General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20268 min read

Library

A library is an organized collection of books, periodicals, and other information resources kept for use rather than sale, together with the staff and services that make the collection accessible. The term covers many institution types, including national, academic, school, and special libraries, but the public library, funded by taxation and open to all members of a community without charge, is the form most people encounter and the one around which modern library history and policy have largely been written.

Key fact	Detail
Defining features	Open to all, no charge for services, and focused on the needs of the general public, typically with local tax support and board governance¹^•²
Early US landmarks	The New York Society Library dates from 1754; the Darby Free Library in Pennsylvania has been in continuous service since 1793; the Boston Public Library, founded in 1848, was the first large public library in the United States³^•¹
Scale in Europe	An estimated 67,000 public libraries serve 757 million visitors across Europe⁴
Use in France	Municipal libraries exceeded 100 million admissions in 2025, and 37% of people in France report using libraries⁵
Digital lending	In 2023 more than 660 million people globally borrowed e-books, audiobooks, and digital magazines through OverDrive, the main distributor of digital content for libraries and schools⁶
Professional ethics	The American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights, adopted in 1939 and last amended in 2019, commits libraries to providing all points of view, resisting censorship, and protecting user privacy⁷

What makes a library public

The modern public library is defined by a combination of funding, governance, and access. From around 1850, some private libraries in the United States began to acquire the characteristics now considered typical of public libraries: local tax support, governance by a board, and accessibility to all members of the community². A 1876 United States definition of the public library, cited in later scholarship, anchored the operational definition still used in quantitative studies².

Professional principles reinforce this open-access model. The American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights states that materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of their creators, that a person's right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views, and that libraries should challenge censorship and protect the privacy and confidentiality of library use⁷.

Historical development

From membership libraries to tax-supported institutions. In the United States, early libraries took the form of membership and subscription libraries; Benjamin Franklin played a role in the development of the first lending library. The first large public library was the Boston Public Library, founded in 1848, though smaller institutions such as the Darby Free Library had already been serving the public for decades¹. In New York City, libraries took a variety of forms between the founding of the New York Society Library in 1754 and 1911, shaped by republican and liberal values, shifting understandings of "public" and "private," and a long debate over whether fiction belonged in collections³.

The mid-nineteenth-century convergence. Historians of the public library movement in Britain and the United States describe a convergence around 1850 to 1900 of rising literacy, schooling, mass-produced cheap periodicals and books, and public funds for education; the British government had allotted public money to education for the first time in 1833, in grants to the British and National Schools societies. The movement's rhetoric held that the populace as a whole had reached a point at which it was ready for public libraries⁸.

Expansion and national variation. The growth of American public libraries between 1870 and 1930 has been documented quantitatively using federal Bureau of Education library surveys, with development correlating with income, urbanization, ethnic composition, and levels of education and literacy⁹. Elsewhere the state drove growth: after the 1917 Russian Revolution, public library development in the USSR accelerated so that by 1941 one public library existed for every 2,000 people².

Individual systems illustrate the pattern. The Los Angeles Public Library began in 1872 as the Los Angeles Library Association in rented rooms with about 750 volumes, became a city department in 1878, received a $210,000 Andrew Carnegie gift for six branch libraries in 1910, and today operates a Central Library and 72 neighborhood branches¹⁰. Collections have also grown through donation: in 1926, during the Harlem Renaissance, the Afro-Latino historian Arturo Schomburg sold his collection of approximately 4,000 books and pamphlets to the New York Public Library, the basis of the research center on Black history that now bears his name¹¹.

Services today

Among the services that public libraries offered toward the end of the twentieth century were help for self-directed study and inquiry, upkeep of collections of popular material for adults and children, responses to reference inquiries, internet availability, and room for community events.² The range has widened further. Libraries offer public programming on health, education, business, job seeking, and the arts, positioning themselves as community cultural and educational centers for people of all ages and economic levels¹². In Detroit, the public library offers free tax preparation, cooking classes, legal aid workshops, and a take-home laptop checkout program aimed at closing the city's digital divide; a library spokesperson described the library as many neighborhoods' first access point for city services¹³.

Technology access has become a core service. In the Public Library Association's 2023 technology survey, almost half of United States public libraries, 47%, offered internet hotspots for checkout, an increase from 2020¹⁴. A European Commission expert group describes libraries as part of democracy's core infrastructure, offering free and safe spaces for knowledge and debate, supporting media literacy to counter disinformation, providing business and job-search resources, and reducing loneliness and integrating newcomers as community hubs⁴.

The digital transition and its economics

Demand has shifted toward digital content. E-books and digital audiobooks surged in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic closures, and in 2023 more than 660 million people globally borrowed e-books, audiobooks, and digital magazines through OverDrive⁶. In the United States, physical material circulation grew again in FY 2023 while electronic material circulation continued its upward trend as in-person access was restored¹⁵.

Digital licensing costs more per use than print. A physical book needs replacement only when it wears out, but publishers typically require libraries to renew e-book licenses every one or two years, or after a set number of loans, usually 26 or 52. At the Indianapolis Public Library, digital checkouts make up almost a third of circulation but about half of the materials budget; the library held 125 e-book copies of one 2024 bestseller, which had been checked out 1,025 times with 1,044 holds pending¹⁶. About a dozen US states have considered model e-book legislation drafted by the Harvard librarian and lawyer Kyle Courtney to prohibit some of these licensing restrictions¹⁶.

Funding and pressures

Most public libraries are funded by city and county governments, with a smaller portion of their budgets coming from state libraries, which receive federal dollars for summer reading programs, interlibrary loan services, and digital books; rural libraries rely on federal grants more than urban ones⁶. In the United States, the Institute of Museum and Library Services distributes less than half of its annual budget, which is below $300 million, to state libraries⁶.

Funding shocks translate quickly into service cuts. After a 2025 federal grant freeze accompanying an attempt to dissolve the institute, Maine laid off a fifth of its state library staff and temporarily closed the library, Mississippi libraries indefinitely suspended the Hoopla e-book app in some counties, and South Dakota suspended its interlibrary loan program; attorneys general in 21 states and the American Library Association filed suit, and federal judges issued temporary orders blocking further steps⁶. In France, local authorities invest €1.6 billion a year in municipal libraries and reading points, yet rising attendance has strained staffing, with strikes in Toulouse and reports of understaffing⁵.

Measuring value

Libraries increasingly justify funding through return on investment studies, which measure how much value a service generates per monetary unit invested; methods vary across studies and across library sectors, because different types of libraries take on different roles¹⁷. Impact assessment has also been standardized: ISO 16439, the first international standard on methods and procedures for assessing the impact of libraries, was published in 2014, and it combines quantitative and qualitative methods on the premise that statistics alone cannot determine a library's impact and value¹⁸.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Education and knowledge institutions › Libraries and archives › Public libraries

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?