This is my entry in the LFPL Blogathon, organized by the energetic and imaginative Andy Woodworth to benefit the flooded Louisville Free Public Library: please donate to the Library Society of the World fundraiser or to directly to the LFPL Foundation. I may have said some of this before. I have certainly used this image in a post before, but I think it’s quite appropriate here. -SL

Don Quixote in his library by Gustave Doré

Whenever I hear someone–an elected offical, often–say that “libraries are for research and information and literature, and not for X” where X = video games or DVDs or comix or books that aren’t in English or Goosebumps or Madonna’s Sex or boardgames or sewing circles or popular novels; whenever I hear that, I think “this is a person who doesn’t really like libraries, who is scared of libraries and what they represent, and wants others others to be similarly scared.”

I think that research and information and literature are all wonderful things, and that almost every library must put some or all of those things at the core of their mission. But that’s not why I think libraries kick ass.

I think that libraries kick ass because libraries help people expand their imagination.

And there is more to the imagination than the serious, gray, DOA literature that people envision when they say that libraries should be for “serious” stuff. Libraries need to collect broadly to reflect the cultures in which they are embedded.

Libraries do many other things, too, many more obviously utilitarian things that even elected officials can get behind, like helping people learn to read or find a job. But in order for people to want to learn to read or get a better job or discover a cure for cancer or write a haiku, they need to have their imagination awakened. Before we can make ourselves better or make our world better, we need the imagination to envision something better in the first place.

To be able to be in the midst of thousands or even millions of volumes containing the expression of human thought and feeling in all its multitude of forms is an awsome thing. Even more so when you think that there are many more libraries like the one you are in, none of them complete. I have memories of being a child and realizing that whatever I happened to be interested in, I could go to the library and come home with an armful of inspiration. I get this feeling from every library I visit, and I hope that I can pass some of that feeling on to students where I work.

The first line of the Darien Statments says, “The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.” Grandiose, perhaps, but it’s something I tend to believe. The Library, and even the small-l-library, provide a way to immerse yourself in the present and past of a culture or a civilization, and come to the surface ready to create the future.

Michael Stephens says that “libraries should encourage the heart,” which I have always thought is kind of corny. But now I think that perhaps we are saying the same thing. Libraries kick ass when they allow our hearts and minds to expand and roam freer than before.