Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

by Amanda Oliver

It is perhaps even more uncomfortable to think of libraries as places that house specific and horrifying incidents of trauma and violence.

To better understand how and why libraries respond to crises, it is important to understand that there is something of a rift among librarians and that they can, for the most part, be broken into two groups. Group one believes library professionals sign up to be in deep service to their community and understand that they may be called on as second, and sometimes first, responders. Group two believes they signed up to be information professionals and protectors of freedom of speech, not emergency responders. There is plenty of crossover between these two philosophies, but every librarian I know or have interviewed leans one way more than the other. Emergencies of any kind are often the way to see where a person sits on this spectrum.

It is a commitment to moving forward instead of staying stuck in guilt or anger, instead of remaining perpetually in grief. This hope does not rely on old ideas or incomplete truths, like the notion that the library can “save” us. That kind of salvation defers the possibility of change to elsewhere—some higher power, some person or entity who might respond to our prayer with deliverance—and allows us to remain passive in our fate and in the fate of others.