Emily Drabinski is Associate Professor of Library and Information Studies at Queens College, City University of New York and the immediate past president of the American Library Association. Her tenure was marked by right-wing backlash and her own strong statements defending intellectual freedom and emphasising the importance of libraries mobilising as a shared public resource. She is in India visiting libraries and spoke with Mridula Koshy from Free Libraries Network (FLN) about the importance of libraries and why India not having enough of them is a concern.
Excerpts from the conversation:
One of the libraries you visited in India is the library in Delhi in which I am a member, The Community Library Project in Khirki Extension. It is free of cost to members, which is not true of most of the public libraries in India but is true of the libraries in the public library system in the United States. What does “free” mean to you?
At its most essential, free simply means available without cost. In the United States, there are very few things available for free, but public libraries – along with public parks, roads, schools – are among them. This does not mean that libraries are without cost. Running a library is expensive, from the building to the books to the people who bring the institution alive. These costs are not borne by the individual user but by the government. Most of our public libraries in the US are funded by municipalities, with additional allocations from the state and grants from the federal government.
The state of Iowa has more than 500 public libraries, an enormous number considering the small population, fewer by millions than the city of Delhi. Iowa has a law that requires cities to designate a certain portion of their budget to the public library – that is how you produce a strong library ecosystem that is free for everyone. Legislators recently proposed changing the language of the regulation to say that cities should allocate those funds rather than that they must. The struggle for libraries is over that word: must.
A fellow library activist, Simpy, wanted me to ask you whether having free libraries as a matter of people’s right to read, and as she put it somewhat wistfully, “even from childhood,” has meant that people take libraries for granted. How do people in the United States relate to their free libraries? How and when do people anywhere value their libraries?
I have been a librarian for more than twenty years and for most of that time, I’ve heard relentless arguments that libraries are dying, that they’re not necessary anymore. Like clockwork, every six weeks or so, a pundit somewhere will publish a piece suggesting that the library is dead. “All information is available online.” “I can order any book from Amazon.” “Google it.” Every time I read one of these stories I know two things. The author hasn’t used their library since their mother took them as a child, and they have economic resources that allow them to exempt themselves from services designed for the public.
People who use libraries know their value, and that’s why they fight to defend them when they are under threat. Policymakers are too often in this category. During the initial stage of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US developed an eviction assistance program that gave cash grants to eligible citizens who risked losing their homes due to job loss. To access those funds, people needed an internet connection and an email address. Any public librarian in the US will tell you that there are large numbers of us who do not have those things.
I spoke with a librarian in Charleston, South Carolina, whose staff worked one-on-one with library patrons who needed assistance in accessing those funds, literally saving people from homelessness. You better believe those patrons love their library. That this falls under the library’s remit is its own issue – we need a more robust social safety net that doesn’t leave the library as one of the only institutions that are committed to solving problems. Most Americans are nostalgic about their libraries and will tell you they love them. Our challenge is to translate that love into expanded government support for our budgets.
You have written elsewhere about the existential threat to the American public library system which has been made vulnerable by the neoliberal state’s disinvestment in public institutions. What have you seen and understood from your reading and personal experience of libraries in India? What does it accomplish to invest in libraries?
There simply aren’t enough public libraries here. I live in Brooklyn, New York, a borough with a tenth of the population of Delhi and we have 62 branches in our system. Delhi has just over half that number. The public libraries I’ve visited in Delhi are in ageing buildings with ageing collections, and little in the way of outreach and programming. Investing in libraries means investing in people, expanding literacy, producing joy, connecting communities to each other and the world.
Eric Klinenberg makes the argument in Palaces for the People that libraries are civic infrastructure every bit as essential for the functioning of public life as hospitals, schools, and parks. I’d say they’re even more important because of the ways libraries create space for a range of social projects. We can gather in a library, learn in a library, develop analysis in a library. When people come together to talk about the reality of their lives and how they might collectively struggle to change them, that poses a threat to the existing order. I think that’s part of the reason public libraries are under threat right now.
In TCLP and FLN we have rallying cries like “reading is resistance” and “right to read”. We also have library-based curriculum and pedagogy underpinned by what is perhaps the American coined “reading is thinking.” What is reading according to you?
Reading is fundamentally a practice of freedom. When we pick up a book and open it, we enter a private world that belongs just to us and the author, the other readers of the same book. When we read, we are sovereign over our own mind, a sovereignty that can never be abridged. We read so that we can be free. Every book is also a moment in an ongoing conversation between people and the world. Reading enables us to develop an analysis of our current condition. It is how we begin to understand how the world came to be as it is and what we might do to make it different. We don’t invent these things alone but through reading the words of others and engaging those words with others. Look at any political movement and you will see reading at the centre. The libraries that sprung up during the Occupy movement, the reading programs of the Black Panthers, the Foucault in the back pockets of ACT UP activists – reading is fundamental to social change. This is why governments seek to repress it. All over the world, people are deprived of the basic conditions of reading: literacy education, access to books, and the time and space – in all senses of those two words – necessary to engage with the words of others. The fight for the right to read is a fight for all these things.
Tell us about the role of reading in a democracy.
The premise of democracy is that each citizen shapes her government through the power of her vote. I can’t vote for my interest unless I understand what my interest is. None of us is born with an analysis of political and social life – we build that in part through reading. Why is the air so heavy with pollutants? What could a government do to make the air clean and safe for all of us? We can’t guess at those things. We read to understand how the world came to be as it is and what might be done to make it different. Access to reading that helps us make sense of the world is a precondition of democracy in any meaningful sense.
And finally, whose responsibility is it to create access to reading?
Community libraries are examples of the worlds we can create on the ground, in the present, when organisers commit themselves to building institutions for reading and freedom. They are extraordinary. But we also know the limits of such efforts. Libraries are costly and they require resources to run, lots of them, resources that only the state controls, and therefore it is the responsibility of the state to build the libraries necessary for the kinds of reading we’ve been discussing here.
When I took the metro on my arrival to Delhi I was struck by its efficiency and speed. I haven’t waited more than five minutes for a train since I got here. It is so much better than the ageing public transit infrastructure back home in New York. When I learned that the system was built within the last twenty years I was amazed. The state can accomplish so much when it decides to! The state can decide to build the libraries necessary to provide access to reading for everyone regardless of economic condition, gender, caste, or distance from an urban centre. It is the responsibility of the government to make a free public library system accessible to all.
