An informed citizenry?

Library Journal reports that most public libraries aren’t doing very much to help folks prepare for the Super Tuesday primaries. According to their poll on election education, this is actually “a cooling-off period.” A sample of responses to their interviews with librarians: “We haven’t even talked about it, to be honest” and “The staff plans to vote—does that count?”

Do public libraries have a role in helping citizens wade through the barrage of advertising on candidates and help them make informed electoral decisions? The trustees of the Boston Public Library thought so, when they established that library in 1852. They wrote that:

under political, social and religious institutions like ours, – it is of paramount importance that the means of general information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundations of social order, which are constantly presenting themselves, and which we, as a people, are constantly required to decide, and do decide, either ignorantly or wisely

The institution they proposed to diffuse this information was the public library. If not the library, who?