Likely Passage

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I seem to have an unfortunate allergy to anything that hints at tech boosterism, so I found myself groaning here we go again when I encountered the first line in Shannon Mattern’s Library as Infrastructure —”Melvil Dewey was a one-man Silicon Valley born a century before Steve Jobs”. Thankfully, this quickly proved to be a clever bait-and-switch. Mattern’s piece ended up being one of the most inspiring, useful texts I’ve encountered in this program.

When I left my previous career in healthcare, I waffled between pursuing a career in social work or a career in libraries. Libraries won because I realized they offered the possibility of directly impacting people’s lives in a much looser, more dynamic way. Social work is important work, but it’s more rigid, bureaucratic. In libraries, or maybe I should say the future of libraries, I recognized endless potential.

Technology obviously plays a role in these possibilities but only if it functions as a counterweight to the tech industry and tech industry’s ethos. The tech industries’ innovations and disruptions should be approached with a critical eye^[1], highlighted primarily as negative examples of what happens when genuine innovation is routed away from the public good towards private interests. When concepts like community, access, and intellectual freedom are co-opted and corrupted for profit. Libraries have a much longer history of upholding these values and we need to stop pre-emptively ceding ground to Silicon Valley.

In 2024, thinking like a startup no longer qualifies as thinking outside of the box. The logged on, hustle mindset is very much the status quo. Everything bends towards following the tech industry’s lead^[2]. Life is becoming fully gigified^[3] and digitally optimized. And adopting the perspective and language of the tech industry, if not the actual tech itself, only leaves us chasing their tail.

They way Mattern raises the specter of tech, with the Dewey-as-Jobs opening and her description of the value and limits of David Weinberger’s “buzzy” Library as Platform, only to ultimately reject its terminology in favor of the weightier, more tactile infrastructure is incredibly smart and refreshing. It acknowledges the landscape modern libraries are forced to contend with, and the importance of adapting to the current reality, without compromising what makes libraries so vital and resilient: their physicality, their presence in the community.

As infrastructure, the library can be woven, inextricably, into the fabric of the communities they serve. They become a utility, as basic and vital as the plumbing, roads, and fiber optic cables. Remove the library, and the basic social, political, and cultural structures of a community will weaken and collapse. The best modern libraries combine the freedom of a public park, the educational opportunities found in the public school system, and the nuts-and-bolts support provided by services like the employment development department. They are, as Mattern wonderfully describes them, “mediators, at the hub of all the hubbub”. They do not and should not mirror in a physical reality the internet.

Which is why, in my opinion, it is vital we—the library workers, students, academics, patrons—begin defending libraries on their own terms. We need to take pride in and present the library as what they are and always have been: sturdy institutions, less vulnerable to shifting trends than it might appear^[4], with deep roots in the communities they serve, and a strong history of innovation.

As infrastructure, we can begin to imagine things like San Mateo County Libraries’ Library Outpost scattered throughout the city. Remote toy and sports equipment libraries at the entrances of the major parks and playgrounds. Smaller drop off and pick up boxes near the entrances of cooperating businesses and all publicly owned property. All blending seamlessly into public life.

We can imagine publicly funded complexes that combine traditional library services with social work, homeless outreach, food pantries, and temporary shelter, something like the Gardner Street Women’s Bridge Housing Center if it had remained a library. Arts complexes with gallery and performance spaces. Spaces where artists-in-residence or patrons of the various maker/creative spaces can display and perform their work.

We can imagine shuttle services, similar to West Hollywood’s free transportation services (Cityline Fixed Routes, WeHo PickUp, Cityline Dial-A-Ride Flex), free for all library card holders that move between a system’s various branches. Making the unique programming and services spread throughout the whole system available to the entire community while simultaneously functioning as a parallel public transportation system, connecting community members to all of the non-library resources and businesses nearby.

We can imagine federally funded open-source ILS software and e-lending apps, made available for free to all publicly funded libraries and local librarian developers. Programs that can be tweaked and tailored to meet each community’s needs.

We can imagine, in other words, a future of well-funded libraries^[5]. Systems that employ a wide range of well-paid librarians and staff. People who live in the communities they serve. Who bring a unique and wide range of skills, including but also extending well beyond those that fall into traditional librarianship. People invested in libraries’ foundational beliefs and libraries’ future.

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[1] I think it’s best to remain on guard against the negative effects of adopting too wholeheartedly even the most promising tech interventions. Programs like the Open+ system are great, they represent the incredible resilience of libraries and librarians in the face of shrinking budgets, and the libraries and librarians who take the risk and adopt them deserve genuine praise, but the anxiety expressed by staff of the Gwinnett County Public Library system, that it would be used to replace jobs, is well founded. As wonderful as they are, these solutions do replace jobs. Ideally, the off-hours usage numbers will be understood by the bean counters as proof of the library’s popularity and value to community, and the program’s success will lead to more funding. But now that the library has shown it can operate longer hours with fewer staff, will they get the budget to hire more librarians or will the county, who have a history of slashing the library’s budget, start asking if other programs could be automated in the same way? This is something that should concern all librarians, especially students pursuing a degree, hoping for stable future employment.

[2] Around the corner from my house, there used to be a billboard for an ordinary accident lawyer branded as the iAccident Lawyer.

[3] A good friend of mine, a certified teacher in New Jersey, recently started working as a contractor for a startup based in Chicago that serves poorly staffed schools in the South. To get around a lack of certified teachers in their districts, these Southern schools pay the Chicago company who uses some of that money to pay certified teachers from all around the county who are, at least in my friends case, unable to find steady, stable local work. The teachers run through a ready-to-use curriculum remotely while in the classroom the schools provide non-certified in-person monitors and extra security if the students prove too rowdy. As contractors they of course get none of the benefits and security employees typically receive. And the students miss out on the value of having teachers who are not only physically present in the classroom but also members of the community and familiar with the community’s needs.

[4] Reading through older LIS literature can sometimes feel like visiting a tech graveyard. You’ll find numerous references to failed websites and apps, programs few use or even remember today.

[5] According to the City of Los Angeles Open Budget, Los Angeles County Libraries received $256.50 million in the 2025 budget, not nothing and an increase from 2024 but significantly less the police department’s $1.98 billion. Can we imagine a world where those numbers are reversed, and the positive impact this would have?