Core Chapter Concept: Libraries must make visible the value they bring to their communities.
I’m going to end the discussion of library types and libraries overall with public libraries. But I’d like to make a few remarks here about “special libraries,” a term representing perhaps the worst failure of a reductionist approach to librarianship. Just as you have academic libraries in colleges, school libraries in schools, and public libraries in towns and cities, so you have special libraries in government agencies, hospitals and medical clinics, music halls, law offices, banks, NGOs, construction and manufacturing companies, museums, sports organizations, and just about every other conceivable organized community. What sets special libraries apart from other libraries? They are all very closely aligned to specific missions of specific communities.
Thus the Smithsonian Museum of American Art has a special library within it (and, yes, it is publicly funded, but not considered a public library), whose librarians build systems to help artists and museum curators. Most hospitals also have medical libraries to help doctors, nurses, health care providers, and even the general public build knowledge about medicine. In “Going to the Conversation” in chapter 6, I talked about how the role of these medical libraries is moving from passive question-answering centers to active participation in medical teams.
Why not have a full chapter on special libraries, then? It’s not that special libraries are less important than school, public, or academic libraries. Far from it. The real reason is that many special libraries have already made the transition to librarians-first librarianship. Embassy libraries have replaced librarians in physical locations with librarians on standby. Special librarians are leaving their library quarters to be embedded in research teams. In essence, special libraries are deep in transition to becoming community libraries because of industry pressures to locate expertise at the point of need and to closely align that expertise with industry outcomes.
As discussed before, unlike the single mission of librarians, the mission of any given library is co-constructed by its librarians and community. As a reflection of its community, that mission will vary from community to community. But there is a common reason that all librarians build libraries: community improvement. The community members of businesses, municipalities, colleges, schools, hospitals, even royal palaces have libraries because they believe libraries make them better. For them, “make them better” may mean a better bottom line, a more literate, informed citizenry, better teachers and students, improved patient outcomes, or perhaps a better understanding of their royal subjects. Whatever the case, there is great power when librarians and communities come together to form platforms of improvement and innovation. But this great power is not always visible. Worse still, the key components of this engine of community advancement are often taken for granted.
A closed library may present the enticing possibility of learning with its impressive architecture and many shelves of books. Yet closed, the library is dead, a warehouse. To make it live takes not only community members using and supporting the library, but librarians crafting that support into services, and structures, and action. It is only when individuals of good intent come together in principled interactions that libraries, their librarians, and their community members can truly use knowledge to ignite possibilities.
By continually attaching what librarians and their communities do to abstract institutions or, worse still, to buildings called “libraries,” we devalue the participants in those systems, and we ignore the real and hard choices that all of them must make to define what community improvement is. For too long have librarians hidden behind the stacks and a false flag of neutrality. For too long have communities been passive “consumers” of libraries, all but totally unaware of the effort it takes to make a community better. For too long have librarians seen communities as receivers of information and not creators of knowledge. And for too long have communities seen their librarians as little more than clerks and readers.
It’s time to redefine what libraries are and to retask them with helping their communities through learning and knowledge creation. It’s time to expect more of these institutions, and those who gather and work within their places. It’s time to free librarians from the shackles of hidebound tradition and to send them out into their communities to listen, learn, and act. And it’s well past time we librarians expected more from our community members than a vote on a budget and passing admiration. Our communities are full of talent and expertise and aspirations, waiting to serve a world desperately in need of all three.