Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

by Amanda Oliver

One of the most prevalent oppositions to the necessity of libraries that people voice is the development and advancement of technology. In these instances, I would point people to link rot. Link rot is the tendency of Internet links over time to no longer direct to their originally intended content or to break altogether. We might consider the Internet as one giant library that is managed by no one person, or groups of persons, in particular. As Google itself puts it on its page titled “How Search Organizes Information”: “The web is like an ever-growing library with billions of books and no central filing system.”19 While this is cited and celebrated as one of its greatest qualities—the overall freedom of speech and expression, of democracy and grassroots perseverance, that the Internet allows for and fosters—it has also altered how we preserve our histories. Never have our recorded histories been more susceptible to erasure, compromise, and deletion in ways that physical libraries are not because they are run by living, breathing librarians who maintain them. As Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard, writes: “Imagine if libraries didn’t exist and there was only a ‘sharing economy’ for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It’s no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be—espec...