Editorial: To Inform Democracy
Don't leave the library job to the media and politicians
by John N. Berry III, Editor-in-Chief -- Library Journal, 11/15/2004
We know it now. We always hoped it wasn't true, even though we suspected it. Governments and politicians dissemble. In times of crises or during election campaigns, they mislead, conceal the truth, suppress dissent, and frequently do just the opposite of what they say they will do. The recent campaigns, coupled with the current wars—in Iraq and against terrorism—have demonstrated that popular democracies are not immune to the distortion and suppression of the truth of which we have always accused dictators and totalitarian regimes.
Unfortunately, the politicians and leaders of democracies act with more subtlety and creative spin, since they must garner votes. The closer the election, the greater the danger that information on the issues facing the electorate will be manipulated to the edge of falsehood, or concealed to the edge of censorship. The more bloody the war, the more intractable the threat or enemy, the more likely information about them will be quashed or misstated.
The media—print and digital, private and public—have fallen victim to these abuses of information. One huge network minimizes war casualties. Another employs faked and unreliable sources. A third simply becomes a platform for one side of the argument. The alarm is raised by civil libertarians, writers, educators, and even, to some degree, librarians, at least in the unity of their organizations, like the American Library Association.
Back in the local library, however, work to deliver the entire record, to reveal the secret, or to correct the misinformation is only carried on in the most passive way. This agency, created to inform our democracy, performs that task reluctantly if at all. Yet, from the beginning of the library movement in America, we have understood that this was our most basic mission, our fundamental raison d'être.
My favorite articulation of that comes from the 1852 report of the Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, Upon the Objects To Be Attained by the Establishment of a Public Library:
For it has been rightly judged that, under political, social and religious Institutions like ours, it is of paramount importance that the means of general information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundations of social order… which we, as a people, are constantly required to decide, and do decide, either ignorantly or wisely.
If librarians are not collecting deeply on the issues debated by our politicians, if we aren't informed on our wars, we are not doing our jobs. If you are not trying to "induce" the people to read about and understand those issues, if you are not publicizing those deep collections you have built to inform our citizens, you are not doing your job.
Some librarians may do the job pretty well. In most libraries, however, the service would collapse if 1000 citizens asked for pro and con materials on the Iraq war, Medicare, terrorism, the Patriot Act, corporate tax breaks—you name it. Equally important, during the last election, few libraries publicized the availability of rich, broad resources on the issues before our electorate. Yet those are our most important jobs and our most important choices.
We have the technology, the skills, and the collections to carry out this founding mandate. Now that the election has passed, ask yourself this question: Did your library induce citizens to read and understand the issues facing our society in this election year? If the answer isn't "yes," the library has failed again.
