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Libraries and the Decline of Public Purposes

Abstract This article explores the idea of the democratic public sphere, and it is grounded in the work of Jurgen Habermas. Libraries help make possible the democratic public sphere ideal in the form of rational organization of human cultural production and they embody an essential element of democracy: a place where the ideal of unfettered communication and investigation exists in rudimentary form, hosting the turbulent discourse of a democracy and its culture. However, the trend of viewing and running libraries along business and profit models- “the new public philosophy” -represents a dismantling of the democratic public sphere. This can be seen in examples as varied as the rhetorical shift from “patron” to “customer,” the current struggles for funding and the justifications used in that process, to coffee bars, no retrospective collections, and the bias toward economically-useful electronic resources. The article ends with the argument that, if we forget this role and reason for being and abandon public purposes, then we are helping in the demise of the democratic public sphere and cutting away at the long-term justification for libraries. It is worth reminding ourselves that the value of a good library-like good teaching-is extraordinarily difficult to quantify.