Early in this century, the library field ideologically adopted the social organizational structure which came into existence with the modern library as not only an expedient but even a normative solution to selecting, collecting, organizing and delivering for wide social use the predominant form of information of the times--information-bearing entities which are print-based. Beginning in the 1930s at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, this social organization was made the basis for a research paradigm in which the social organization called the library was equated with the idea of a social institution and, as such, was viewed as the basic phenomenon of our field for investigation.[7] The rationale for the paradigm was that the library ensured the survival of a society by having become the chief agency to make information easily accessible to the society's members. The importance of the idea of the library organization as a social institution became so powerful that it also became a basic tenet of the library field, the basis for what since that time has become one of the field's common assumptions, that the modern library in and of itself, the library as a social organization, is the field's most significant cultural legacy to society.

Now, we should be quick to remind ourselves that the modern library upon which this idea was based has functioned in a grand way for a century and a quarter. Who could have thought up any better mechanism? Further, the evolution of this approach to getting information to the people was really quite natural. Librarians essentially took the private library idea from earlier times and adapted it to a public form with an extraordinary dose of efficiency.

The chief problem with this point of view is that it does not fare well in the light of the expansion of the information services pie already noted. If the chief contribution of the modern library is the social organization it created and there are now a growing number of fields and information services which have crowded that social organization into a proportionally smaller part of the whole information services scene, then we might well conclude that despite having been a good thing, the social institution our field bequeathed to society will in the end have been relatively short-lived and at best only a modestly significant legacy.

The foregoing is not the only approach one might take to identifying the social institution that constitutes the modern library's chief cultural legacy to society, however. In the foregoing, the interpretation of a social institution is focused on a concrete social phenomenon. However, a social institution may also represent something more abstract, for example, a social practice or even a fundamental idea. In this respect, I submit that the chief social institution that the modern library has contributed to society and which constitutes its most enduring cultural legacy is not the social organization which it created, but rather an exceptionally profound and unique idea that in reality has resided behind the social organization--that making available to the members of a society the widest possible array of information-bearing entities and doing so in a value-added but efficient way with respect to the selection, organization, and delivery of those entities, and with respect to aiding in their use, is absolutely necessary for the society's survival; that in this context information accessibility is not merely a social nicety but constitutes a "right" of the members of the society.

It would be facetious to claim, of course, that the modern library has been the sole champion of this social institution, this idea about information accessibility in society. Nevertheless, the modern library has been an exceedingly strong and significant voice--in many respects, perhaps, the strongest and most significant voice--giving shape to the idea. It has promoted the idea under many different guises--for example, in its early emphasis on reading guidance; in its long-term partnership with public education; in its critical role in the rise of the modern university; in its support and its advocacy of the social betterment goals of the country over the past seventy years and, especially, since the 1960s; and finally in its adoption of new information technologies.

This list could be lengthened. The main thing is that the modern library has not only been a very strong and able champion of a much more abstract sense of a social institution than merely that of a concrete form of a social organization, but that the means by which this goal is accomplished is not absolutely necessary to its success. The means might well change in many, if not most, of its particulars, in fact. However, such changes ultimately matter little, because it is the idea itself which is the social institution bequeathed to society, not the social organization employed to achieve it. As long as that idea remains, the legacy is intact.