionally, libraries gently qualified the principle of free and open access by imposing late fees. Today's progressives have decided that this practice was somehow rooted in racism. Here is a straightforward case of what George W. Bush called the "soft bigotry of low expectations": No one can explain why low-income and working-class minority patrons cannot be relied upon to turn books in on time. Yet traditional patrons, who could be so relied on, saw their own access diminished; books stayed out for longer as the incentive for timely returns was eliminated.
A close cousin of "access" is "inclusivity," which librarians invoke to affirm their more recent role as daytime homeless-shelter operators. Homeless shelters typically require clients to leave dorm spaces during the day, both to encourage them to get on with their lives and because shelters are barebones operations without much on-site programming. Other homeless library patrons arrive at opening hour after having spent the previous night on the streets.
It goes without saying that libraries bear no responsibility for the modern homelessness crisis, which began around 1980. Before that time, major cities typically hosted a "Skid Row" neighborhood inhabited by "bums" and "vagrants." Skid Rows not only met the nighttime housing needs of the homeless, but also their daytime recreational needs. Yet cities phased out these neighborhoods, leaving inhabitants with nowhere to go and nothing to do during the day. So they started congregating in public libraries.
Another public place the modern homeless began concentrating in the 1980s was train stations. But transit officials routinely protest this state of affairs, while librarians do not. Librarians either keep silent or positively affirm the presence of homeless patrons. They do that by offering homeless services on site (funded directly by the library or via partnerships with other agencies), by not enforcing codes of conduct, and by promoting their good works through press stories about homelessness at the library.
The art of managing public spaces, such as a library or park, consists of trying to attract as many normal users as possible, so as to make antisocial users feel as out of place as possible. The single-adult homeless population, sheltered and unsheltered, is made up of many individuals who are addicted to drugs, seriously mentally ill, or both. Much as families and the middle classes avoided the old Skid Row districts, libraries that host their city's homeless population generally don't feature large concentrations of non-homeless patrons. De jure inclusivity is not the same as de facto inclusivity.
Even when libraries don't go so far as to embrace homelessness, they will adopt a social-services role through, for example, dispensing ID cards to immigrants regardless of legal status, as New York City's public library does, or providing job-search assistance. This represents a self-defeating utilitarianism. The logic runs thus: Helping people find jobs is indisputably important, and libraries provide such assistance, therefore libraries are important.
If what makes libraries valuable is their participation in job-search assistance, why not transfer library resources to bona fide workforce-development agencies? If real shelters can't host their populations during the day for lack of programming, why not redirect library funding to shelters to support those activities? Homeless services will help most people exit homelessness when provided by professionally run programs monitored for performance. But when libraries operate as shelters, there's not much net gain for the homeless, and an enormous loss for traditional patrons.
DIMINISHING BOOKS
Much as budgets are moral documents, the way modern libraries use their limited physical space reveals their values — and how much their mission has changed. Particularly illuminating are new investments in the form of expansions, major renovations, or new building. Invariably, investments in 21st-century libraries deemphasize books. More space does not mean more stacks for physical books, but rather areas for public computer rooms (also known as "community technology centers," which mostly feature homeless patrons watching YouTube), private study rooms, podcast-recording studios, "Makerspaces" for 3-D printing, or any other type of community-center space. Some places — Chicago; New York City; Cornelius, Oregon — have combined new library projects with affordable housing.
Dense urban environments feature high rents. But urban library branches are also cramped, and do not have extra space that can be easily spared for housing. Private study rooms consume more square footage than public-use tables and comfy chairs. Their popularity stems in no small measure from libraries' disinclination to enforce rules about noise. Aside from the example of search engines discussed above, libraries' technology investments typically reduce efficiencies. Library-based technology programs feature elaborate equipment whose cost and technical details require staff; these employees are then unavailable for traditional library functions.
Homelessness has also affected library design by necessitating clean sightlines achieved by low shelves. Serendipitous discoveries made by browsing in a forest of tall stacks are therefore impossible in libraries hosting large homeless populations.
By devoting so much space to non-book functions, libraries have placed themselves in tension with their own access principle — understood as access to the collection, which must be either shifted off site or reduced via "weeding" efforts. (Online used-book purchasers will often find themselves in possession of former library copies, a mass transfer of public property into private hands.) History has come full circle. Whereas, before Carnegie, libraries shared space with various other community functions, book collections must now share library space with community activities that for unspecified reasons could not have been hosted by some other agency.
Libraries' diminished focus on books is beginning to have real-world effects. As teenage students report less "reading for fun," they also register declining reading scores. Adults are scoring worse, too. Literacy, robustly understood, is trending downward among many cohorts: children, college students, and adults generally. As a policy question, encouraging a reading culture means promoting high culture on the demand side. Fran Lebowitz once said of the AIDS crisis: "Everyone talks about...what artists were lost. But they never talked about this audience that was lost....There was such a high level of connoisseurship of everything....An audience with a high level of connoisseurship is as important to the culture as artists." That is what we are in danger of losing with declining interest in books: an audience capable of appreciating excellence, both past examples and when it arises on the current scene.
Leading left-leaning publications, including The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and the New York Times, have extensively covered the reading decline. Indeed, from technology critic Neil Postman up through recent phone bans at schools in blue states such as New York, the left boasts a strong tradition of denouncing the dumbing down of American culture. Among progressive institutions, libraries stand alone in their indifference. To address the reading crisis, libraries don't have to become conservative institutions. But they do need to reverse a whole generation's worth of bad policies.
BEING PRIVATE IN PUBLIC
It's tempting to speculate that librarians pursued change out of a reach for relevance in the face of declining faith in public libraries' traditional mission of promoting high culture. However much low-income families truly needed internet hotspots, libraries felt they needed to distribute them for more press coverage, philanthropic opportunities, and praise from local politicians. But evidence is scant that libraries faced any kind of existential threat necessitating radical change. The total number of public-library locations has not changed markedly since 1990. Libraries poll well, despite the fact that relatively few Americans use them regularly, which is normal for a cultural institution. Many Americans speak fondly of performing-arts organizations and museums in their community that they never personally patronize.
Libraries are either an institution that must change or die, or one that rests, untroubled, on a foundation of broad popularity. The latter case is closer to the truth. Libraries do need to evolve with the times, but that does not mean they need to pursue opportunistic, radical change.
There are several ways libraries might adapt to a changing culture while recovering their original mission of serving book-seeking patrons — on whom depends, in no small measure, the future of reading in America.
Restoring libraries' institutional integrity must begin by defending their physical space. All-purpose community centers acquire a charmless, bureaucratic feel. When authors write about how meaningful bookstores are (the sheer number of these love letters proves that reading culture is not dead yet), they tend to reflect on poignant details like the smells, the cats, the long-remembered browsing finds. Public libraries must recover some of this spirit, rather than leaning too much on abstractions such as "access" or "inclusivity." All the non-book community-center innovations and programs should therefore be segregated from library space, which should be reserved for serious books and quiet study. Ideally, they should be moved to different public facilities.
How else might libraries defend their physical space? An essential element of the original public library was that it was a quiet place. On Amtrak trains, conductors sometimes direct occupants of the quiet car to "maintain a library-like atmosphere." But libraries themselves post signs designating certain areas for quiet study that serve as depressing reminders that the entire library is not for quiet study. Like the modern teenager, the modern library is over-programmed.
The best way to maintain a quiet ambience in a library is to fill it with people who want to work quietly. What's needed is a place to be private in public, distinct from both the home and the office. Parks are exposed to the elements and don't offer unqualified silence or protection against disturbances. Coffee shops require you to pay "rent" and also don't present a completely quiet and unobtrusive environment. Museums charge fees and are not places of rest. Churches, while reverent, are meant for worship and are not to be used like library space is. Maximizing the number of physical books on site can effectively promote a silent and still atmosphere.
The old stereotype of the maniacally shushing librarian reflected an honest appreciation of how modern cities can be bustling and noisy places, wherein quiet stillness is the preserve of the few. Places for sports, recreation, and dogs are considered public goods. Library-based quiet and stillness should also be understood as a public good — one that would be unavailable to many households if the local library branch didn't provide it.
Public libraries should also defend their physical space by making it safe and secure. Libraries with too many homeless individuals don't feel safe. Politicians respect both the reality of safety and the perception, but librarians too often ignore both. Instead of adopting a reactive disposition that waits for patrons to complain, they should be more proactive in enforcing behavioral standards. Libraries are capable of maintaining order when they desire. Examples include the New York Public Library's Rose Main Reading Room and children's sections, which are reliably free of homeless adults. By and large, public libraries have perfectly serviceable codes of patron conduct. The problem is a lack of will to enforce them.
Along these lines, libraries should cease offering services that cater specifically to homeless patrons. They should exclude problem patrons more liberally, and it should be politically easier to do so, because access to libraries is not as essential as access to, say, transit. Libraries should also invest in security, even if that means reducing hours or hiring fewer librarians. It's a sad commentary on our culture that so many library systems now need more security guards than librarians.
Finally, library leaders should stop pitching stories to the media about how "the library is not just about books anymore" or "not your grandfather's public library." That "grandfather's public library" embraced a moving commitment to making American cultural life as worthy of pride as our nation's military and economic achievements. We should embrace that legacy.
RESTORING INSTITUTIONAL INTEGRITY
With physical spaces that are quiet, safe, and full of books, libraries can focus anew on their institutional purpose. That means fulfilling functions that, if libraries didn't do them, no one would.
Consider libraries' curation of resources on local history. These programs were not central to the original vision of the library and thus represent an innovation — but it is one that aligns with the theme of serious books and quiet study. Most major libraries and library systems already do some projects in the way of local history, but these vary widely in quality and palpable enthusiasm. Stand-alone local-history organizations, meanwhile, are typically obscure institutions, open during limited hours and run by volunteers on a shoestring budget. Libraries could incorporate them as subordinate departments, thus offering them institutional support.
The need for libraries to engage in local history was less keenly felt before the collapse of local journalism. In our country's countless "news deserts," the "rough draft of history" no longer exists. Libraries can fill this void by being more vigilant in compiling and curating stores of municipal-government documents like annual reports, transcripts, and videos. They could consider commissioning local-history monographs and books. Libraries could also spearhead the preservation of high-quality local-history blogs written by amateurs, which are in danger of being lost when their underlying platform becomes obsolete. Preserving history has long been a core function of the federal government, through institutions like the Smithsonian and the National Archives. Municipal government has some catching up to do.
One function that libraries don't need to fulfill is that of moralizing, free-speech center. Libraries do enrich our lives; we need them like we need parks and museums. But they are not essential like police and fire protection or free and fair elections. Constitutional democracy in America will never stand or fall by anything libraries do. Librarians' boastfulness about their contribution to democracy — that they are "sentinels of foundational civil rights," as one English professor put it — indicates an insecurity about their contributions to reading culture, which is what we truly need them for. Libraries could begin by adopting a humbler political pose and ending the self-righteous charade that is banned-books week.
Techno-skepticism is a more natural fit for libraries than moralism. The ranks of tech-wary Americans are growing. By not targeting this constituency and instead expanding offerings such as coding-club meetings and video-game setups, libraries are blowing an epic marketing opportunity. American teens do not need additional encouragement to engage with technology — that much is clear. Libraries should rather pitch themselves as safe spaces for analog, where it's possible to cultivate powers of concentration otherwise threatened by glowing screens. They might host more "Luddite Clubs," for example, where high schoolers meet to draw, read, and liberate themselves from social media and other technology. Libraries can rest assured that this will lead to positive news coverage.
A Luddite-inflected institution would also mean one less enamored with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). It is hard for a small educational or cultural institution to excel at both STEM and the humanities. Some colleges understand this, but libraries, whose resources are much more limited, do not, or at least act like they do not. STEM offerings in some sense trace their roots back to libraries' aspiration to promote public enlightenment and universal knowledge. In practice, though, libraries' STEM programming results in unedifying activities, such as using 3-D printers to make keychains. STEM professionals — coders, physicians, life-sciences researchers, physicists, technology executives — do not find libraries essential to their endeavors. But humanities professionals, such as novelists, can and do find sustenance at the library. We need more libraries for them, too.
By reorienting themselves toward their traditional mission, libraries can help reverse the decline in America's reading culture. To do this, they must stop morphing into all-purpose community centers and return to being places of public enlightenment for the common man.
