What Is a Library? What Do Libraries Do?

This page features resources—including opinions and perspectives— on both historical contexts and on potentially changing information landscapes of the present.

Libraries—including those in Wisconsin and Minnesota—may provide a variety of resources in support of their patrons' overall well-being. In a public library context, consider:  Libraries & Well-Being: A Case Study from The New York Public Library (includes six key points presented in a clear and user-friendly manner). 

This may be understood, in part, to reflect attention to current social needs. 

Specific examples of local resources include:

• access to published information about health and medicine, including scientific research and discovery (ex:UW-Superior).  
• specific collections of physical materials (ex: the First Floor collections gallery of the JDH Library at UW-Superior includes our Mindfulness & Well-Being Collection).
• listings of local resources and services (ex: Duluth Public Library). 
• and even on-site social work services (ex: Superior Public Library).

Libraries May Contribute to and Reflect Social Change

Contemporary Perspectives

• On July 11, The Observer (out of Britain) posted: ‘There is no political power without power over the archive.’ The author serves as Bodley's Librarian—senior executive officer of the Bodleian Libraries for the University of Oxford.
• On July 9, representatives of a selection of Library and Publishing groups posted a joint statement to convey that they "stand united to face the mounting risks to public trust and the social benefit that research delivers." 
• In a brief blog post to the Chicago Tribune in June, there is an expression of appreciation and concern for the services of libraries, especially those that have been supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (UWS patrons can access here) 

Examples from the 1950s and 1960s United States

Libraries and Librarians are a part of their society and of their time and place. Consider these examples from the middle of the twentieth century: 

• In 1950, Ruth Brown, Director of the Bartlesville (Oklahoma) Public Library, was dismissed from her position after thirty-one years of service.
  • One argument of the time was that under Brown's leadership, the library held allegedly subversive (Socialist) materials.
  • Notably, Brown advocated for Black patrons to have access to library spaces and services in ways not permitted under the segregation laws of the time, though this was not emphasized in the film depicting her. 
  • Louise S. Robbins (former director of the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Library and Information Studies) has set Brown's dismissal within a framework of Cold War politics while also connecting  Brown's dismissal to her efforts for racial justice and civil rights (Robbins' book is available to UW-Superior patrons  through Resource Sharing).
• "Our books are not here to gather dust on the shelves; library service is not denied to anyone in Florida if the service is within the limits of our budget."
  • This quote is attributed by the State Library and Archives of Florida to Florida State Librarian (and the first Archivist of the State of Florida), Dorothy Dodd, in 1962. 
  • In the same context, Dodd is recalled by Santa Fe College as one of the "Fearless Women of Florida," in part for her extension of library services to "prison inmates." 
  • Yet Dodd is perhaps most remembered for what has been thought of as her call for Florida public libraries to remove titles including Tarzan and The Wizard of Oz (both of which were part of a larger series) from shelves. 
    • A January 1959 newsletter issued under Dodd asserted that "the presence of books of this type on the library shelves indicate waste of time and money on the part of the librarian and lack of interest in the welfare of the children of the community." 
    • There was quickly a clear difference of opinion shared in a variety of ways, including in an editorial published in Life Magazine. 
    • The newsletter text attributed to Dodd appears to align with that depicted in the March 1959 Newsletter of the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee Association. 
      • This association's newsletter attributes the general premise and even the wording not to Dodd and not to Florida, but to the Library of South Carolina.
      • It also seems sympathetic to what it situates as Dodd's broader point, which is that it is challenging for libraries to select books (and perhaps especially complete series of books) guaranteed to be of long-lasting value.

These examples illustrate that libraries and librarians have long sought to provide their entire communities with library resources and services to meet identified needs. They demonstrate the importance of professional ethics.

• The example of Dodd, in part, illustrates how fraught the book selection process can be for libraries and librarians,* and how public responses can take on a life of their own—even going so far as to single out individuals (and perhaps not always with complete information).
• These examples can also help us to see that book bans and concerns about and challenges to library holdings are far from new. In fact, The Wizard of Oz was a contested title for decades (UW-Superior patrons can see a brief entry on this topic in a May 8 2000 issue of the Chicago Tribune).  

*For an example of  how some of this has been understood to work in library and information sciences, consider "Not Censorship But Selection," by Lester Asheim, and first published in 1953

Additional Related Resources

Under segregation, not all public libraries in the United States provided services—or full access—to Black patrons. 

• According to the Digital Public Library of America, the "first free public library for African American readers staffed and operated entirely by African Americans" was opened in Louisville, KY, in 1905.
• In 2018, Greg Landgraf published features of and discussions with "five leading African-American librarians about their careers." 
• In 2021, in the article The Right to Read: The Fight to Desegregate Southern U.S. Public Libraries, Laura Wertz asserts the importance of the awareness of this history, in part, to help libraries fulfill their mission of service.
• A related discussion on public school libraries is offered by Wayne A. Wiegand in a book from University of Mississippi Press: In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries. 

Many current approaches in the United States to extending public library services to incarcerated persons also took shape in the twentieth century. 

• The American Library Association published interviews with contemporary perspectives in 2023.
• Historical context is presented in the Open Access article, Libraries on the Inside: A Study of Public Library Outreach to Correctional Institutions, by Annaliese Melvin.

Conversely, while some of the approach may have changed, challenges to libraries' book holdings and calls for banning of books have occurred for a long time. 

• PEN America has a timeline, Manuscripts Don’t Burn: a Timeline of Literary Censorship, Destruction, and Liberation, that dates to 1601.
• For more recent information, consider our Banned and Challenged Books Guide.