Public Libraries

Today public libraries are considered throughout much of the world to be an essential feature of a functioning and healthy civil society. Taxpayer dollars and private philanthropic funds are collected and utilized to maintain the availability of these services offering access to different kinds of information and media for the purposes of the general public. Any city or town that is considered to be thriving will offer its residents and visitors access to at least some kind of public library, though the size of a facility and the range of materials and services it offers may vary according to financial health and the size of the local population being served. In the history of the United States, the development of the concept of a public library has played an important part in the nurturing of the country’s sense of its citizenry and correspondingly in its sense of the importance of the democratic system. Going back further in history, to the English origins of the American political system, one will find that the creation of public libraries also played some part as a factor in the development of political culture and the space it allowed for the participation of ordinary citizens. By providing a relatively inexpensive and largely self directed means for the education of the citizens of a country, the public library concept has contributed greatly to the development of democratic political culture.

The early growth in library systems in world history occurred largely through religious and educational institutions that generally restricted the availability of the materials they owned to members of the institutions. The first institution in England which could be described as resembling the modern notion of a public library was created in 1598 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, with the creation of the Francis Trigge Chained Library, which is still in existence. The widespread proliferation of public libraries organized according to a standardized system had to wait in England for several centuries, until 1847, a time of legislative and governmental change in the country that saw a widening of the political process in terms of its accessibility to the general populace of England. In that year Parliament appointed the politician William Ewart to head a committee that would study conditions throughout the country to determine if it would be necessary to establish a system of public libraries for the benefit of the public. Two years later Ewart’s committee returned with a recommendation that a public library service be made publicly and widely available, noting the poor state of those public libraries then available. This report persuaded Parliament to pass the Public Libraries Act of 1850, which gave all cities in which the number of residents was greater than 10,000 the right to pass taxes for public library support. Another important legislative step toward the development of the public library system occurred with the 1870 Public School Act, which greatly increased the rate of literacy in the English public and thereby increased demand for creating available public library institutions.