In an update of Carnegie’s idea, Klinenberg describes public libraries as “social infrastructure.” That means “the physical spaces and organizations that shape the way people interact,” he wrote in a 2018 op-ed in the New York Times. Klinenberg borrowed the title from Andrew Carnegie, the Gilded Age industrialist-turned-philanthropist who funded some three thousand public libraries-“palaces for the people”-in the United States and abroad. Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist based at New York University, spent a year doing ethnographic research in New York City library branches for his latest book, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. Such interventions indicate the expanded role our public libraries now play in a fraying social network. Other libraries, including the San Francisco Public Library, have followed suit and begun to stock the life-saving drug.
That prompted the library to lay in a supply of Narcan, a drug used to counteract opioid overdoses. In February 2017, a twenty-five-year-old man suffered a fatal overdose in one of its bathrooms. If the idea of libraries as frontline responders in the opioid crisis sounds far-fetched, look no further than the Denver Public Library. These days, a branch librarian might run story hour in the morning, assist with a research project at lunchtime, and in the afternoon administer life-saving medical aid to a patron who’s overdosed on the premises. But it has also put pressure on them to be all things to all people, and to meet a vast range of social needs without correspondingly vast budgets.
That commitment to inclusivity, along with a persistent ability to adapt to changing times, has kept public libraries vital in an era of divisive politics and disruptive technological change. “We certainly are without judgment about anybody’s characteristics.” “We are open spaces,” says Susan Benton, the president and CEO of the Urban Libraries Council, whose members include public-library systems serving cities large and small across the United States. In a country riven by racial, ethnic, political, and socioeconomic divides, libraries still welcome everyone. And the library will never share or sell your personal data. You don’t need money or a library card to access a multitude of on-site resources that includes books, e-books and magazines, job-hunting assistance, computer stations, free Wi-Fi, and much more. You can stay all day, and you don’t have to buy anything. The public library requires nothing of its visitors: no purchases, no membership fees, no dress code. One place, though, remains open to everybody.
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