The Washington Post recently ran a piece declaring that the world was in the midst of a new “golden age” of libraries. The piece approvingly mentioned a few recent library projects around the world, including the just-opened Deichman Bjørvika library in Oslo, which won the public library of the year award in 2021. The article approvingly cited the Norwegian library’s “stunning reading rooms . . . cinema, a 200-seat auditorium, cafes, recording studios, rehearsal spaces and game rooms.”

While the article focused on libraries
abroad, there were a few mentions of American libraries, which have become more
innovative. The recently expanded Fayetteville Public Library in Arkansas, for example, “offers an ‘art and movement’ room, an
event center and a teaching kitchen, among other amenities.”

With articles like this portraying
libraries as such vibrant places, one could easily be misled into thinking that
our nation’s libraries are thriving and central to the fabric of local
communities. Sadly, at least in the United States, libraries are
not functioning as central pieces of social infrastructure and most Americans do not even visit their
local libraries regularly. Library devotees, journalists, and academics must
stop focusing on a handful of spectacular new library projects and consider the
overall status of American libraries if we are going to actually revitalize
these hallowed institutions.

Consider the fact that the Washington
Post piece mentioned the newly renovated Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library on 5th Avenue in mid-town Manhattan. This library is indeed breezy
and open while offering ample places to read, along with a business center, a
podcasting studio, a floor dedicated to children and teens, and a rooftop
terrace. However, this is not a community library. While the library does offer
classes and spaces to gather and learn for guests of all ages, its location is
not within a residential area whatsoever and the library does not serve any
neighborhood or community — like many of the other almost 100 libraries that
are far less resourced.

While there have recently been a few nice library developments in the US, the Washington Post piece cherry-picked libraries from around the globe. The fact remains that library use has been in steady decline across the nation. Tim Coates has found a 31 percent decline in public library building use between 2000 and 2018. This decline has little to do with funding, as revenue has actually increased in most places, and most years, since 2012.

Moreover, a new national survey from the Survey Center on American Life explores American communities and the data is unambiguous: Libraries are not significant to the lives of Americans whatsoever. Only 7 percent of Americans visit libraries weekly, while 22 percent report visiting libraries at least once or twice a month; hardly a large number. Almost six in 10 Americans report they seldom or never visit their local public library, with 32 percent — the plurality in the sample — saying they never do, bringing into question the purported centrality of these public spaces.

The lack of interest in libraries
is a widespread phenomenon. There are, for instance, no real generational
differences — younger cohorts of Americans are as likely to visit the library
as their grandparents are. About a fifth of every generational cohort reports
visiting their local library at least once or twice a month. There are minimal
geographic differences too: Whether one lives in
a small city suburb, big city, or rural area, people are not visiting libraries
at variable rates. Income, distance, racial or ethnic, and even familial
structure differences are not statistically important either — Americans uniformly
do not visit libraries.

The Institute for Museum and Library Services’ Public Library Survey (PLS) data finds that over the past decade, there has been a non-trivial decline in visits per capita to libraries nationwide. The PLS data show that in 2009, Americans visited a library 5.4 times per year on average. A decade later in 2019, attendance dropped to 3.9 visits per year — a 28 percent decline.

The empirical reality is that libraries are not third places for most Americans; the average American rarely sets foot into one. Visits to the nation’s 16,000 or so library locations have been falling over the past decade. Articles in major news outlets which declare that the nation is witnessing a “golden age” of libraries are not only factually inaccurate but by ignoring reality harm those of us who care deeply for libraries. For if libraries today were so dynamic and were truly “at the heart of their communities,” it would not be the case that the overwhelming majority of citizens rarely or never visit their libraries. If newly improved libraries one day do help, improve, and change their communities for the better, they should then serve as models of innovation. But until then, it is wrong to suggest that the nation is experiencing a library renaissance.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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