You can learn anything at a library. Schools only teach you what they want you to learn. We now enjoy the “Library of Things” which lends musical instruments, weaving looms, badging machines, cameras, audio recorders, 3-D printers, telescopes, microscopes, etc., etc.
In some sense this has always been true. Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1950s and 60s, the public library catalogs included sound recordings and cinema films. The main library had a special Typewriter Room. The main library also had a large room for Patents and it was usually pretty busy. (A friend of mine from a patriotic group said that many of the guys in there were Russian spies.)
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| The South Branch Library 3096 Scranton Rd, Cleveland Pretty much as I remember it. |
When I returned to Cleveland in 1996 to write for an information audit project, I applied for a local card. Proof of residency was a bit of a challenge but they did accept three postmarked letters sent to your home. So, I wrote to the President of the United States, the Secretary General of the United Nations, and His Holiness in Rome, and told them that they were doing a great job. (I included $5 for the Pope.) I took the replies to the library and got a card.
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| The South Branch Library today. Clark-Fulton is one of the city’s poorer communities, with below-average levels of educational achievement and median household income ($22,900 compared to about $25,300 for Cleveland as a whole). More at https://case.edu/ech/articles/c/clark-fulton |
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| Today's South Branch Library features a music studio. |
I have several library cards, one for my hometown outside of Austin, another for a nearby library in the same county—turns out they are in the same consortium—the City of Austin, and the University of Texas. I got the UT card as soon as I could when I moved here in 2011. To do that, I needed a TexShare card (which I still have) honored by all public libraries in the State of Texas. That only required six months of “good patronage” (no outstanding fines or fees). Now that I work at UT, I still rely on the TexShare card, for example, as my gateway to the City of Austin card now that I live in another tax district. In 1992, I served as a delegate from the Lansing, Michigan, library community to the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services. They gave us a tour of the Library of Congress which came with a very special courtesy borrower’s card.
You really need only one library card. They are all members of consortia and can let you borrow books from other libraries via Interlibrary Loan. Speaking “I-L-L” to a librarian is a magic spell.
About the time that Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the Internet, I was researching computer viruses with an online database at my community college library. A search returned Fred Cohen’s 1985 doctoral dissertation and the library arranged for me to borrow a copy of it via Interlibrary Loan.
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| Formerly the Main Library in what is now the Administration Building, the Life Sciences Library at UT-Austin does not get much use. Whenever I ask a student for their ID, I am told that they never carry one because they never use it. Asking them about going to the library, I was told, "Everything is online." The life science stacks are actually wrapped around the staircase of the Texas Tower, much like nucleotides. |
Five years later, we were living in a village of 3,000 in central Michigan and the library at the county seat was subscribed to the OCLC database. Researching numismatic topics, I happened upon a Science News article about a new book on ancient clay tokens and the origin of writing. I began corresponding with Denise Schmandt-Besserat.
Libraries are supported by property taxes which means that you typically must live within the tax district to get a card. However, some libraries in metropolitan areas are more flexible. In Farmington Hills, Michigan, one of the suburbs along the automation on-ramps of Detroit, the library recognized that businesses pay property taxes, too. So, anyone employed in Farmington Hills could apply for a library card. Here in Austin, anyone with a child enrolled in any school (public, private, or daycare) within Travis county can apply for a City of Austin library card.
In addition to honoring the TexShare card, the University of Texas extends special borrowing privileges to members of the TexasExes association of university alumni and other athletic supporters. Any self-defined sentient can join using a few mouse clicks.
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| Entrance to the Scholars Lab at the UT Austin Perry-Castañeda Library, completed for Academic Year 2024-2025. |
By comparison and contrast, when we lived in central Michigan, as a taxpayer and resident of the State of Michigan, I held a Michigan State University courtesy card for many years and it was a great help. (Among the many books I borrowed for various projects was The Man Who Found the Money: John Stewart Kennedy and the Financing of the Western Railroads by Saul Engelbourg and Leonard Bushkoff. I also taught myself to read Tibetan.) However, when we lived in Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan had no similar program. That being so, it remains that any civil, urbane, or polite person is allowed (even encouraged) to visit and read (or etc.) within any public library in the United States.
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