I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Andrew Carnegie lately. Specifically about the more than 2,600 libraries that he donated to various municipalities around the world in the first quarter of the twentieth century. What a thought: give a building to one town; its next door neighbor will surely want one, too. Carnegie thought of his libraries as cagey acts of philanthropy. When asked why donate a library, he replied: “I think it fruitful in the extreme, because the library gives nothing for nothing, because it helps only those that help themselves, because it does not sap the foundation of manly independence, because it does not pauperize, because it stretches a hand to the aspiring and places a ladder upon which they can only ascend by doing the climbing themselves. This is not charity, this is not philanthropy, it is the people themselves helping themselves by taxing themselves” (Koch, A Book of Carnegie Libraries, 8).
Robert Moore, in his recent essay “Bones of the Book,” mentioned in the previous post, suggests that libraries are on their way out. “If those noble institutions exist at all in thirty years, our children will probably know them as quiet places to use computers and read e-books. You can already walk into one of 11,000 public libraries, from Manhattan to Missoula, and have e-books loaned to your Kindle.”
I am not here to bemoan changes in the landscape of information technology — as much as I love libraries, they are clearly in a sea change. I met a lovely reference librarian the other day. When I asked her name, she replied, “Google.” No, what I’m thinking about is the spirit of Carnegie’s gift. What might we be building today (if not libraries) that “stretches a hand to the aspiring and places a ladder” that only they can climb? There must be something.