So it turns out there are a cou­ple of poten­tially con­tro­ver­sial things about the cur­rent issue of The New Yorker, one of them being an arti­cle called “The Lion and the Mouse” by Jill Lep­ore. I’ve always agreed with the ethic and atti­tude of “Library 2.0,” even though I didn’t like the impli­ca­tion that libraries had never before in our his­tory evolved. For me, it sym­bol­izes the need to change again, in what may seem to some like rad­i­cal ways (online con­ver­sa­tions, user-generated con­tent, zoned phys­i­cal spaces, col­lab­o­ra­tive rela­tion­ships with users, etc.), but this arti­cle shows just one exam­ple of when this hap­pened in the past. Libraries responded then, as many are respond­ing now.

As a pro­po­nent of gam­ing in libraries, one of the crit­i­cisms I hear about the move­ment is that libraries are for books and the edi­fi­ca­tion of the mind. That we shouldn’t cor­rupt young minds with games, and that we shouldn’t use games as a ploy to get kids in the door. But libraries are vibrant places where quite a wide range of other things hap­pen besides just books, and I think it’s sad when patrons or librar­i­ans por­tray us as just ware­houses. Any build­ing can be a book ware­house — that’s not what makes us “libraries” and com­mu­nity cen­ters (regard­less of type of library), and librar­i­ans cer­tainly aren’t “book tellers,” just sit­ting behind a desk wait­ing to hand over a book in return for see­ing a library card.

I believe quite strongly that libraries are about con­tent, peo­ple, and com­mu­ni­ties. The peo­ple cre­ate com­mu­nity there, often around the con­tent, but not always, espe­cially in pub­lic libraries where we also serve a recre­ational role. All of this is why I believe gam­ing in libraries is a per­fect fit, and I cringe when I hear some­one con­jure up “the good old days” when all kids did was sit in the library and read. When I hear this, I won­der whose child­hood they’re remem­ber­ing, because while I cer­tainly loved the library and would often read there, a lot of my friends never went there, maybe even most of them. The truth is that a lot of the kids I grew up with weren’t spend­ing their days read­ing the clas­sics unless they were forced to by teach­ers, let alone enlight­en­ing their minds by just sit­ting qui­etly in the mid­dle of the library.

And if we go back far enough in “the good old days,” it turns out they couldn’t have done those things even if they’d wanted to, because chil­dren sim­ply weren’t allowed in the library, a point brought home in The New Yorker piece. While the author spends the major­ity of the arti­cle dis­cussing rival­ries between the early play­ers in the world of book reviews of children’s lit­er­a­ture, the back­ground his­tory is rel­e­vant to our own dis­cus­sions today.

“At the time [1895], you had to be four­teen, and a boy, to get into the Astor Library, which opened in 1854, the same year as the Boston Pub­lic Library, the country’s first pub­licly funded city library, where you had to be six­teen. Even if you got inside, the librar­i­ans would shush you, carp­ing about how the ‘young fry’ read noth­ing but ‘the trashy’: Scott, Cooper, and Dick­ens (one century’s garbage being, as ever, another century’s Great Books). Samuel Tilden, who left $2.4 mil­lion to estab­lish a free library in New York, nearly changed his mind when he found out that ninety per­cent of the books checked out of the Boston Pub­lic Library were fic­tion. Mean­while, libraries were pop­ping up in Amer­i­can cities and towns like cro­cuses at first melt. Between 1881 and 1917, Andrew Carnegie under­wrote the con­struc­tion of more than six­teen hun­dred pub­lic libraries in the United States, build­ings from which chil­dren were rou­tinely turned away, because they needed to be pro­tected from morally cor­rupt­ing books, espe­cially nov­els. In 1894, at the annual meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion, the Mil­wau­kee Pub­lic Library’s Lutie Stearns read a ‘Report on the Read­ing of the Young.’ What if libraries were to set aside spe­cial books for chil­dren, Stearns won­dered, shelved in sep­a­rate rooms for chil­dren, staffed by librar­i­ans who actu­ally liked children?

Much of what [Anne Car­roll] Moore did in that room had never been done before, or half as well. She brought in sto­ry­tellers and, in her first year, orga­nized two hun­dred story hours (and ten times as many two years later). She com­piled a list of twenty-five hun­dred stan­dard titles in children’s lit­er­a­ture. She won the right to grant bor­row­ing priv­i­leges to chil­dren; by 1913, children’s books accounted for a third of all the vol­umes bor­rowed from New York’s branch libraries. Against the pre­vail­ing sen­ti­ment of the day, she believed that her job was to give ‘to the child of for­eign parent­age a feel­ing of pride in the beau­ti­ful things of the coun­try his par­ents have left.…’ In each of the library’s branches, Moore abol­ished age restric­tions. Down came the ‘Silence’ signs, up went framed prints of the work of children’s-book illus­tra­tors. “Do not expect or demand per­fect quiet,” she instructed her staff. ‘The edu­ca­tion of chil­dren begins at the open shelves.’ In place of locked cab­i­nets, she pro­vided every library with a big black ledger; if you could sign your name, you could bor­row a book.” (Thanks, Richard!)

So when we talk about “the good old days,” let’s be sure to spec­ify which period we’re refer­ring to, because just over a hun­dred years ago, fic­tion was the great cor­rupter of young minds. A few decades later, it was E. B. White’s “Stu­art Little.”

But things change, and now it’s games in the libraries that are bad influ­ences or candy or inap­pro­pri­ate instead of books. What a dif­fer­ence a cen­tury makes! How much more pow­er­ful is it to look back on our his­tory and see how library ser­vices to all patrons have changed dur­ing the last hun­dred years? It’s some­thing to be proud of, even as we expe­ri­ence another tran­si­tional period and change again to serve new [and old] users in new ways.

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