Public Opinion toward User Fees in Public Libraries

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The issue of user fees in public libraries has been debated extensively in the library community in the last several years. Since their origins in the nineteenth century, American public libraries have relied almost exclusively on public funding. An examination of their nature as public goods, however, reveals public library services to be as much private goods as public goods. This conclusion based on economic grounds is supported by surveys of public opinion toward user fees in libraries, which have typically found the general public to be more tolerant of fees than librarians. In this study, we reanalyzed the data from a national telephone poll of 1,181 U.S. residents conducted in 1991 by the Library Research Center at the University of Illinois. When asked what they would like to see done if their local public library were facing a fiscal crisis, 47 percent of those voicing an opinion favored raising taxes, while 44 percent favored instituting user fees. The remaining 9 percent advocated a reduction in services. We used the framework of discrete choice analysis to determine whether attitudes toward fees and taxes stem more from citizens' own self-interest or more from their political outlook. We found greater support for self-interest as an explanation. In particular, more frequent library use, urban residence, a higher level of education, and greater income were all associated with a greater preference for taxes over fees or service cuts.