IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY 133

munication needs of the community For if, as another re-
port in this Inquiry series suggests,* the book industry in this
country is becoming increasingly commercialized, with an at-
tendant lowering of critical standards, this definition of the
public library function becomes all the more appropriate. By
so doing the public library might well take upon itself a dis-
tinctive role in the community’s pattern of communication.

In a real sense, the title of this book is a misnomer. There
is no such thing as “the library’s public.” In the first place,
the eligible population of the community is the library’s public
only in a legal sense, certainly not in a substantive socio-psy-
chological sense. By this definition, the library’s public 7y
use the public library, but it does not, and within the next
years it will not. In the second place, the clientele of the li-
brary does not represent a public in a meaningful sense. There
is no single public of library users; there are several publics.
This is not simply a nice semantic dlstlnctlon It i1s central to
the problem of the values and the objectives of public library
service; it is the key to the “philosophy of public librarian-
ship.”

%he several publics of the library are the several distinctive
groups which make distinctive demands for library materials.
There is a public of high school students who mainly want
from the public library what their school libraries cannot
adequately supply. There is a public mainly composed of
housewives and white collar workers who want “some light
reading.” There is a public of business representatives who
want specific and isolated pieces of information from the li-
brary files. There is a public of ambitious young people who
hope to use the library in their drive for occupational mobility.
There is a public of serious-minded people concerned with
serious-minded materials on a variety of topics who find in the
library what they cannot get elsewhere. There is a public of

‘William Miller, The Book Industry.