Why Libraries [Still] Matter

[Commentary] Libraries remain crucial to free and open societies, and not simply because their traditional services within academia, from curation to preservation to research, remain in high demand by scholars.

More broadly, they crucially complement the Web in its highest aspirations: to provide unfettered access to knowledge, and to link authors and readers in new ways. Here’s why. First, information may be easy to copy, but it’s also easy to poison and destroy. Second, libraries are natural places to help keep the markets for information honest, and they can even participate in them themselves. In a world suffused with so much transient information as to inspire epistemic paralysis, we acutely need libraries’ power, independence, and ethos: institutions conceived to fight on behalf of their patrons, which is to say for the public and for the preservation and intelligibility of the public record.

[Zittrain is the George Bemis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Director of the Harvard Law School Library]