Written under the bold lettering “The Values of Library and Information Science,” in the book, “Foundations of Library and Information Science” by Richard Rubin and Rachel Rubin in 2020, is the value “justice.” They suggest that “justice cannot be understood solely as equality; it must also include fairness. Equality implies the same amount for everyone; fairness implies an amount that is needed or deserved. This distinction is important for LIS professionals because it might mean that some services provided are fair rather than equal” (Rubin and Rubin 2020). This is a call for Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals to consider fairness as an aspect of justice as it applies to services. It might also be extended into the production, arrangement, and management of public library physical spaces. History informs a determination of fairness – whether an ‘amount’ of something like physical library space - is ‘needed or deserved’ by a group. Considering fairness as it applies to public library spaces requires historical reflection on the establishment of libraries in the United States. Physical library spaces were envisioned by many as extensions of social control and oppression through the Foucauldian processes of surveillance and discipline, and may be perpetuating such injustices to this day in modern library architecture and design.
In 1851, Boston, George Ticknor was the leader of the “Brahmins”, Boston’s intellectual class, and convinced Edward Everett, the U.S. Secretary of State, to “allow the library to become a democratic and popular institution for continuing education” (Harris 1975). Ticknor’s convincing arguments could not have been fair or just, however, as the Brahmins steadfastly believed in “the persistence of natural inequalities and [the] folly of all attempts at social and economic leveling” (Harris 1975). Ticknor’s push for public libraries was a reaction to increased immigration in Boston and the “urgent need to ‘assimilate their masses’ and ‘bring them in willing subjection to our own institutions’" as well as “restrain the dangerous classes” (Harris 1975). This is an envisioning of the public library as a space of disclipline that “fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways…” (Foucault 1975). Foucault examined discipline as so ingrained in Western culture with efficiency as its ostensible justification. When we apply social context, we understand that space and place are geographies constructed, and production is tied up with the differential placement of racial bodies (Dunn and Tubman 2024). Ticknor’s perspective illustrates how disciplined public spaces like libraries may have very little to do with efficiency, but would certainly succeed in fixing individuals in space to subjugate groups, particularly racial bodies.
Foucault described that once discipline had been framed as neutralizing or fixing ‘dangerous’ populations, it was then reframed as having “a positive role… to increase the possible utility of individuals” (Foucault 1975). Ticknor applies this sentiment in his hopes for what public libraries could do: “[A] library's purpose should be to ‘train up its members in the knowledge which will best fit them for the positions in life to which they may have been born, or any others to which they may justly aspire’” (Harris 1975). Given Ticknor’s belief in ‘natural inequality’ and the foolishness of ‘social and economic leveling’, the anticipation of what he may have deemed undeserving, ‘unjust’ aspirants to certain positions in life is implied, and ominous. Libraries, he hoped, would be "exert[ing] a moral influence over behaviour” and “treat[ing] actions in terms of their results, introduc[ing] bodies into a machinery, forc[ing] into an economy" (Foucault 1975). Ticknor, a man historically credited with the launch of U.S. public libraries, saw value in their existence as a means to subjugate and force groups into the dominant culture’s economy. With these arguments, he succeeded in bringing public libraries into existence in the United States. "On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society... to an indefinitely generalizable mechanisim of 'panopticism'. Not because the disciplinary modality of power has replaced all the others; but because it has infiltrated the others" (Foucault 1975). The preoccupation with disciplined social order as a means to unjustly exert power over minoritized populations led to the creation of many institutions in the U.S., the public library likely one of them.
Once public libraries were installed onto the physical landscape of the U.S., the injustice of ‘generalizable panopticism’ - surveillance and discipline - inside library spaces manifested. Public libraries historically served the interests of white racial dominance and actively harmed non-white people “by denying or restricting access by non-white bodies and by minimizing and erasing non-white funds of knowledge while promoting White and racist epistemologies” (Dunn and Tubman 2024). Indeed, Alistair Black, in his Foucauldian interpretation of British Public Library attitudes, supposed Michel Foucault’s focus upon libraries would have been, “less concerned with class friction or tensions between high and low culture than with the microphysics of administrative power and the professional discourses that constructed it” (Black 2005). Modern libraries must acknowledge and reconcile within their ‘administrative power’ and ‘professional discourse’, how the physical spaces of their libraries might not fit Ruben & Ruben’s descriptions of ‘fair’ when considering justice as a LIS value. With a history of serving the interests of white racial projects by aiding in the construction and maintenance of a white American citizenry (Honma 2005), it would not be surprising if common default physical aspects of public libraries may feel steeped in whiteness to non-white patrons. In fact, even when a library like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a New York Public Library, has a “majority (more than two-thirds) of staff… identify[ing] as Black… it is constrained by dominant expectations of what a (research) library should be and look like. Those expectations are often shaped by whiteness” (Dunn and Tubman 2024). The physical space of a library – even a library explicitly titled to address a Black population, a library with a majority of staff identifying as Black – carries with it a perception of whiteness that restrains. It also surveils. A Schomburg junior scholar “recognized some of these tensions: ‘We know it’s a library, but we’re also kids. We’re gonna make some noise. But I don’t think we’re being disrespectful. The [guards] look at us like we’re gonna burn the building down’” (Dunn and Tubman 2024). Incorporating not only librarians but also guards, perhaps even police, into a public library space further supports Foucault’s description of an economy that builds around panopticism; an economy that may become so dependent, so reliant on the existence of racial bodies to surveil and discipline that it may seek new, arbitrary behaviors like kids making noise to keep itself alive.
It is very possible most public library physical spaces and layouts reflect white western European culture and its obsession with discipline, as described by Foucault, to exert unjust, unfair power upon non-white populations. For example, a circular help desk in the center of a public floor of a library would be an explicit reference to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon structure, replacing guards with librarians and the easily-surveiled patrons as prisoners. It is administrative power and professional discourse constructing library spaces that determines these physical aspects of a library, and with 81% of librarians identifying as white in 2023 (“Library Professionals: Facts & Figures” 2024), it is possible that even now, most libraries are not paying attention to justice, or fairness, as it is applied to the physical structures or aesthetics of the library they’re deploying to patrons for occupation and use. Many public libraries purchase from the same vendors like Demco and Agati, which flatten opportunities for libraries to distinguish their spaces as uniquely welcoming to their patrons in a localized way they might prefer. The most typical choices made by most public libraries in the U.S. to construct and style their public spaces may seem to be an attempt to be ‘innocuous,’ but in fact all have cultural associations and meanings attached to them. “Space and place are often perceived as innocent, neutral, and transparent. However, when we examine space and place in the context of settler colonialism, white supremacy, imperialist capitalism, and cis-het patriarchy, we understand that space and place are geographies constructed by certain political and social norms” (Dunn and Tubman 2024). If most public librarians identify as white, and most public libraries look similarly ‘neutral’, there may be more than a correlation at play: white librarians may be prescribing their concept of neutrality onto library spaces.
In contrast, there are examples of librarians acknowledging and transforming library spaces to meet patron populations that have been historically, intentionally, traditionally marginalized in an effort to achieve fairness and justice along Rubin & Rubin’s foundational values. In the case of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Junior Scholars Program seeks to map a Black geography onto the library, “offering critiques of the exclusionary constructions of society and place” and “draw[ing] attention to Black articulations of space that validate Black experiences and their alternative visions for space and place (Dunn and Tubman 2024). In 2010, “Talk Story: Sharing Stories, Sharing Culture” was a family literacy program focusing on Asian Pacific American (APA) and American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) families. A pilot study of ‘Talk Story’ occurred in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the library counted thirty-five Vietnamese American elders, “many of whom had never set foot in the library during twenty-plus years of living in the United States.” A few of them had such a positive experience, they decided to start a mahjong competition at the library (Clarke, Pun, and Tong 2018). The Lincoln Public Library offered two spatial transformations here: a temporary space for the ‘Talk Story’ program run, and the other as a regular space for Vietnamese elders to run their own mahjong competition. To offer patrons a sense of power and ownership over the space they occupy and use, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Lincoln Public Library are examples of libraries interested in transforming their spaces to welcome patrons that public libraries have historically harmed.
LIS as a field would do well to examine the architecture and visual design of its public libraries through a Foucauldian lens tracking western European evolution of discipline as a means to exert control for the sake of purported ‘efficiency,’ in all its applied, deep-seated racial, sexist, and classist contexts. In doing so, libraries might become a unique community fixture, its physical attributes characterized by its patrons, not by library administrative power or its professional discourse. That outcome would reflect the LIS foundational value that Rubin & Rubin describe as justice.