The Values of Libraries

Abstract

I'm going to focus on the historical motivations for the found-ing and development of modern academic and public librar-ies. These may or may not be the values that libraries still have, but they were the values that founded them. I argue they were founded upon an array of Enlightenment values, including the use of human reason to study the world, to create and disseminate new knowledge, and to educate the citizens of a democratic republic and enrich their lives. The Enlightenment can be roughly divided into the philo-sophical and the political. By Philosophical Enlightenment, I mean all those principles of Enlightenment that coalesce around scholarship and research, the increase of knowledge, the belief in the benefits of science and education, and the right and even obligation to publish scholarly findings. In contrast, Political Enlightenment could be considered the Philosophical Enlightenment democratized—Enlightenment at least within the reach of everyone, even if not desired by everyone. This rough division plays itself out in the history of li-braries. Academic libraries—and the universities they sup-port—to a great extent fulfill the promises of the Philosophi-cal Enlightenment to collect, organize, preserve, and within limitations disseminate scholarly knowledge and the human record. Public libraries fall into the category of the Politi-cal Enlightenment, and many have conceived their mission partly as one of making knowledge more available to people.