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This is a very interesting discussion! Thanks to all who've participated so far.
It's interesting to me how institutions develop their own will to live, like all living things. The March of Dimes, for instance, began as an institution to battle polio. Once the polio vaccine was successfully developed, did they go away? Nope. They became an institution to battle birth defects. That mission should keep them in business for a good, long while.
The March of Dimes evolved to stay alive. They had the organization and the reputation and it would have been a shame for them to fade away with so much more good work to do.
Now our libraries are at risk. With tax revenue down, services are being cut that were previously considered "essential." These include fire, police, schools, and health services (including mental health). And libraries.
Facing the fact that much of their mission has been usurped by the internet, libraries are having to evolve to stay alive. Part of that evolution involves the services they provide, but another part lies with their funding.
Government support is waning. If libraries were an animal species, it would be as if their main food source were drying up. Like an animal that needs to find another source of food, which may entail a change of diet, libraries may find they need to look further than the government for support. They've always held book sales and taken private donations and charged some fees, so now is the time to double down on those efforts.
Maybe some of those wonderful, free-market corporations that are doing so well, who get the tax breaks they spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year lobbying for...maybe it's time for them to pony up in a bigger way.
Maybe while they're paying millions for the naming rights to a new stadium, they could throw a hundred thousand into naming a library.
Maybe Amazon could reach a settlement with the state of California: We'll not pay your state sales tax, but we'll match at some ratio whatever your state pays for libraries every year.
Ultimately, libraries may find that weaning themselves from the government teat is the best thing they can do. (NPR here in Southern California seems to be adapting quite nicely to that scenario.) Once free of the stigma that they are funded by our tax dollars, libraries might be surprised at the amount of private support they can muster.
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