Why Libraries Need to Stop Saying “More Than Books”: a Guest Post by Misha Stone

I start every single one of my signature "RA For All: Flip the Script and Think Like a Reader" training programs with this slide:

Click on the image to enlarge it

It is also embedded on my 10 Rules Page.

The key point of sharing it is that while the world wants to talk about how the library is more than books-- which it is-- books are the heart of everything we do. When we focus on the "More Than Books" and double down on it as our brand, we are hurting ourselves. 

My colleague and friend Misha Stone, librarian and library school instructor, recently wrote me an essay to help explain why this "dismissive" phrase is hurting us and what we can do and say instead.

Take it away Misha.

Why Libraries Need to Stop Saying “More Than Books” by Misha Stone

For years now, I have been noticing a pernicious and dismissive phrase being used in relation to libraries. The phrase “more than books” continues to crop up when someone in leadership or on staff is asked to talk about all of the amazing and varied services and programs that libraries provide. While I understand why it is said, and how many people have no clue how much libraries have changed over the years, it irks me deeply that we use a phrase that plays into the rhetoric of library detractors that simultaneously dismisses how much the “books” invoked still do to serve our diverse communities.

The Problem of Telling the Story of the Many Things Libraries Do

Libraries have long provided a variety of services to better respond to the community’s changing needs. The plethora of what libraries offer and the ways in which libraries need to proactively and reactively adapt to a busy and networked world is constantly evolving. Libraries operate in a world with growing wealth disparity and increasingly global concerns and this adds complexity and layered concentric circles to our need to grow beyond our core services. 

Telling the story of what libraries do and how they have evolved to provide services and programs beyond what libraries are most well known for–services and programs like rich collections, story times, book clubs, reference, readers’ advisory and mobile services–is important. Not everyone knows how creative and responsive library services have become, but too often libraries themselves adopt the language of detractors in order to tell this story.

When libraries use the rhetoric of those who do not see the relevance of libraries in the age of search engines and high speed internet or give credence to the adage that no one reads anymore, we are giving into a binary rhetoric that pits core services against new or emergent services and programs. In telling the story of what libraries offer, we too often denigrate the gateway and core services that are both our brand and central to all of our other work.

“Books and More”

Collections are not always appreciated in libraries, even though the books on our shelves form the foundation of a lot of our work. Reference and leisure reading collections work hand in hand in our work with community members of all ages to meet their information and emotional and social learning needs throughout the many phases of their lives. Library collections meet the diverse needs of the public, and also create nodes of exploration, discoverability, and critical inquiry.

When leadership and even library workers say we are "more than books” a binary is imposed that denotes a lack of respect or valuation of the myriad ways our collections and readers’ advisory serves our communities. Books help people get jobs, educate themselves, learn about history, learn about their ancestors, and they also connect people to stories that can meet them in times of emotional turmoil or offer solace as well as comfort. Books connect people to themselves and others.

Books sometimes save lives. There is a reason that concerted efforts are afoot to challenge collections and access to the stories that represent BIPOC and queer lives; these stories were hard to find for so long and now that representation is only starting to be felt in publishing and on library shelves, there are those who see their power and want to thwart it.

Books are our brand. At some point, it became commonly adopted that books and reading are somehow unsexy or uncool, and that we somehow need to distance ourselves from our brand. Libraries started describing themselves via apology rather than enthusiastic exclamation, but why?

Reading has been perceived as boring, sure, and some of that is due to the way education assigns reading at a formative time in people’s lives. Libraries, which serve leisure readers and help match readers with books they may enjoy based on appeal and interest, can heal and repair that perception and experience. Reading can also be subversive, expansive, and revelatory. Libraries do not need to devalue the power of reading in order to say that books are the foundation from which all of our other services and programs originate. We should not give in to detractors that want to shame us about our brand.

Additionally, we should not make racist assumptions about who reads. In the recent Netflix documentary, “Butterfly in the Sky,” about “Reading Rainbow” and Levar Burton’s influence on generations of young readers, Black children’s and teen author Jason Reynolds, who was also the 2020-2022 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, shared how having an authentic Black role model like Burton helped him see himself as a reader and later as a writer. 

While publishing has upheld white cis heteronormative voices and socialized those voices as the norm, libraries have countered the norm by offering collections that offer plurality to a public we believe can inform themselves. Our collections are robust, rich, contradictory, and bursting with numerous voices, accounts, lived experiences, perspectives, and counter-narratives. Books remain our brand because they offer perspectives beyond the scrolling screens in people’s lives. 

In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell invokes libraries as a space of resistance:

"I feel the same way about libraries, another place where you go with the intention of finding information. In the process of writing this book, I realized that the experience of research is exactly opposite to the way I usually encounter information online. When you research a subject, you make a series of important decisions, not least what it is you want to research, and you make a commitment to spend time finding information that doesn't immediately present itself. You seek our different sources that you understand may be biased for various reasons. ...Nothing could be more different than the news feed, where these aspects of information--provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it's even about--are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgment. Instead this information throws itself at me in no particular order, auto-playing videos and grabbing me with headlines. And behind the scenes, it's me who's being researched." (175)

Reference versus RA

Reference and readers’ advisory are often framed in library programs and libraries themselves as somehow opposed or in hierarchical relationship. Why do we pit them against each other? Reference and readers’ advisory encompass a continuum and sometimes serve the same patrons at the same time or at different points of their information seeking. Because leisure reading and fiction in particular have been snobbishly dismissed as fluff or for the privileged, we, again, center tired narratives that support dismissive paternalism and competitive thinking that should have no place in how libraries operate or describe themselves to the public. 

Library services are not a zero sum game. While some audiences, services, and programs will get prioritized differently over time, libraries can and should try to embrace a yes/and approach as staff capacities allow. Reference, readers’ advisory, social services, outreach, economic development, community engagement, and community-led initiatives all have important places in libraries and need not be placed in conflict or in hierarchical relationship.

My colleague Genesee Rickel noted that libraries are one of the few institutions where additional services and programs can get “slotted in.” Some of what gets slotted in is due to a critical divestment in social services and a divestment in systems of collective care. Just because libraries have been rising to the occasion, does not mean (hopefully) that we will always have to do so. Should society’s commitment to the vulnerable and marginalized become more robust and compassionate, libraries may become one more part of the puzzle of community and collective care. Books and reading will remain core to our mission and values, and, yes, our brand.

Readers’ advisory remains an undervalued and misunderstood service that receives little investment in library school programs, research, or dedicated staff and training in public libraries. The assumption that RA is easy or already being done without sustained commitment and training by institutions also persists.

The assumption that RA is “traditional” or passé also lends to the adoption of belittling notions about core services centering books and reading. There is little acknowledgement that anti-racist and critical approaches to RA are moving this work into innovative and interrogatory spaces that libraries should embrace and find exciting. RA does more than just promote collections–it moves the library beyond the transactional by creating relationships and connections with community to foster a love of reading that feels personalized, affirming, and expansive.

We choose a binary narrative when we discard books as our brand. This rhetoric gives into the detractors when libraries should, more than ever, be embracing the power of books and reading and defending the freedom to read as an intrinsic part of a healthy democracy. Books and more” can be used more as a corrective if we do more to connect the dots between our collections and our other services and programs. We do not get to the “more” without books. 

In Books for Living, Will Schwalbe had this to say about the power of books and reading:

“Books remain one of the strongest bulwarks we have against tyranny–but only so long as people are free to read all different kinds of books, and only so long as they actually do so. The right to read whatever you want and whenever you want is one of the fundamental rights that helps preserve all the other rights. It’s a right we need to guard with unwavering diligence. But it’s also a right we can guard with pleasure. Reading isn’t just a strike against narrowness, mind control, and domination; it’s one of the world’s great joys.”

What can we say instead?
Well, for one, we can start by saying that books and reading and our collections are still vital to ALL of the work we do. Libraries offer more programs and services than people realize. Libraries are committed to innovative and evolving approaches to our work and collections remain core to all of the work we do. Starting with stating that people may not know just how much libraries do now can be framed in a more affirming way by sharing that we still are deeply committed to incredible collections, reference and readers’ advisory, and have built enriching services and programs from that foundation.

Libraries create community and connection, and books will remain the center of a wheel with many spokes. You don’t get to the “more” without the books, and it’s time for libraries to center a more enthusiastic reclamation of how books inform and undergird the “more.” Let’s all keep thinking about narratives that embrace our multi-faceted approach to service; we do not need to renounce or reduce any of our rich and varied services to show just how remarkable libraries really are and how growth is also central to our mission. 

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Misha Stone (she/her) is a readers' advisory librarian in Seattle. Misha was a 2022 World Fantasy Award judge and serves on the Clarion West Writers Workshop board. Misha appears on local media to talk about books and reading regularly and teaches readers' advisory courses for the University of Washington's Information School.