【Abstract】

The question of fees for library service is a hotly contested issue within the field of librarianship. The controversy over user fees reveals more than a wide range of professional opinions on a difficult issue. It also illuminates for librarians the array of concepts available to them for evaluating the public nature of libraries.

　　The idea of free public libraries is firmly embedded in the American tradition formed in the late nineteenth century and anyone who tries to undermine it will encounter fierce opposition. However, librarianship has changed from what it was in the late nineteenth century when the library faith was born. The present world of libraries is a vastly different one from that of the late nineteenth century. The debates on professionalism have clarified that a library functions in a larger institutional environment, and that it is in that larger environment that priorities are determined. When viewed from the broader perspective of the public-environment, the defense of the free public library that we found in the philosophy of equity is seriously challenged by the economic ideas of efficiency.

　　This paper seeks to examine the issue of user fees in the public library from a variety of viewpoints: history, economics, public finance, science of management, the impacts of technological innovations and law. The paper is organized into nine sections. Each of these sections relates to the controversies of user fees in the public library. Most of the discussions in the paper are cast in terms of pro or con.

Keyword：User Fees, Public Library

1.Introduction

　　The question of fees for library service is a hotly contested issue within the field of librarianship. An unfortunate polarization has developed between those who regard fees as a practical solution to pressing financial realities and those who regard them as a threat to the traditional values of their profession.

　　To charge or not to charge the user for access to expensive machine- readable databases is the source of the sharpest conflict in reference service today. The real issue is that of paying for information, a question with ramifications far beyond the reference department. The controversy over user fees reveals more than a wide range of professional opinions on a difficult issue. It also illuminates for librarians the array of concepts available to them for evaluating the public nature of libraries, for understanding what it means for a library to be public rather than private, and what the implications of that meaning are for defining the library's mission and designing services to fulfill it. The fee issue is intimately tied to the broader issue of the purpose of the public library. Especially, the fee controversy occupies a central position in the minds of librarians exactly because user fees challenge a fundamental tenet of the library profession equal access. Librarians have examined the question from a variety of viewpoints, economics, political, and ethical, and almost invariably the discussion has been cast in terms of pro or con.　Librarians are caught between their inadequate resources and their professional values. They find it difficult to reconcile their need with their beliefs, and a certain uneasiness is latent in the debate.

　　Actually, public libraries are charging fees for a wide variety of services, and although it cannot be proven in any formal way, the use of fees seems to be spreading. The most comprehensive surveys of the specific types and extent of fees in public libraries are a decade and more old, and no recent studies seeking similar detail have been done to provide comparative data. Still, these dated surveys do establish a foundation upon which to based an assessment of the magnitude of reliance on fees.

　　Most significant is a survey conducted by the Public Library Association of 716 public libraries in the United States conducted during fiscal year 1977, which found that 10 percent or more of these libraries charged for the following types of services: meeting room use during regular hours (10%), art print rental (10%), typewriter rental (12%), book rental (13%), film rental (20%), audiovisual equipment (21%), meeting room use after hours (26%), reserving nonfiction (31%), and photocopying/microcopying (88%). Some libraries also charged for admission to library-sponsored programs, reference services, library cards, and, of course, database searches.1 No new comprehensive studies in the late 1980s, it is safe to say that videocassettes have become a major source of fee activity in public libraries, must be added to the list of services.

　　While fees may not be the ideal, the public does not abandon the public library because it charges them. Librarians may prefer to preserve equal access by funding public libraries entirely from taxes; but if the library must choose between offering a service at a fee, or significantly reducing the service, or eliminating it completely, isn't there an argument to be made for the fee? Isn't it better, even for the economically disadvantaged, that the library offer a given service for a modest fee rather than leave the service to the profit-making segment of the information industry.

2.Historical Perspective

　　Taxpayer-funded library service began in the United States when the first free public library opened in Newington, Connecticut in 1787. Prior to that time libraries were financed by the people who used them. During the late nineteenth century there was some discussion over whether or not the library should be tax-supported, but it was very limited because no one seriously questions the propriety, the desirability, nor the civic and social necessity of publicly supported libraries. American public libraries are popularly established at the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1852, the date of the foundation of the Boston Public Library and the conventional beginning point of the public library movement, and the end of the century every town with pretensions to civic respectability equipped itself with one. The growth of the free public library paralleled the growth of the concept of free public education. In the United States, by defining libraries as educational institutions. Supporters advocated public libraries on educational, cultural, economic, moral, and political grounds. Libraries were considered extensions of the public school system with the added values of supplying information as well as intellectual and moral advancement.

　　Educationally speaking, the library was promoted as a means both to provide an opportunity for further education for children. In addition, the public library was an important preserver of culture and contributed directly to the development of culture through its influence on individuals. In addition, the idea of service to the poor and disadvantaged grew out of Andrew Carnegie's view of the library as a place where the working masses could uplift themselves equally with the more affluent members of society. The need to teach the English language and American cultural values to the immigrants who arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave additional stimulation to the concept of service to the disadvantaged. This concept has grown in strength, despite data indicating that the poor and disadvantaged are not the primary users of libraries. By 1911, a public library was taken for granted as a civic service; it had, moreover, as a movement never encountered any serious opposition.

　　Many librarians favoring user fees accurately dispute the notion that fees are a late 20th century contagion into the previously uninfected public library. Surveys conducted in the 1920s, 1940s, and 1950s found that an almost constant 50 percent of responding public libraries offered rental collections, which provided rapid access to duplicate copies of popular titles for a minimal charge.2

　　With the onset of the Great Depression, the "free" public library in America suffered unprecedented financial plight, and the role of fees expanded beyond rental collections in an effort to compensate for the tremendous decline in library revenue and to control the staggering demands for services placed on the library by an impoverished, leisure-plagued citizens.

　　Many of the elements in this late nineteenth-early twentieth century discussion have been recapitulated in terms of the fee vs. free controversy. The same arguments earlier fees called forth are being used again. Opponents of fees emphasize that denying an individual information access contradicts the American democratic tradition of equality of opportunity. For instance, recent articles opposing fee for service have relied heavily on arguments based on the mythical "golden age" to give librarians a cause and mission, appealing to the American view of equality. The idea of free public libraries is firmly embedded in the American tradition and anyone who tries to undermine it will encounter fierce opposition. Actually, most resistance to fee introduction is likely to come from the librarians themselves. Fee-for-service is widely viewed as the single greatest threat to the traditional values of librarianship. Moreover, the White House Conference on Library and Information Services, a group representing all shades of professional and lay opinion, held information to be a basic right of the individual in a free society and unequivocally declared "be it resolved."

　　More than half a century later, the library profession officially remains opposed to user fees, as exemplified by the American Library Association (ALA) Policy Manual:"The American Library Association asserts that the charging of fees and levies for information services, including those services utilizing the latest information technology, is discriminatory in publicly supported institutions providing library and information service."3

　　Much of the debate at the 1979 White House Conference on Libraries and Information Science was focused on fees. The topic of fees figured prominently at ALA Council meetings in the late 1970s, resulting in a formal and official statement of policy that "the charging of fees and levies for information service, including those services using the latest information technology, is discriminatory in publicly supported institutions providing library and information services." Throughout the 1970s, Library Journal--taking its well-known socially conscious editorial position--carried articles that both favored and opposed fee-charging, ran numerous letters to the editor, covered the public debates at ALA meetings, and provided John Berry (LJ's editor) a platform for an unwavering anti-fee position.

　　After the flurry of debate, the passing of resolutions, and the publication of articles on both sides of the issue, however, there seemed to be a hiatus in the early 1980s: academic libraries weren't debating anymore, they were deciding. And, in the case of online bibliographic search services, they were deciding to charge fees. In fact, fees became widely instituted for online searching, and the outpouring of professional meeting programs, articles, and general hand-wringing abated to a near-total silence.

　　Technological change is continuing to challenge and modify the value structures in librarianship as it first did in the early 1970s when online searching was introduced as a normal component in academic library reference service. With the advance of computing into more and more aspects of library worklife, education, scholarship, and publishing, we may expect increasing change in the values related to information access and to the expected functions of libraries. Also, costs associated with these new and more pervasive mechanisms for access to information must be absorbed. It falls to librarians to explore again the meaning of this principle--to determine its relevance to and its implications for public libraries in an era of user fees.

3.Democracy and Value Orientation

　　A profound belief in freedom of access to information is rooted on the ground of democracy. The literature on the subject is full of sweeping pronouncements such as "A democracy without free access to any and all information cannot survive"4 Horn, in her opposition to user fees argues that "access to information is a fundamental right of a citizen in a democratic society." However, there is a difference between information obtained at no cost and freedom of information. Horn argues, "If you concede that the right of access to information is essential, then having fees levied which discriminate against those unable to pay creates barriers that negate that right"5 McMullen has with justice described the public library as one of the most characteristic institutions of Western democracy.6 Librarians believed that the public library had a unique contribution to make to the future of democracy, particularly to the American version of democracy with its emphasis upon equality, through developing informed citizens.

　　Many commentators in the information industry, and others not directly connected with librarianship, have wondered why librarians have so often and so strongly opposed fees for information services. For those of us within the profession, an opposition to fees is often expressed with considerable emotion. Why is that so? Strong opposition to fees may be explained in part by considering the occupational identity and values of librarians.

　　For American librarianship, one key occupational value is the provision to the larger society of access to information in a barrier-free manner. Any inhibiting factor to information access, whether it is a poorly designed cataloging system or a fee for admission, is thus negatively valued. Coupled with value orientations toward public education, toward literacy as an integrative force for new immigrant populations,and toward nascent liberal democratic ideals countering both the laissez-faire capitalistic trends of the industrial revolution and the anti-intellectual populist movement, the ideal of free access to the written word was a powerful molder of a professional ethos.

　　The value of universal access to information as expressed in the free public library movement, resonating as it did with a larger social movement in 19th century, which articulated a powerful mission for librarianship that, to this day, is a very important force for occupational cohesion independent of institutional setting. Though there are clearly some value differences among librarians in school, academic, special, and public libraries, the library leaders of the late 19th century were seminally influential in defining a unitary occupational category of "librarian" through their speeches, writings, and organizational activity. That unity was made possible primarily through appeals to support the value positions of free access, literacy, the promotion of reading, and the improvement of bibliographic access as a means to separate the occupation from the larger society and thus to gain a higher occupational status. That a belief in free access is part of the "glue" that defines librarianship as distinctive helps explain why the fee issue sparked such emotion in the early 1970s when new technologies challenged this value.

　　The traditional philosophy of librarianship on the principle of equal access is expressed in Article 5 of the Library Bill of Rights, which reads, "A person's right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views." These advocates of libraries took themselves and libraries with high seriousness. Public libraries serve serious political, social, economic, and cultural purposes which are important to the community. In effect, they equated library service with the provision of information.

4.Tax Support

　　Few would oppose the importance of freedom of information in a democratic society, but whether user's fees would create discrimination is not so clear. Every taxpayer is now paying for library services and information regardless of use. One question to be resolved is whether tax revenue is the most appropriate form of funding.

　　In United States, public libraries are funded primarily by local government through property taxes; 85% of revenues are derived from local government , 13% from states, and 5% from the federal government. These revenues are enhanced by the contributions of gifts, volunteer labor, and volunteer available for library boards responsible for library corporate governance.

　　Tax support would be sensible, enabling the library to plan constructively since it was a more reliable source of income than private donations, thereby serving the American ideal of equality of opportunity. Tax support would transform a charity into an institution that was the property of all, thereby conferring increased dignity upon it. In contrast, fees are an unstable source of revenue. But the growth of fees as a factor in local government finances has been sustained for over a decade and is likely to continue. Fees are attractive to elected officials who do not want to raise taxes, to administrators who wish to implement new services and to better secure the funding of existing services, and to citizens who desire improved services but not tax increases. So, despite their disadvantages, fees are becoming too attractive to be ignored.

　　Isn't what we are talking about discrimination? If everyone must pay the fee, a fee in itself is not legally discriminatory. It is a class of people, not the individual, who is protected. What is discriminatory is tagging the fee to certain user groups. Public libraries are primarily funding by the property tax and that it is not an equitable tax. Our tax base is disproportionately go to the middle class. Libraries distribute their products at zero price while financing them through coercive, unequal taxes. This is exacerbated by adding fees, they believe. Therefore, it can be argued that a service fee for everyone is actually fairer as it does not charge those who do not use the service while taxes charge everyone. On the other hand, those who oppose fees argue that fee itself discriminates against those who cannot afford to pay the fee.

5.Fees as a Management Tool

　　Many proponents of fees believe that fees can improve the allocation of resources by assisting administrators in identifying those services that the public truly prefers. This faith is revealed in the advantages of user fees listed by the Colorado Municipal League, which include as following:

• Even nominal or token fees for services motivate citizens to give some thought to the value of the service they received.
• Services with no charge attached to them may lead to overuse, overcrowding, and waste of the service, ultimately resulting in public pressure to expand the service facilities.
• Fees allow patrons to reveal their service preferences through their willingness to pay.
• Demand for services for which there is a fee reflecting full cost can serve as a guide for public decision makers in determining which services citizens want and are willing pay for. Also, full-cost accounting can aid decision makers in comparing alternative methods of providing the service.
• Fees or penalties for excessive use or abuse of public services can offset the costs of providing the service.

　　In other words, fees are seen as a mechanism to force citizens to make more thoughtful choices about uses of services and can help administrators reacting to altered citizen behavior adapt service and expenditure patterns to better and more efficiently satisfy citizen preferences. Fees not only provide at least a portion of the money needed to fund a service, but they can also function as a safety valve to assure that the service will not be used at wastefully high levels.

6.Information as Economic Commodity or Gift

　　Tax support problem did raise the fundamental issue of whether or not the library services is a public goods and answered the question affirmatively. If information is a public good, a persuasive economic argument can be made in favor of the public provision of library services. Then is library service a public good? The answer is yes and no. Library service is not a pure public good, but it has attributes of public goods. While it could be argued that the benefits of library service, especially public library service, are largely private, the public or social benefit is significant. In some cases this benefit may result in positive externalities, as in the cases of education and research. Since these externalities exist, library services can be classified as quasi-public good.

　　We still lack methods for finding the technically correct solution for separating the private and public good elements. To see how analysis of mixed goods applies to a specific government service, consider the example of education. The benefits from education are both private and public. The improved general productivity, civility, patriotism, and common decency are public in nature. At the same time, education also entails private benefit, such as higher salaries, more challenging jobs, power, and prestige. What are the public benefits that flow from the library to justify taxpayer support? These benefits are closely allied with those produced by schools; they are educational in nature. Because of the similarities in the benefits created by schools and libraries, the greatest degree of tax support for libraries should be devoted.

　　Many economists, however, make their case for fees in the public library using public good theory not as the end, but as the beginning of their argument. They are concerned with allocating scarce resources--tax dollars--not only between various services within the library, but also between the public library and other government agencies. Theodore Schultz, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Economics, counseled against considering educational outlay as consumption, and a similar serious error is committed by those who argue the corollary that information is a commodity. An alternative way to conceptualize information in this context is the notion of "information as gift."7 Such a conceptualization offers new ways of considering the options libraries may have for making fundamental allocation decisions in a changed technological environment--ways that remain consistent with the values of access to information, of free inquiry in the library education tradition, and of the public good inherent in shared knowledge. The notion of "gift" is distinguished from "commodity" by its placement of greater emphasis on human control of social exchange relationships. Thus, it provides potentially deeper insights into issues related to information access than can be provided through cost-benefit analyses. The notion of information as gift also makes explicit the fundamental difference between information and any commodity--its transference from one person to another does not deplete the information stock of the first person, and thus may not require compensation. The information-as-commodity conceptualization leads to imperfect and short-sighted cost-benefit analyses, will better prepare us to sort out the many difficult financial issues we will be facing in next few years. The information-as-gift alternative does not suggest that information is free but calls for an understanding of the exchange relationship involved within a context of mutual respect, and implies an exchange in which both parties are rewarded. Obviously, this concept will be more adaptive in the age of multimedia.

7.Fees for New Services

　　It is widely recognized that technological change brings with it changes in values--changes in what people believe to be right, or worthwhile, or important. Such change is not immediate or mechanical, of course; existing values within a society or community are not immediately superseded by new values when a new technology comes along. Rather, value conflicts arise when people supporting a new technology challenge the values of other people who wish to maintain a more traditional value.

　　In the early 1970s, it was becoming increasingly clear throughout the occupation that computerization would have tremendous social importance and that librarianship was becoming a player in this major social change. The technical advances made by information scientists in the 1960s were moving into the field at the decade's end--OCLC, the MARC format, automated circulation systems and serials lists. When online searching arrived on the scene in 1972, it was really quite remarkable that librarianship adopted the technology so quickly. The impulse to innovate, coming at the same time that academic libraries were experiencing a financial downturn after the flush 1960s, led to explorations of alternative financing arrangements and, of course, fees for online searching.

　　Fees became an serious issue only when libraries began to charge for computer searches. Database searches introduced not only a few technological option into the public library, but also an entirely different set of parameters for administrators to consider. The National Commission on Library and Information Science study for user fees identifies three characteristics of database searching that make it an attractive candidate for user fee financing: First, such services are innovative. Second, computer-based reference and information retrieval services produce a customized product for each user. Finally, the costs of computer-based information services are easily identifiable and attributable.

　　It is readily apparent that a given individual is benefiting from the search; he or she is given a product that is not reuseable by any other patron; the cost of the search can be isolated from other costs of library operations; and each search accrues an additional charge so that the aggregate cost of searches for given year is dependent on the number performed and thus cannot be easily predicted or controlled unless some rationing device. These features of database searches have been stated and restated in the literature. A checklist of arguments for and against charging a fee for on-line reference searches is overdue. Let us now start our checklist of reasons for charging for the service with what the goals of such a charge might be:

• To defray the unpredictable cost of use by the hour: this may be as low as $6.00 an hour or as high as $300 for a search. A patron on a very simple search could quickly bankrupt a library without the library being aware of it.
• To defray the total cost of the equipment, staff, marketing and materials. Some reference departments charge as much as $30 an hour for professional help and $16 for non-professionals and even sell private memberships
• To make a profit for the parent institution. Some cities have learned that this is hidden tax the public will accept in other areas (i.e. water, garbage collection, inspections, sewage and others) so why not libraries?
• To raise money to upgrade the system in future without a budget defense.
• To discourage "entertainment" and "frivolous" use.
• To encourage the user to learn how to use the other less costly resources of the library before going "on-line."

　　The controversy surrounding fees for database searches has had implications beyond the technology itself. First, it has encouraged librarians and others to reformulate their ideas about the services offered by public libraries and who should pay for them. Most prominently, this reconsideration has generated a distinction between "basic" and "nonbasic" library services, the former tending to be preserved as free, the latter being susceptible to fees. This distinction has crept into the laws governing public libraries. It is being employed in many library mission and policy statements.

8.Are User Fees Legal?

　　Isn't the right to use a library a freedom protected in law in America? The answer is no! The British have a clause in the "Public Libraries and Museums Act of 1964" which says: "no charge shall be made by a library authority," but we have no such law. In fact, the precedent for completely free access to libraries is not all that clear: hence the need for the resolution of the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services advocating "full" access and 1977 American Library Association resolution on the subject saying in part: "charging of fees and levies for information services, including those services using the latest information technology is discriminatory in publicly supported institutions providing libraries…"

　　Are user fees legal? One might expect to find considerable differences in public library fee-charging practices in states where different forms of statutes are in effect. Instead, one finds a blurring of the distinctions between the statutory approaches--a blurring that seems to nullify the value of the written law. As with many issues of law, this seemingly straightforward concern is complicated by subtleties and ambiguities, which require interpretation--sometimes by a city attorney, sometimes by a state attorney general, and on occasion by a court of law. As a result, decision makers are frequently uncertain about possible legal constraints on their authority to charge fees.

　　Texas is one of the few states with explicit and unambiguous laws, about fees in public libraries. Services for which fees may be charged are precisely delineated:

　　Library services include the dissemination of materials and/or information by the library staff to the general public during posted or otherwise published hours of library outlets. A public library shall provide library services without a use charge to all persons residing in the library's tax supporting political subdivision. The following exceptions to this rule are permitted at discretion of the library's governing authority: reserving library materials; use of meeting room; replacement of lost borrower cards; fines for overdue, lost or damaged materials in accordance with local library policies; postage; in-depth reference services on a contractual basis; photocopying; library parking; service to non-residents; sale of publications; rental and deposits on equipment; and charges for the use of materials and machine-readable data bases not owned by the library, major resource center, or regional library system for which the vendor or supplier has charged a borrowing fee.

　　The written law in Texas leaves librarians little room to doubt whether or not a particular fee is legal. However, this is not the case in the majority of states. Consequently, public library administrators do not know whether fees in the library are legally sanctioned or not and, if so, for which services.

　　Another against fees was rendered by the Attorney General of California but that involved only the contract for service with non-residents who pay for service if an added fee is charged. It also is based on a California law guaranteeing "Free Access to the resources of libraries" as an adjunct to the free education system.

　　The use of revenues raised from fees may also be governed by state law. In a few states, library law grants the library board discretion over the use of all nontax revenues. In other states, however, the law is not so permissive, tending to require that revenues raised from fees for a specific service be used to finance that service and that service only.

9.Conclusions

　　The fee issue has become more complex as a result of my research because I have come to see the public library itself as a more complex institution. The public library is one of a family of public institutions intimately tied into the legal, economic, educational, and political processes that penetrate the public-policy environment. The fee issue is not, therefore, a library issue only; it is also a public-policy issue. To be sure, librarians bring to the process and to the resulting policies their own personal and professional commitments and sensibilities, and a particular sense of the history and role of public librarianship in democratic society. These commitments and sensibilities generally encourage librarians to resist the full force of many of the ideas originating from other disciplines and to reject the directions which the logic of these ideas would compel the library to take. But whether a librarian prefers to draw on these ideas to improve the quality of his or her decision making regarding fees, or simply to resist them, a knowledge of the assumptions on which they rest, their structure, and their implications is essential to cogent and consistent thinking and response. When viewed from the broader perspective of the public-environment, the defense of the free public library that we found in the philosophy of equity is seriously challenged by the economic ideas of efficiency

　　Librarianship has changed from what it was in the late nineteenth century when the library faith was born. The present world of libraries is a vastly different one from that of the late nineteenth century. The debates on professionalism have clarified that a library functions in a larger institutional environment, and that it is in that larger environment that priorities are determined. The issue of fee vs. free must be considered in many different situations.

　　Library have traditionally been responsible for information access to information and dissemination, but have failed to recognize the intrinsic costs in providing that service. This disparity, combined with a trend of libraries to produce information, have provided library management with the impetus for developing a corresponding redefinition of the library's role and parameters of service. It is no longer sufficient to justify the existence of libraries on the basis that they provide for society's information needs and are the guardians of culture. Moreover, a declining budget environment combined with advances in information technologies have revolutionized the concept of library service, and the topic of fees is integral to that revolution. Because of these changng conditions, the application of library fees may be economically justified.

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