Tag: Your Library Matters

Funding Statewide Library Resource Sharing

Published September 8, 2026

Your Library Matters, September 2026

Montana Libraries Need Your Help
Funding Statewide Library Resource Sharing
In the 2027 Legislative Session

Bruce Newell, Helena

Dani Hess, Helena

All Montanans are big winners when their libraries share with other libraries. No single library can ever have enough books and stuff [1] to meet all their users’ needs. When libraries share, more Montanans’ needs are met. This is nothing new, to meet users’ needs, libraries have long shared with one another.

Modern era libraries began developing formal interlibrary loan (ILL) policies for sharing resources during the late nineteenth century. One hundred years later, Montana librarians begin noticing that our new networked environment offered fresh resource sharing opportunities. These new ways of sharing promised to provide more Montana’s library users with more copies of more books, about more topics, more economically than libraries attempting to serve their users exclusively from their own collection, or for that matter via traditional ILL methods. There’s a legislative stream running through these changes:

In 1989 the Montana legislature appropriated $200,000 to reimburse libraries for interlibrary loan costs.
Twenty years later in 2009, Montana changed the language of Montana’s ILL reimbursement statute, MCA 22-1-328, enlarging the statute’s scope from just ILL to statewide library resource sharing, but making no additional appropriation to carry out this commitment.
By 2026, the overall need for statewide investment had grown to over $8 million dollars.

Resource sharing works for our users and for libraries alike. In order that Montana libraries statewide (not just in our largest communities, and not just along an interstate highway) can all offer resource sharing’s benefits to their users, libraries are asking the fast approaching 2027 Legislature for help extending resource sharing’s benefits to all Montanans. Here’s what a statewide investment of $8 million dollars, in addition to local libraries’ contribution, would accomplish:

Expand access to the Montana Shared Catalog (MSC) — Helping all Montanans find the books and stuff they need, and helping Montana libraries more efficiently manage their collections
Pay for a cost-saving courier service between libraries — Expediting the delivery of books from library to library, so that books discovered and requested on the MSC can quickly move from library to library at affordable costs. Shipping books between libraries via the USPS costs $4—5 a book. UPS and FedEx are even more expensive. Courier costs per book are about $0.70.
Reinforce MontanaLibrary2Go, Montana’s shared e-book collection — Reducing wait times for popular titles, and expanding access to less popular but equally valuable titles.
Expand students’ access to K-12 instructional e-books and audiobooks (SORA) — Expanding a shared digital collection of books, ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, and other library materials aimed at engaging K-12 readers.
Fund statewide access to online educational magazines and databases (typical example subject to future selection) for K-12 and public library users — Providing full-text content from magazines, research-supporting journals, and news sources.
Expand the Montana University System’s TRAILS Infrastructure — Improving Montanans’ access to online academic resources while reducing institutional costs.

We can think of no better way to conclude than an excellent, soon to be published introduction for a fact sheet prepared by Montanans for Libraries:

“For decades, Montana libraries have successfully found ways to provide innovative library services to patrons and communities across the state. Solutions rely on shared, scalable infrastructure made possible through collaboration. Unfortunately, the spirit of collaboration is not enough to ensure that all Montanans can access the same basic level of library service, especially in our most rural and under-resourced communities. Adequate state funding is needed to truly level the playing field and ensure relevant, reliable, and resilient library services statewide for all Montanans.”

The upcoming 2027 Legislative Session is the time to get these resource sharing funds appropriated. This will help Montana libraries continue to help their users learn and pursue Thomas Jefferson’s notion of happiness. If and when as a friend of Montana libraries you are asked to relate what your library’s resource sharing means to you, please lend your voice.

[1] ’Stuff’ includes library materials and programs such as e-books, films, magazines, children’s and adult programs, archives, exhibits, etc

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Please support Montanans For Libraries’ campaign to provide each Montanan with sufficient, twenty-first century library services.

Bruce Newell is an increasingly retired librarian. Dani Hess is employed by Central House Strategies. This essay and others like it can be found on the Montanans For Libraries website.

Campaigning for Readers’ Rights

Published August 10, 2026

Your Library Matters, August 2026

Bruce Newell, Helena

The 1st Amendment unambiguously guarantees everyone’s right to freely speak and read. Librarians and public library boards vigorously defend this right when books are challenged. This is laudable, but libraries would more effectively support everyone’s right to read by routinely and continuously asserting readers’ rights, instead of as needs must getting bogged down defending individual challenged books. [1]

Attempts to censor library books are on the rise. During 2025, nationwide, “…ALA documented 713 attempts to censor library materials and services, 487 of which targeted books … 92% of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and decision makers, up from 72% in 2024. Less than 3% of challenges originated from individual parents.” (Quoted from: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data)

Libraries’ responses to book ban challenges seldom satisfy anyone. Libraries, following Ranganathan’s dictums that A) Every book has its reader and B) Every reader has their book, are reluctant to remove books from their collections. Libraries have collection development policies which direct the kinds of books that are purchased to meet their community’s needs. Most importantly, library users have an infinite variety of wants and needs. Nearly every book is of interest and use to someone. Few book challenges result in the challenged book being withdrawn from a library’s collection.

When libraries get caught up in a book challenge, their efforts are most profitably spent by focusing on defending the reader, not the book. This is a strategic choice on libraries’ part, an approach that in essence focuses on the doughnut instead of the hole. It’s important to remember that at their root, requests to withdraw a library book are usually less about the book than they are about power, “…power entirely for its own sake…” as Orwell writes in 1984. If libraries focus on the appropriateness of any particular book, instead of everyone’s indisputable right to read, they are giving short shrift to those in the community who do or might find a book useful or entertaining. The are surrendering the power to choose what we read to someone other than the reader. Admittedly, regardless of whether libraries are able to make book challenges to be about the readers’ rights instead of the book, it gets more complicated if the book’s primary audience is kids.

While all Montanans’ rights to privacy are protected in Montana’s Constitution (Article II, Declaration of Rights, multiple Sections pertain), minors’ library-related rights to confidentiality and privacy are subject to statute. For example, kids with their own library card have an right to privacy in public libraries. If however their card is shared with their parents, or in school libraries, these rights are conditional. Further, local library boards have considerable autonomy in regards to policy, and local policies may have the effect of either protecting or restricting minors’ rights. In sum, so far as minors’ rights to privacy in libraries go, there are many aspects of Montana law to consider. The State Library offers a useful fact sheet: https://ftpaspen.msl.mt.gov/OrganizationResources/1051_65.pdf

While there’s no doubt that censorship attempts threaten people’s right to read, libraries (as institutions in support of the public good) face far bigger threats — such as having to operate with not enough money to get the job done right, or persistent efforts to reduce the authority of local library boards to govern their libraries. And book challenges cost scarce library resources. When libraries stop everything to reexamine a book’s suitability, they are directing resources away from their primary job of providing every library user with content and services sufficient to their needs.

Libraries fundamentally exist not to collect books but to help readers thrive. Let’s change the censorship discussion from the defense of books to the defense of everyone’s right to read.

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[1] In 1939, in pragmatic support of this human right, the American Library Association published its Library Bill of Rights, and again in 1953, their Freedom to Read Statement. These two statements have for over ninety years guided libraries and library boards and given rise a number of other similar statements including the United Nation’s Article 19 of their Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Federation of Library Associations and Federations (IFLA) Statement on Censorship.

This essay can be found, with others, on the Montanans for Libraries website. The writer is an increasingly retired Montana librarian.

Liberty & Libraries

Published July 3, 2026

Your Library Matters, July 2026

Bruce Newell, Helena

Two weeks before D-Day in 1944, eminent jurist Learned Hand spoke in Central Park (NYC) to a gigantic audience, including 150,000 newly naturalized citizens. In his 511 word address titled ‘The Spirit of Liberty’, Hand reminded those listening that —

…Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it…

Hand explicitly dismissed the power of the Constitution and our courts to guarantee our liberties. Hand’s small-d big democratic hope was rooted in humility and charity, a belief of people’s goodness and ethical good sense. The spirit of liberty that Hand spoke of is a spirit based on humility, curiosity, honesty, and learning. Hand summed it:

…The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women…

Bret Stephens wrote about Hand’s speech in his June 20, 2026 New York Times column, Rays of Hope in Dark Times, optimistically concluding in full-throated support of “…the institutions of a free society, particularly universities and the press, inculcate habits of wide-open inquiry and free expression, not least by refusing to bend the knee to demands for ideological correctness and conformity of thought.”

Libraries are essential pillars of open inquiry, available to all, a place where we all can go learn the minds of other men and women and in the process better learn our own minds. Libraries are a place where we can safely and freely admit that ‘being absolutely right’ is an elusive, slippery, likely unobtainable goal, but one best pursued using the all the best stories available. The kind of stuff available in libraries.

In libraries we find formal stories about faith and philosophy, historical accounts of humankind’s attempt to get things right while doing them wrong, and allegorical tales formed around fundamental truths. Plus books on growing rhubarb, childrearing, and recipes for pita bread. And these stories are available for everyone. Gratis. What a great deal. Libraries are something America has gotten right.

On this Fourth of July weekend, let’s reaffirm Hand’s belief that being sons and daughters of liberty means we can and should be a little unsure about being right. And further, that we have a right to seek the minds of other men and women, regardless of what they say and believe, so long as no harm is done.

Happy 4^th of July!

Your Library Matters: June 2026

Published June 7, 2026

Miles From Any Town
Bruce Newell, Helena

Throughout this last month I’ve been driving Montana installing AEDs (Automated External Defibrillators) and AED cabinets in libraries, bringing to completion The Trust for Montana Libraries’ two-year project that benefits twenty-nine project libraries and the communities they serve.

Motoring about, I was repeatedly reminded of Richard Hugo’s poem, Driving Montana. Like Hugo, I was …

… lost in miles of land without people, without
one fear of being found, in the dash
of rabbits, soar of antelope, swirl
merge and clatter of streams.

Spring is the beginning of Montana’s second season, the first being Winter and as everybody knows the second being Construction. While I was slowed or halted many times for road work, I never was inconvenienced one iota by the having to stop for a flagger and smell the sagebrush.

My travels took me over 7,260 foot Skalkaho Pass, where roadside snow still blanketed. Further on, winding downward dizzyingly above Daly Creek, Skalkaho Falls was a seamless sheet of white sound and water.

On the HiLine, obscuring my view of the Sweetgrass Hills, magisterial rainstorms scuttled eastward. Further along, crossing from Big Sandy to Winifred, I wheeled over a vanishingly graveled bentonite roadbed, chased by rain while I climbed out of the Judith River Breaks. Dumb luck is better than no luck at all.

Near Miles City the Tongue was full and chocolate brown, its riparian Cottonwoods garbed in the freshest green leaves ever to bedeck a tree. The Yellowstone at Forsyth was bank-full and rushing toward New Orleans — sans brakes, sans parachute.

My trip’s most reliable source of pleasure was visiting Montana libraries and talking with Montana librarians. Librarians are a resilient, resourceful, optimistic, can-do bunch. Every library had something good going on in anticipation of summer. Every librarian had a smile on their face and a nice thing or two to say about their library and their community.

To cheekily continue and conclude by corrupting Hugo’s poetry,

Never has my Toyota
found this forward a gear. Even
the chicken salad in Cut Bank is good.
For that matter, so too is the Strawberry-rhubarb pie,
and a terrific Helles style lager in Hamilton.

Thank you all for your kind welcomes, and in particular for your manifest quiet love of Montana, Montanans, learning, and libraries.

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Bruce Newell is a retired librarian who served Montanans at Helena’s Lewis & Clark Public Library and at the Montana State Library. He is currently a board member with The Trust for Montana Libraries.

Your Library Matters: May 2026

Published May 12, 2026May 12, 2026

Your Library Matters: Are Libraries Liberal or Conservative?

May 2026

Bruce Newell, Helena

In these partisan political times, it’s easy to overlook the ethical or philosophical meaning of the words liberalism and conservatism. These twinned terms had meaning before they were tied to a political theory or party. Liberalism was linked to the idea of individual liberty or freedom. Conservatism was bound to a skeptical view of change and strongly valuing traditions. When stripped of partisan, social, or economic overtones, liberalism and conservatism taken together offer libraries complimentary lenses for more fully understanding their roles in their communities.

Libraries are the product of a body politic possessing the sometimes antagonistic impulses of individual liberty and social continuity. Libraries, through books (etc) and programming help users explore both the bounds of their freedom and the best of the human story, a narrative itself formed and bound by these two complementary, indispensable philosophies.

In the Wikipedia we read that liberalism speaks to individual rights (freedom) while conservatism is all about preserving institutions and values (continuity):

“Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.”

“Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.”

Libraries preserve the past, strive to identify what’s valuable in the present, and carry forward our best stories into the future. This is libraries’ conservative mission. At the same time libraries serve the public good by helping their users thrive. This is an intrinsically liberal impulse.

Libraries, like any institution, find it challenging to identify mile markers to use in evaluating their progress. Looking at libraries’ liberal reasons for being, we can ask ourselves, are we helping our users be free and happy? [1] And at the same time, looking at our conservative mandates, are we preserving the past and ensuring that our users (and tomorrow’s users) have ready access to the most important stories of humanity’s shared past?

Libraries were formed by and are in support of both liberal and conservative philosophies. Great libraries reflect and celebrate the complexities and contradictions inherent in a free, diverse, and heterogeneous society. We can use these two philosophical lenses, liberalism and conservatism, to help us understand the degree to which we are providing our communities with a great library.

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[1] Happiness in the sense that Aristotle, Jefferson, or Locke would have understood it; as in “…certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

A copy of this essay and others in this series can be found at: Montanans For Libraries, https://montanansforlibraries.org/support-libraries

Your Library Matters: April 2026

Published May 12, 2026

Your Library Matters: On Reading and Worldview

April 2026

Bruce Newell, Helena

A preliminary note —

I write these essays because libraries are our communities’ shared workplaces in our collective pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. When we advocate for libraries, which we surely need to do, I hope that we are able to lean into the notion that libraries are a necessary public good. And if you work in a library, for money, for love, or for both, I want you to feel proud of what you do.

The essay —

My partner Sue and I are just back in town after a lengthy road trip. While happily motoring along we listened to a wonderful book, The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin. [1] All 36 hours 42 minutes of it.

We were struck by Goodwin’s extraordinary storytelling about a time in America’s history that strikingly parallels our own. For myself, and the focus of this essay, I became increasingly aware of how by listening to and thereby reading this book, [2] my view of the world, my worldview, was being expanded.

Worldview | noun | A particular philosophy of life or conception of the world. Oxford Languages, on the web.

We’re all constantly assembling and expanding our worldviews, and when we read we often journey into exotic terranes. Through books I have climbed Mt. Everest, sailed solo around the world, survived a spaceship wreck on Mars, and been given an intimate glimpse into others’ lives such as Roosevelt’s and Taft’s in Goodwin’s extraordinary biography.

If you will, please imagine that our worldviews are houses made up of many rooms, each with windows admitting a distinct view out into a larger world. Every book we read adds one or more rooms to our house, especially if our reading is accompanied by thought. With books, through reading and reason, we’re expanding and enriching our worldview.

Our worldviews are shaped by the company we keep, whether that company is other people, a book, or a social media platform. It pays to carefully select our companions with their associated worldviews. This is not a new thought, in the book of Proverbs (circa 971–931 BCE) it is written “…Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools suffers harm…” [4]

At the same time, we must remember that mummifying our worldview is as unwise as is consorting with fools. To quote no less an authority than Dr. Seuss, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” [5]

John Locke wrote about this in 1706, advocating a diverse, expansive worldview:

“If men are for a long time accustomed only to one sort or method of thoughts, their minds grow stiff in it, and do not readily turn to another. It is therefore to give them this freedom that I think they should be made to look into all sorts of knowledge, and exercise their understandings in so wide a variety and stock of knowledge.” [6]

Continuing this thought, and echoing or perhaps adding to the book of Proverbs cautions, Locke counsels against merely increasing knowledge without wisdom or discernment, writing:

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge, it is thinking makes what we read ours.” [ibid]

It’s a beautiful world. My wish for you is that you read deeply and broadly and that you are able to help others do likewise. May reading broaden your worldview and deepen your happiness. Your library is doing good and important work. You are doing good and important work. Keep it up.

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As always, this essay and others can be found at the Montanans for Libraries website. montanansforlibraries.org/support-libraries

[1] Goodwin, Doris Kearns. The Bully Pulpit : Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. Simon & Schuster. 2013. Available on MontanaLibrary2Go.

[2] ‘Audiobooks don’t really count as reading? Think again.’ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/03/audiobooks-dont-really-count-as-reading-think-again/

[3] Proverbs 13:20, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.

[4] Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut! Random House, 1978. Available on MontanaLibrary2Go.

[5] Locke, John. On the Conduct of Understanding. Awnsham and John Churchill, publishers. London, 1706. (posthumously). https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Of_the_Conduct_of_the_Understanding/Of_the_Conduct_of_the_Understanding