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Leviathan's Libraries

Copyright 1998 by Leigh Kimmel

Libraries have a long and venerable history, almost as old as the written word itself. Of course in the days before the printing press, there was little to distinguish between libraries and archives. However, the first libraries were almost certainly tax-supported, since books were so rare and precious that only the government could afford to maintain them or the scribes who created and read them. The ancient libraries of Mesopotamia were more on the order of a working archives of government documents used by government officials in their business, more akin to the Library of Congress or the National Archives and Records Administration than the sorts of libraries that most people are familiar with.

However, this began to change with the development of the printing press, which made it possible to make large numbers of books cheaply. This also created the newspaper and the periodical publication, in the form of the popular magazine or the scholarly journal. Now that written material became more common, it came into the reach of a larger portion of the population. At the same time, cultural change brought about by the Scientific Revolution and then the Industrial Revolution made the written word a steadily more important means of conveying culturally significant information. No longer could the bulk of the population subsist entirely upon verbal transactions, as had been the case for untold generations. More and more jobs required people who were able to read and write, and written agreements became the norm throughout the culture.

America was founded by and large by people who valued literacy and regarded it as an important part of living. Within years after establishing their first colony, the Puritans of Massachussetts Bay Colony founded Harvard College (later to become a university) for the training of future ministers of the Gospel. This institution included a library of books that were considered necessary and useful reading. Many communities organized various kinds of social libraries, which were forerunners of the modern public library. Since literacy was considered so important to society, most communities also arranged for some form of a school, which generally included some books, the forerunner of today's school libraries.

As time has gone by, libraries have become more and more clearly a part of our society. As librarianship became professionalized in the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries, a group appeared with a vested interest in the maintenence of library funding. At the same time, other factors came together to cement the role of our tax-supported public, academic and school libraries, as well as the development of the multi-type library systems that bring them all together and function to share resources bewteen them.

When asked about libraries and government funding, most people immediately think about public libraries. Generally people are most aware of their local public library because it is directly accessable to them, it functions as an independent unit (as opposed to academic and school libraries, which are administratively part of larger institutions), and often puts referenda on the ballot to raise money for additional expansion. However, the origins of the public library lies not in government mandates, but in voluntary assocations.

In America, people could choose their own communities, rather than being tied to a specific locale and its associated community. As a result, people tended to feel a stronger sense of involvement and responsibility for the wellbeing of their community. In fact, in many parts of the United States community actually preceded government, so that people chose to provide various basic services voluntarily and only organized government bodies to perform them when the community became too large and unweildy for the functions to be performed on a voluntary basis.1

Early Massachusetts towns developed a system of social libraries, which were a form of subscription library attached to a club. In a subscription library, the club dues paid by the members served to support the collection. Eventually some of these social libraries extended certain library priveleges to non-members of the club, which led to the transformation of these libraries into the New England town libraries that were one of the predecessors of the modern tax-supported public library.2

In 1731 Benjamin Franklin founded the first American subscription library, which was later called the Philadelphia Library Company, for the use of his associates. From its modest beginnings in the efforts of a few poor young workingmen to better themselves, it grew to incorporate other collections and eventually was opened to public use.3

However, the subscription library, in all its various forms, had one major weakness -- it was highly vulnerable to economic change. Because it was supported by voluntary contributions, difficult times generally led to tight or non-existant funding as people cut back on their discretionary funding. Without a secure source of funding, such libraries could rarely undertake any sort of capital-intensive activity unless they were supported by substantial permanent endowments. Unfortunately such giants as the New York Public Library were the exception rather than the rule, and most subscription libraries struggled by on the pooled funds of a few people. Many were too small to be more than a sort of club reading room, and did not have the resources to really serve their communities. Some alternative form of funding was needed to really make the modern public library work.

New Hampshire has the distinction of being the home of the first tax-supported public library, in the town of Petersborough, which was created in 1833, sixteen years before the state passed enabling legislation for towns to levy taxes to support libraries. However, Massachusetts passed such enabling legislation one year before New Hampshire, in order to create the Boston Public Library, and thus takes that honor. Three years later, in 1851, that law was extended beyond Boston so that all Massachusetts towns could levy taxes to create libraries.4

In some states, tax-supported libraries originally grew out of legislation enabling taxation to support school libraries. Ohio is an example of this situation. Ohio school district libraries were first authorized in 1867, and were generally under the authority of the local board of education.5 Over time, this legislation was extended to cover public libraries as well, although these were generally considered to be connected to the school library administratively, and often was under the governance of the school board. In 1931 Robert A. Taft, then a member of the Ohio General Assembly, proposed a plan to shift funding of school district libraries from real estate taxes to an intangibles tax, which would be assessed on such "nonreal" properties as stocks and bonds. This was passed by the General Assembly and signed into law in June of 1931. At the time it was intended as a two-year temporary measure.6 On June 30, 1983 the Ohio General Assembly formally abolished the intangibles tax. Instead public libraries would henceforth be funded by a proportion of the state income tax.7

In the ninteenth century, relatively few public libraries permitted their collections to circulate beyond the library, primarily because of the high cost of the materials and difficulty of replacing them. This changed as the modern power-driven rotary printing press made it possible to produce large numbers of books at relatively low cost. This led to the transformation of the public library from a closely-guarded treasurehouse of knowledge to an open and welcoming institution of knowledge. Not only did libraries begin to allow users to borrow books for home use, but they also began to allow the patrons to enter the formerly-closed stacks and peruse the collection directly instead of having to request specific books.8 These sorts of precautions are now generally reserved for rare or unusual books, but libraries of that period seldom had many such treasures. American library leaders and benefactors were generally chary of using library funds to purchase items that were valuable primarily for their rarity. Rather, such items should come primarily as gifts from private collectors, while public funds should be put to the acquisition of items that would be used by the general public.9

As the ninteenth century wore to a close, the greatest private patron of public libraries appeared on the scene -- Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate. His philanthropy was based upon an critical part of his personal philosophy, which originally developed when his early business successes suddenly provided him with more money than he had ever imagined possible. Suddenly he was faced with the problem of what he should do with it, and from those considerations he developed his Gospel of Wealth.

Carnegie believed that a wealthy man should not use his wealth for personal ostentation, but rather should live modestly and regard himself as merely a trustee of his wealth. He believed even more adamantly that passing it unearned to one's children would do them a grave disservice by encouraging them to live idle lives. Merely leaving one's wealth as a bequest to be distributed after one's death was little improvement, for it evaded the responsibility to be sure that the money was used well. Poorly used, charity could actually worsen people's lives instead of bettering them, particularly if such money encouraged the recipients to become idlers and wastrels. In Carnegie's mind, the finest way for a wealthy man to use his money was to use it during his life to benefit such causes which would improve the lives of many people by giving them the means by which to better themselves. One of the best ways of helping people better themselves was to educate them, including making quality reading materials accessible via the establishment of free public libraries.10

Before their family left their native Scotland, Carnegie's father organized his fellow weavers to raise a fund for the purchase of books and had one member of this informal club read aloud while the others were at work. This social library developed into the first circulating collection in their town of Dunfermline. Carnegie would later proudly refer to himself as being the son of the weaver who founded a library.11

Carnegie, either directly or through his Carnegie Corporation, funded 1,679 public libraries in 1,412 US communities, 108 academic libraries, and 159 libraries in the British Commonwealth. Carnegie's firm conviction in the importance to give wisely and assure that one's largess was not wasted or squandered led him to consider the problem of making sure that his libraries were subsequently maintained. It would do no good to build libraries merely to have them decline in neglect. He knew all too well the pattern in many of the social libraries, which would begin well on the enthusiasm of their early members, only to decay as that enthusiasm waned. Thus he attached two major conditions to his gifts. First, the local community must provide a suitable site upon which to build the library. Second, it must formally agree to provide continual funding for the library. The second stipulation solidified the paradigm of the public library supported by taxes.12

However, even those precautions were not sufficient to prevent communities from squandering the money they received through poor planning and ill-conceived grand architecture. One of the more notable examples of this problem happened in Springfield, Illinois, which received its money with great enthusiasm and fanfare. The original name for the public library in Springfield, Illinois, was to have been the Lincoln-Carnegie Memorial Library. However, Carnegie requested that the library be simply named Lincoln Library.13 The architecture of the Lincoln Library, like so many Carnegie libraries of the early period, was a chaos of columns and wasted air space, incorporating sixteen distinct architectural styles. Carnegie himself expressed regret at the waste of his money on an impractical structure. In 1911 he had his secretary, James Bertram, draw up a set of "Notes on Library Buildings" which mandated simplicity of design and the eschewal of expensive portals, columns, domes and winding stairways. With a little judicious pressure on architects, he was able to put an end to this sort of waste and impracticality in his libraries.14

Although Carnegie stopped giving money to libraries directly in 1911, this did not mark the end of his philanthropy toward libraries. Rather, he only changed the manner in which the giving was conducted. He created the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which administered the distribution of his money to deserving organizations.15

By 1914, problems with the misuse of Carnegie funds by various communties had become so severe that Carnegie added the stipulation that no funds would be released without a signed statement by the mayor of the recipient town that the building was not to exceed a specified cost. This came in the wake of several cases in which cost overruns resulted in an unfinished building and further pleas for money, or poor planning led to the entirity of the money being spent on the building proper, with nothing kept back for providing the necessary furnishings (shelves, desks, chairs, etc.) for an operating library.16

Unfortunately, even Carnegie's careful system of safeguards did not always guarantee that his gifts would not be wasted. In several instances, a new city council reneged on the pledge of maintenence made by a previous city council. In one particularly extreme example, this resulted in the library being closed, vandalized by tramps, and finally put up for auction to be converted to some other use, until someone argued that the resulting money should be given to Carnegie instead of going into the city's coffers. Subsequently the building was abandoned entirely and surrounded by a tall fence with no gate.17

Part of the problem lay in the fact that many of the communities were really too small to be able to support a library, even on a tax levy based upon Carnegie's formula. Furthermore, many other communities were completely without public library service. After World War II, people began to look beyond the local community for support for library service, seeking federal and state money to supplement what the local tax base could provide.

In 1956 Congress passed the Library Services Act (LSA) which allocated federal money for the improvement of library service to unserved and underserved populations. The primary focus of this act was to improve service in rural areas, but it was also intended to stimulate state and local governments to increase their support of libraries by providing matching funds according to the amounts coming from state and local revenues.18 In 1964 the act was expanded to include urban libraries and the construction of new library buildings. Additional amendments in 1970 mandated stronger metropolitan libraries and state library administrative agencies. This form of the LSA also included legislation relating to the establishment and maintenence of library networks.19

State funds were also an important component of support for public libraries. Although state libraries and state library agencies could easily use their control of state library funding as a means of setting policy in individual libraries, most state libraries have regarded leadership rather than dictatorship as their primary role. Thus they have generally tried to facilitate interlibrary co-operation, staff development, increased funding and other programs by which individual libraries can be encouraged rather than coerced to make better use of their resources.20

Library funding hit a low point during the Reagan Administration. In 1988 Senator J. Danforth Quayle of Indiana introduced the Library Improvement Act (LIA) at the request of the Reagan Administration. This act, to be funded by 76 million dollars, was supposed to be a better approach than the existing funding mechanisms to support the programs and services of libraries. However, the library community did not greet it with enthusiasm or support.21

Since that time, library support has waxed and waned, particularly as public libraries feel the pressure of competition from the Internet and from the "super-bookstores" such as Borders and Barnes&Nobles. These concerns have been a major point of discussion in recent issues of American Libraries, the official organ of the American Library Association. Many public libraries have taken to providing Internet access to their patrons, although this has not been without controversy due to concerns about possible access to objectionable materials, particularly by minors. Others are looking into what patrons find most inviting about the super-bookstores and attempting to duplicate those features in the library.

The problems of the public library have been complicated by issues of governance, which reflect the long and tangled history of the American public library. Many libraries cannot make major decisions, particularly related to expenditures on their own, but must instead obtain the approval of some form of governing body.

Public libraries fall into five major types: corporate/association libraries, school district libraries, municipal libraries, county libraries and multi-county libraries. The first type, such as the New York Public Library, are generally tax-funded but have an independent governing board. School district libraries are not necessarily located in the school building (although they may be, as in the case of Lemont, Illinois), but are under the administration of the school board. Municipal libraries are an agency of the municipality in which they exist, while county libraries function as an agency of the county government. Multi-county libraries often are consolidations of several counties that were too small to efficiently support their own libraries, although at times they begin to blur into library networks and library systems.22

The New York Public Library came into existance in 1895, when the Astor and Lenox Libraries merged with the Tilden Trust.23 The NYPL is unusual in being governed as a private coroporate body with its own board of trustees instead of having a board appointed by the mayor. However, this does not mean that the city government has no voice whatsoever, as the mayor, the comptroller and the president of th City Council of New York have been ex officio members since 1902. However they generally have not come to board meetings or otherwise taken action in the actual work of governance. This has been done primarily by a body of elite white males in their middle to late years, which gave it a certain patrician character. Unfortunately this sometimes led to major rifts between the library board and City Hall, upon which the library is dependent for a major portion of its funding.24

Runaway inflation in the aftermath of WWI was devestating to the library budget. In response, a number of employees formed a union which demanded that branch librarians be put on the city's civil service system and pension fund. The union objected to the private governing board as being unaccountable to anyone. Although the board did act to give pensions to needy and deserving retirees, they moved very cautiously to avoid the loss of their autonomy to munincipal governance.25

In the late 1940's and early 1950's, NYPL underwent a steady shift from private to public funding. NYPL director Ralph Beals led the board to ask the city to assume the full cost of maintaining the central library building (previously the city had provided for repairs, but the library corporation was responsible for the day-to-day operational costs). Beals also turned to the state government for help, and his lobbying led to laws in 1950 which raised state aid to libraries from a token sum to a substantial amount.26

Since then, the New York Public Library has gone through a great deal of change, particularly under the tenure of Vartan Gregorian, who brought it out of the doldrums of the 1970's. With his personal approach, referring to the staff as "my fellow educators," he re-built the weakening administrative support structure for the library and was able to restore confidence enough to reverse the pattern of shrinking service and once again made it an important part of the city's educational system.27

Another important kind of library is the academic library. People familiary with today's great research libraries such as Harvard, Yale, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be surprised to discover that the library played a very minor role in early American colleges and universities, which concentrated primarily on rote memorization of the classics of Greek and Roman literature as a means of inculcating mental discipline. The twentieth century brought a major change in this pattern, driven primarily by the growth of the social sciences which required a great deal of library reading as an element of the learning process.28

Here again Carnegie played a major role in "jump-starting" the growth of libraries, but again it was not without problems. Although most people are familiar with Carnegie's gifts to public libraries, few are so cognizant of the 108 colleges and universities that also benefitted from his generosity. While Carnegie began giving to colleges and universities later than to public libraries, his gifts to the former tended to be larger.29 When the Carnegie Corporation began making large-scale grants of money for college and university libraries to purchase books that would more fully develop their collections, it seemed reasonable and efficient to order the books through some form of central purchasing arrangement with a commercial book dealer. Problems soon developed which had to be dealt with in order to prevent the wasting of major portions of the grant money. For instance, some librarians would simply pay all invoices without checking against the inventory of books actually delivered, and only later would discover that they had not received some of the books for which they had paid. At that point, they would complain about being cheated of the books they had purchased. One librarian in particular was apt to alter the stated prices of books if she did not approve of them, then reduce the payment accordingly. Such foibles as these meant that the staff of the Carnegie Corporation had to spend a great deal of time and effort sending letters requesting that the offending librarians change their behavior.30

However, even with grants from such external agencies, many academic libraries were part of state institutions, and thus dependent primarily upon tax money rather than private donations and endowments for regular operating and collection development activities. Academic libraries were profoundly affected by the information explosion of the post-World War II era, since they generally provided the principal market for the most expensive materials such as scientific journals. Not only were the numbers of these journals steadily growing, but they were also constantly increasing in price, so that the libraries were having to spend an ever-expanding sum to keep up with the needs of the scholarly communities they were supposed to serve. At the same time, the tide of information pouring into libraries' acquisitions departments was threatening to overwhelm the ability of library personnel to process it and make it available to the user population in a timely fashion, leading to troublesome cataloging and filing backlogs that threatened to make access a bad joke (particularly in scientific endeavors, a book or journal that is a year old is often obsolete). Furthermore, the necessity of storing these rapidly-growing collections was putting a strain on the budget and the physical plant of virtually every library, forcing library directors to struggle for additional budgetary funds to purchase the growing number of materials while looking woards new plans for expansion to contain them, all in a time of growing financial austerity. In Illinois, which contains a number of universities, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Illinois Board of Higher Education was beginning to see a pattern in the repeated requests of various university librarians for additional funding for expanding acquisitions budgets and storage expansion. The Board finally decided that they must find a new way of looking at the problem if the state's universities were to pass between the twin perils of bankrupting the state's education budget and falling behind in academic excellence due to budget cuts.31

For many years the University of Illinois and other academic libraries in the state had been doing some co-operative work, including use of centralized cataloging through the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and facilitating interlibrary loans through the Illinois Research and Reference Centers (IRRC). But as long as they were primarily dependent upon microfilmed and book catalogs to determine what library owned materials that other libraries wanted to borrow, the process was necessarily slow and inefficient. By the close of the 1960's, interactive terminals were becoming common enough that it was actually feasable to use a computerized system for managing the resource-sharing process. Thus the Illinois Board of Higher Education's Library Committee issued the first call for electronic resource sharing in 1969, specifying the investigation into establishing a statewide automated interlibrary loan network. In 1971 the Illinois Board of Higher Education issued their Master Plan for Higher Education in Illinois, which discussed the necessity of integrating the programs of the various state-supported universities in order to eliminate needless duplication and increase operating efficiency. In addition to its plans for an integrated system by which each university would specialize in certain curricula to reduce duplication of very small departments, the Master Plan also examined ways in which supporting activities could be streamlined. These included specific mandates for automating basic clerical routines in libraries and for creating an automated network that would expedite exchange of materials between libraries.32 This system would ultimately become the Illinet Online computer system, which serves as a union catalog for the holdings of all Illinois state-supported university libraries as well as a large number of other libraries. In many ways it would become an important part of the state's system of multi-type library networks.

School libraries have also been an important type of tax-supported library, although they generally get very little notice by those who are not educators, since they are administratively a very small part of the school systems and generally do not have powerful or influential librarians, as contrasted with the great academic libraries, who often have administrative librarians who are regularly in the public eye. New York state passed the first known legislation to fund school libraries in 1838. The legislators' rational was that the school library was an essential part of education and the books within them were a form of equipment for running the school. Numerous other states soon followed their examples.33 By the twentieth century, it has simply been assumed that every school should have some books. However, it has not always been easy to convince local boards of education and voters that the school library really needs increased funding in order to fulfil its mission. This has often been a product of the very invisibility mentioned earlier. Furthermore, with the growth of library co-operation and of the Internet, it has often been easier for school boards to simply suggest that the librarians should make better use of resources at area public and community-college libraries, rather than duplicating them at the school library.

The growth of library co-operation has been both beneficial and troublesome for libraries. Although it has opened access to items that patrons request but which would probably never be used again, and thus could not be justified for purchase, even if possible, it has also become an excuse for local funding agencies to reduce real funding to the libraries, thus shifting the tax burden of service provision to a larger taxing agencies. Almost all multi-type library networks which facilitate interlibrary loan and resource sharing are at least in some part funded by tax money.

The movement to the creation of library systems, bringing together the resources of multiple libraries in a given area, began in New York state in 1948. However, real development would wait until 1958, when the state government passed more flexible enabling legislation which created an effective framework for the formation of such systems. From their example, many other states developed similar systems. Illinois initiated a study of public library systems in 1963 which was approved by the General Assembly in 1965. By 1969, Illinois had created a network of eighteen library systems which served roughly 83 percent of the state's tax-supported libraries and 92 percent of the population.34

Although many multi-type library systems obtain a portion of their operating expenses from member library dues and from user fees, this is generally not sufficient to fully maintain the system. In order to maintain continuity of operations, administration and flexible services, systems generally must depend on a substantial amount of state and federal funding.35 When that funding is cut, libraries often have to cut back on their own participation in such arrangements because the money they receive in return for participating goes down. To the patron this translates into restrictions on reciprocal borrowing (the ability to go into another public library in one's area and borrow as though one were a local patron) and interlibrary loans.

What has been the overall effect of the growth of tax supported libraries, whether public, academic or school, and the library networks that tie them together? Certainly it has created more government, particularly at the local level, where many libraries have their own taxation districts and boards that are independent of any other body of local government. However, this growth may not have been entirely without benefit, especially in a society of ever-growing complexity. It is possible to make a plausable argument for public library service being a public good in the same sense of such things as the national defense, law enforcement and public roads, such that it would be impractical to directly charge the individual users because the benefits of the library goes far beyond the persons who actually cross the library threshold. Additionally, once a certain critical level of support is reached, the costs for providing service to each additional person are negligible.36 This is certainly true of libraries, since there is a certain "core collection" that a library really needs to have in order to adequately serve a user population of any size. Furthermore, the benefits of the accessibility of knowledge provided by a library often goes far beyond the people who pass the threshold, since an educated and well-read body politic is better equipped for citizenship in a democratic society.

However, that does not mean that it is totally inappropriate to charge for at least some services of the library. Particularly in the area of public librarianship, the "fee or free" question has been vexing, with some people arguing that everything should be "free" (ie paid through tax money) while others argue that it is not only legitimate but reasonable to expect patrons to help defray the cost of at least some library services through direct charges.The financial problems of the Depression led many libraries to charge fees for various services in order to supplement their meager funding. Although the official position of the American Library Association opposed such fees, public libraries continued to charge fees for various services throughout the following decades. Most of these, such as meeting room use, art print rental, photocopying and typewriter rental, were considered to be incidental to the library's primary mission of providing quality reading material to the public. Therefore it was easier to believe that the specific users of these ancillary services should pay directly for them. In the case of photocopying and typewriters, the expensive nature of the equipment served as an additional justification for asking patrons to help defray the cost of purchasing and maintaining the equipment.37

Studies have shown that people will pay more attention to the value and quality of a public service if they are required to pay a fee to obtain it, and a fee pegged to some fraction of the actual cost will spur citizens to consider how much they are using the service. By contrast, people are far more apt to overuse or abuse a service to which no clear fee is attached, simply because it is "free." Fees or penalties for abusing a service can also motivate people to use it more wisely.38 This has generally been the rationale for imposing fines on those who keep books until they are overdue.

It is probably not feasable, at least for the present, to totally abolish government funding for libraries and leave them entirely dependent upon local fundraising and the contributions of wealthy benefactors. However, it is probable that a closer supervision of libraries' use of government funds would lead to a better utilization of those funds. Certainly Carnegie was able to influence communities and librarians to eschew wasteful habits and spend his gifts wisely, and he had a strong motive because the money he was giving was money that he had earned. It is far less easy for government bureaucrats to take responsibility for the wise use of the tax revenues that they are distributing, since they have no personal stake in it.

Notes

  1. Virginia Ann Hodgkinson. "The Public Good: The Independent Sector's Point of View." in Libraries, Coalitions & The Public Good, E. J. Josey, ed. (New York: Neal-Schuman, 1987), 23.
  2. Ernestine Rose. The Public Library in American Life. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 15.
  3. Ibid. 15.
  4. Ibid. 17.
  5. Kathryn McChesney. "Ohio Public Libraris and Local Situs Intangibles Tax Support, 1931-1985." Libraries and Culture 24, # 4 (Fall 1989), 437.
  6. Ibid. 439.
  7. Ibid. 454.
  8. Jean B. Wellisch; Ruth J Patrick; Donald V. Black and Carlos A. Cuadra. The Public Library and Federal Policy. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1974), 7.
  9. Neil Harris. "Public Funding for Rarity: Some American Debates." Libraries and Culture 31 #1 (Winter 1996), 47.
  10. Andrew Carnegie. The Gospel of Wealth and other Timely Essays. Edward C. Kirkland, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1962), 20-37.
  11. George S. Bobinski. Carnegie Libraries: Their History and Impact on American Public Library Development. (Chicago: American Library Association, 1969), 11-12.
  12. George S. Bobinski. "A Call for Preservation -- of a Carnegie Library." Libraries and Culture. 24 #3 (Summer 1989). 367.
  13. Joe Natale. "The Springfield Lincoln Library Building, 1904-1974" Illinois Libraries 69 # 9 (Nov 1987), 622.
  14. Ibid. 622.
  15. Neil A. Radford. The Carnegie Corporation and the Development of American College Libraries, 1928-1941. ACRL Publications in Librarianship no. 44. (Chicago: American Library Association, 1984), 6-7.
  16. Bobinski. Carnegie Libraries. 47.
  17. Ibid. 99-100.
  18. Wellisch, et al. 12-13.
  19. Ibid. 63.
  20. Ibid. 32-33.
  21. David R. Bender. "People in Washington who Work for the Funding of Libraries." in Politics and the Support of Libraries, E. J. Josey and Kenneth D. Shearer, eds. (New York: Neal, Schuman, 1990), 167.
  22. Rose, 60-66.
  23. Julie C. Boehning. "NY Public Library Celebrates 100 Years of Public Service." Library Journal 120, v11(June 15, 1995), 13.
  24. Phyllis Dain. "Public Library Governance and a Changing New York City." Libraries and Culture 26, 2 (Spring 1991), 219-220.
  25. Ibid. 232.
  26. Ibid. 230.
  27. Milo Nelson, "Lighting Candles on 42nd Street: NYPL Celebrates its Diamond Anniversary." Wilson Library Bulletin. (May 1986) 16.
  28. Radford, 14-15.
  29. Ibid. 4-6.
  30. Ibid. 151-152.
  31. Illinois Board of Higher Education, Report of the Library Committee, (Springfield, IL: Illinois State Government, 1969), 109.
  32. Illinois Board of Higher Education, A Master Plan for Higher Education in Illinois: Phase III of an Integrated State System. (Springfield, IL: Illinois State Government, 1971), 42.
  33. Wellisch, et al. 5.
  34. Ibid. 15.
  35. Janet M. Welch. "The Multitype Library System and its Political Environment." in Politics and the Support of Libraries, E. J. Josey and Kenneth D. Shearer, eds. (New York: Neal, Schuman, 1990), 137.
  36. John N. Berry. "The Public Good: What is It?" in Libraries, Coalitions & The Public Good, E. J. Josey, ed. (New York: Neal-Schuman, 1987), 8-9.
  37. Pete Giacoma. The Fee or Free Decision: Legal, Economic, Policital, and Ethical Perspectives for Public Libraries. (New York: Neal-Schuman, [undated]), 2-3.
  38. Ibid. 21.

Bibliography

Bender, David R. "People in Washington who Work for the Funding of Libraries." in Politics and the Support of Libraries, E. J. Josey and Kenneth D. Shearer, eds. New York: Neal, Schuman, 1990, 167-174.

Berry, John N. "The Public Good: What is It?" in Libraries, Coalitions & The Public Good, E. J. Josey, ed. New York: Neal-Schuman, 1987, 7-15.

Bobinski, George S. "A Call for Preservation -- of a Carnegie Library." Libraries and Culture. 24 #3 (Summer 1989), 367-369.

Bobinski, George S. Carnegie Libraries: Their History and Impact on American Public Library Development. Chicago: American Library Association, 1969.

Boehning, Julie C. "NY Public Library Celebrates 100 Years of Public Service." Library Journal 120, v11(June 15, 1995), 13.

Carnegie, Andrew. The Gospel of Wealth and other Timely Essays. Edward C. Kirkland, ed. Cambridge: Harvard, 1962.

Dain, Phyllis. "Public Library Governance and a Changing New York City." Libraries and Culture 26, 2 (Spring 1991), 219-250.

Giacoma, Pete. The Fee or Free Decision: Legal, Economic, Policital, and Ethical Perspectives for Public Libraries. New York: Neal-Schuman, [undated].

Harris, Neil. "Public Funding for Rarity: Some American Debates." Libraries and Culture 31 #1 (Winter 1996), 36-55.

Hodgkinson, Virginia Ann. "The Public Good: The Independent Sector's Point of View." in Libraries, Coalitions & The Public Good, E. J. Josey, ed. New York: Neal-Schuman, 1987, 22-33.

Illinois Board of Higher Education, Report of the Library Committee. Springfield, IL: Illinois State Government, 1969.

Illinois Board of Higher Education, A Master Plan for Higher Education in Illinois: Phase III of an Integrated State System. Springfield, IL: Illinois State Government, 1971.

McChesny, Kathryn. "Ohio Public Libraris and Local Situs Intangibles Tax Support, 1931-1985." Libraries and Culture 24, # 4 (Fall 1989), 436-358.

Natale, Joe. "The Springfield Lincoln Library Building, 1904-1974" Illinois Libraries 69 # 9 (Nov 1987), 621-624.

Nelson, Milo. "Lighting Candles on 42nd Street: NYPL Celebrates its Diamond Anniversary." Wilson Library Bulletin 60 # 5 (May 1986), 14-18.

Radford, Neil A. The Carnegie Corporation and the Development of American College Libraries, 1928-1941. ACRL Publications in Librarianship no. 44. Chicago: American Library Association, 1984.

Rose, Ernestine. The Public Library in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1954.

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Copyright 1998 by Leigh Kimmel

For permission to quote or reprint, contact Leigh Kimmel

This paper was originally written as part of a course in policy history, taught by Dr. Jonathan Bean of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

Last updated November 5, 2010.