OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts

A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren’t. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded—permanently. “We’re being very ruthless,” boasts library director Sam Clay. …

But this raises a fundamental question: What are libraries for? Are they cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been thought and said? Or are they more like actual stores, responding to whatever fickle taste or Mitch Albom tearjerker is all the rage at this very moment?

Libraries are one of the great symbols of freedom of speech and democracy by virtue of being seen as guarantors of an ‘educated electorate’. The public that has access to edifying reading will be more likely to vote ‘rationally’ and be well-informed. However, does the public have a say (vote) in what should be in the libraries for their edification? And if so, how is their say recorded? I would suggest that the public should have a say but that recording it by pure majority preference (a sort of implied vote) is insufficient.

The library officials are making the mistake of assuming that since readers mostly check out popular literature they would, if asked, not prefer that the library be the curator of some of the less popular but more ‘important’ titles. However, the author of the commentary makes a similarly problematic assumption, i.e. that Nelson DeMille has less to say on the subject of human existence than Dostoyevsky or Marlowe. That’s why it should not be left just to the elites to make the decision which is just as determined by social prestige of authors as the preference of the airport potboiler (only the social circle that determines the prestige is different).