This NY Times article on libraries surprised me with a revelation about the smallest, saddest library in human history: the children’s library at Auschwitz, consisting of eight books that the girls hid every night so the guards wouldn’t confiscate them.
But it goes on to talk about the role of libraries, and how it’s shifted away from a central focus on books and towards providing a variety of services the library is ill-equipped to handle:
Librarians today are forced to take on a variety of functions that their society is too miserly or contemptuous to fulfill, and the use of their scant resources to meet those essential social obligations diminishes their funds for buying new books and other materials. But a library is not a homeless shelter (at the St. Agnes library in New York, I witnessed a librarian explaining to a customer why she could not sleep on the floor), a nursery or a fun fair (the Seneca East Public Library in Attica, Ohio, offers pajama parties), or a prime provider of social support and medical care (which American librarians today nonetheless routinely give).
