Importance of Public Libraries

Your March 12 stories on the building space problems of two library systems--Chicago’s as your Column One feature and Ventura County’s in the newcomer section--were particularly important to me. Both of them have been vital to the enrichment of my life and the advancement of my career in writing, reporting, editing, publishing, photography, television and public affairs.

So has the Library of Congress, which in the 1940s and ‘50s was in a bind with room for only 270 miles of bookshelves (now over 540), which for years was my across-the-street neighbor; and in the ‘20s the library in Sedalia, Mo. It was in 1914, when I was about to turn 10, that my family moved from primitive rural areas (northern Michigan, Alabama, and the Arkansas Ozarks) to the college town of Albion, in southern Michigan, that I first discovered that there was such a thing as a public library, with all kinds of books, most of which I hadn’t known existed. A few years later that two-room Albion Ladies’ Public Library, on the second floor of a clubhouse, was succeeded by a Carnegie library with its own building and with trained librarians, and the whole wide world and universe began to open up to me.

I have just one fault to find with your stories about the Chicago and Ventura libraries. Your depiction of a public library is one of a static institution. But a well-ordered public library is most kinetic by nature. It is not just a place where aimless persons come in to read books just to pass the time away. It is a place where people young and old come when they need to and can, to find the answers to questions, to seek out the world and to hold communion with wise and otherwise men and women, boys and girls anywhere and everywhere, now and in centuries past.

Among the 650,000 volumes in the E. P. Foster Library here in Ventura (along with newspapers and magazines) one can find answers to his questions, and new questions that never occurred to him. If that’s not enough, he can draw on the resources of the great state library in Sacramento, or if need be, the Library of Congress .

Even so, Dixie Adeniran (director of the county’s Library Services Agency) assures me that Ventura does not aim to be a “research library for the ages” but addresses itself to this area, its past and present and possible future. It seeks to serve the needs of its users. That’s quite an order to fill, and only a vigorous effort can succeed. How effective it can be will depend upon its facilities, of course, and staff, but mainly its users.

FLOYD B. QUIGG

Ventura