Against Little Free Libraries [View all]

[brooklynite]

City Lab:

The take-a-book, leave-a-book movement has gone global. As of last year, Little Free Libraries—those birdhouse-looking book-stops that pop up in people’s front yards—were represented in every U.S. state. Little Free Library has now touched down in more than 70 other countries. These book exchanges are now 50,000 strong and growing.

And at least one person wants to put a stop to them.

“There was something that kind of irked me about the title,” says Jane Schmidt, librarian at Ryerson University in Toronto. “As a librarian, my gut reaction to that was, ‘You know what else is a free library? A regular library.’”

Where many people see a charming yard decoration or a heart-warming civic-minded gesture, Schmidt finds something more nefarious at work. In a recent article for the Journal of Radical Librarianship—this is a real publication, launched in 2014 by the Radical Librarians Collective, now three peer-reviewed volumes in—she and another Canadian library scholar outline the case against Little Free Libraries, diving deep into mapping data, network effects, and recent library history to make their stand.

I'm sort of fuzzy at the complaint, but it seems to boil down to: "real" libraries are better and these are just an excuse for educated people in better neighborhoods to show off all the books they read.