Reading Disrepair: Library Space and Institutional Value

by Vaughn X. Haynes

Damp carpets. Stained ceilings. Moldy books. Contrary to the idealized public perception of library spaces, the reality is often closer to these images of compromised architectural integrity in derelict conditions. In December 2025, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that 38 percent of public libraries surveyed had at least one building system in poor condition, 61 percent had at least one feature posing a potential health or safety concern, and 70 percent had a backlog of deferred maintenance and repair. Physical accessibility and building size were among the concerns most often identified.¹

None of this should be surprising to people who work in libraries, but the report makes clear that building conditions are a measurable problem on a national level. Library and information studies has long understood the importance of buildings. The literature on library as place has shown that users do not walk into a neutral shell for services and collections, but rather, an atmosphere of expectations materialized in walls, furniture, lighting, noise, technology, and layout. Writing on academic libraries, Nitecki argues that space assessment should be tied to the library’s shifting roles as service provider and site of knowledge creation.² Elmborg similarly argues that library space cannot be understood only in utilitarian terms. He treats it as a relational environment in which people encounter one another, negotiate their place within an institution or community, and develop ways of learning and belonging.³

What the literature says less about, however, is what deterioration itself means. Much of the scholarship on library space has focused on renovation and successful planning.⁴ Shill and Tonner’s studies, for instance, document the scale of renovated academic library facilities and ask how those improvements affected use.⁵ Cha and Kim likewise examine the qualities that shape students’ choices within library space, including amount of space, noise level, crowdedness, comfort of furnishing, and cleanliness.⁶ These works reveal that library space tends to be theorized at the moment of aspiration, when a building is being redesigned, improved, or optimized, and, more importantly, that a building has the resources and infrastructure to adequately support it.

We are starting elsewhere. What does it mean when the library is not newly renovated, not especially comfortable, and not obviously cared for? What are users meant to make of the broken chair, the overflowing trash, the frayed carpet, the inaccessible entrance, the flickering light, or the sign that looks like it belongs to a different decade? These details are easy to wave away as ordinary building problems, however, I want to suggest that they are more than that. Disrepair is meaningful and buildings are complicated. They age unevenly, budgets are finite, and maintenance backlogs stem from different causes all at once, from understaffing to budget cuts. Still, visible neglect carries rhetorical force. It shapes how users understand the library’s authority, how comfortable (or uncomfortable) they feel in it, and where the library seems to sit within the institution’s hierarchy of care. It shapes the conditions and labor expected of its workers, and it shines a light on the broader conditions of the library’s neighborhood. “The medium is the message” being applied in its most literal sense: if well-kept library space represents value, then neglected library space represents disinvestment.

The conversation about the library as place has been central to academic librarianship for at least three decades, growing out of claims that digital access would make the physical library less important. Against that assumption, scholars argued that the academic library building still mattered because it supported sociability and intellectual work that could not be reduced to remote access. Antell and Engel’s study of faculty and doctoral students found that while the physical library mattered as a source of materials, it also mattered as a tangible place conducive to scholarship.⁷ Their work is a reminder that being in the library is more than simply another way of accessing library resources.

Later studies widened that question by asking not just whether the building mattered, but what kinds of spaces within it mattered most. Jackson and Hahn found that students responded positively to images of traditional library buildings and interiors, associating them with scholarship, engagement, and other affirmative emotions.⁸ DeFrain and Hong, studying a learning commons, found that students generally experienced the space as supportive and community-oriented, even when their actual patterns of use did not fully match the collaborative intentions built into the design.⁹ Other studies have stressed the practical consequences of those physical conditions. Vondracek found that students looked for comfort, convenience, and quiet both within and outside the library.¹⁰ Shill and Tonner likewise write that physical improvements affect patterns of use and users’ experiences of the building.¹¹ At the same time, this body of literature often speaks in a developmental register, asking how space can be assessed and improved, framing problems in the context of planning a better future. That orientation makes sense, although, it can also leave certain libraries out of the picture. Libraries are also encountered in ordinary, aging buildings whose shortcomings have been normalized. A library can be heavily used, even loved, and still feel worn down. In those cases, the institution’s commitment to the library is experienced as partial, uneven, or even deferred. For that, we need a vocabulary of maintenance and care.

In “Maintenance and Care,” Mattern asks readers to pay attention to rust, dust, cracks, and breakdown, rather than looking only at novelty and innovation. Maintenance and repair, in her account, are never merely technical matters. What gets fixed, whose labor is recognized, and which kinds of breakdown are tolerated are all contingent and contextual questions shaped by race, gender, class, and other political, economic, and cultural forces.¹² That framework is especially helpful for libraries, which are often described in the PR language of transformation and future-readiness, even as their daily functioning depends on routine upkeep and labor that is easy to overlook. And once maintenance becomes part of the conversation, deterioration begins to look a lot more like deliberate decision-making. A stained ceiling tile may suggest a leak that was addressed only partially; fraying upholstery may indicate replacement cycles stretched past a reasonable point. Disrepair suggests that some threshold of decline has become acceptable. None of these conditions on its own tells the whole story. Taken together, however, they form a pattern of toleration. Nitecki’s account of space assessment ties questions of comfort, function, and expectation to the library’s larger purposes.¹³ Neglect becomes legible as a gap between mission and material reality once those questions are on the table. A library may describe itself as central to learning and research; a visibly uncared-for environment undermines that claim.

Disrepair also has a history. It accumulates slowly, through postponed fixes, stretched budgets, mismanaged priorities, and years of compromise. In that sense, a neglected building is a layered record of deferred decisions. The politics of maintenance, then, is not reducible to a clean opposition between “cared-for” and “uncared-for” space. It is about thresholds: how much deterioration an institution is willing to normalize in one of its information spaces. Mattern’s emphasis on repair as a way of seeing erosion and breakdown clarifies that maintenance reveals what has been allowed to linger.¹⁴

A recent turn in library scholarship has been the attention given to atmosphere and affect. DeFrain and Hong explicitly connect interiors, affect, and use, showing that the experience of library space cannot be reduced to task completion alone.¹⁵ Public library research broadens this discussion beyond the academic campus, with Peterson, writing about libraries as felt spaces, similarly arguing that libraries generate atmospheres of comfort, welcome, discomfort, and unease that shape people’s sense of belonging both within and beyond the building.¹⁶ This is important because deterioration is often registered before it is named. Most users do not walk into a library and consciously think, “This building communicates institutional disinvestment.” What they notice instead is an atmosphere of disrepair, an affective puzzle put together with pieces made of instances of neglect. In addition to being aesthetic judgments, they are also social and emotional ones that shape whether the space feels trustworthy. DeFrain and Hong’s findings suggest the inverse as well—that atmospheres of discomfort can weaken a library’s perceived capacity to support the people in it.¹⁷

Library-space literature reinforces this point in more concrete terms. Cha and Kim found cleanliness and comfort of furnishing among the most important factors in students’ spatial choices, alongside amount of space, noise level, and crowdedness.¹⁸ Vondracek found similar patterns in students deciding where to study.¹⁹ While these studies are not framed as critiques of neglect, they do make clear that ordinary conditions of maintenance and atmosphere matter to users’ choices and experiences. The difference between a persuasive study environment and an alienating one rests on details that are often treated as mere operations.

There is also a symbolic side to atmosphere. Jackson and Hahn show that users invest traditional library imagery with meanings such as scholarship and engagement.²⁰ “Traditional library imagery” refers to the familiar visual language of the library as a serious intellectual setting: stacks, study tables, and a sense of order or permanence. This imagery should not be mistaken for the ideal library space. A traditional library can be exclusionary or inaccessible to the ways people actually study and gather. The ideal, then, is not necessarily a return to nostalgic markers of academic seriousness, but rather, one that is visibly cared for and accessible to the people who use and work in it. The symbolic charge of a traditional library does not disappear when people encounter less maintained spaces; it becomes strained. A visibly neglected library is especially striking because it collides with the cultural expectation that libraries preserve, order, and care. The contradiction is hard to miss when the institution most closely associated with stewardship appears insufficiently stewarded itself—the institution may continue to invoke the library as evidence of its commitment to scholarship, but the condition of the building makes that commitment increasingly difficult to believe.

Upkeep is part of librarianship’s ethical infrastructure. Libraries support reading, concentration, browsing, instruction, consultation, and refuge—activities that require more than strategic planning. They also require furniture that supports bodies, temperatures that are bearable, and bathrooms and common areas that do not humiliate users. These seemingly mundane conditions are not minor. This framing also helps resist too sharp a separation between intellectual and custodial labor. Mattern notes that maintenance work is often socially devalued and unevenly recognized.²¹ Library discourse can fall into the habit of celebrating visible forms of professional expertise while treating upkeep as only adjacent to the library’s real mission. And yet, users experience the library through the combined effects of many kinds of maintenance labor. When that labor is missing, reduced, or structurally unsupported, users encounter a disappointing moral atmosphere: a place that feels unprepared for their presence.

The language of care works only if it is not sentimentalized. In library settings, care is often discussed as customer service or hospitality. While those dimensions are important, care is infrastructural too. It is visible in whether a building acknowledges the body as well as the intellect, whether accessibility is treated as fundamental rather than optional, and whether chronic discomfort is treated as an inevitability or as a problem worth solving. The 2025 GAO findings translate what could otherwise be naturalized into measurable building conditions like poor HVAC systems, accessibility barriers, health and safety concerns, and repair backlogs.²² Those are infrastructural deficits, and they are also failures of care, produced by funding structures, mismatched administrative priorities, and deferred capital planning. When infrastructural problems persist, the institution has effectively decided that users and workers can continue to adapt to conditions that should have been addressed materially.

The failure of care visible in a neglected building should not be confused with a failure of care by library workers. Librarians and library staff are simultaneously the people most aware of a building’s shortcomings, and the least able to resolve them directly. Public libraries identify construction costs, labor and materials, and limited funding availability as major challenges to addressing maintenance and repair needs; most libraries rely on local funding for these repairs.²³ Often, they field complaints about the broken or outdated infrastructure while having little control over critical administrative ends that dictate where resources are directed, being asked to neutralize, normalize, and soften the effects of divestment they did not create.

Understaffing and underfunding intensify this problem. In public libraries specifically, 18 percent of libraries reported losing staff positions in the previous twelve months, with city libraries reporting even higher rates of position loss.²⁴ That same report notes that salaries for directors and beginning librarians were not keeping pace with inflation. These conditions inform maintenance work because spatial care is labor intensive, even when it looks small. While it may seem minor compared with “standard” branches of library work like reference or circulation, they are a major part of how a library remains usable. They also take time and attention from workers already being asked to do more with less.

The labor of compensating for disrepair also belongs in conversation with Fobazi Ettarh’s vocational awe. Ettarh argues that librarianship often frames libraries as inherently good, even sacred institutions, a framing that can make overwork, low pay, and burnout seem like natural sacrifices for a noble profession.²⁵ The dynamic becomes material in a neglected building. Staff are expected to preserve the library’s atmosphere of welcome and usefulness even when the building itself undermines these goals. Research on academic library workplaces reveals a similar institutional dynamic. Kendrick’s work on low morale in libraries shows that workplace harm is a matter of organizational structures, not just individual stress, that allow demoralizing conditions to continue. Her study of academic librarians identifies low morale as a workplace experience shaped by institutional systems, emphasizing the effects of low morale on workers’ physical and emotional health.²⁶ Disrepair can and should be understood as a contributor to that broader ecology of strain. Library workers may be asked, explicitly or implicitly, to make the institution feel caring when its infrastructure does not, which results in a compensatory addition to the job description. Library workers must translate material failure into explanations, apologies, and reassurance.

This labor is often invisible because, when it succeeds, users simply experience the library as more functional than it otherwise would be. Workers develop informal knowledge of the building’s failures and use that knowledge to keep the library operating. However, this kind of care has limits. While a staff member can help a student find a quieter corner, they cannot fix years of underinvestment in acoustics and space planning. Advocacy, while important, becomes another demand in an already limited capacity in the context of disrepair. Constraint becomes publicly visible through space. Users see where reinvestment has happened and where it has not. They feel which spaces have been prepared for them and which have been left in a holding pattern. The library building, like the collection or the service desk, becomes an interpretive surface.

In addition to use and labor, the condition of library space shapes belonging as well. Elmborg’s idea of library space as something “between us” underscores that libraries are social and cultural spaces, not merely sites of service delivery.²⁷ This applies irrespective of library type. DeFrain and Hong show that students value academic library environments that feel supportive,²⁸ and Peterson emphasizes atmospheres of comfort and welcome as part of how public libraries generate belonging.²⁹ Within that frame, neglected space can teach users and workers what level of care they should expect from the institution and, by implication, what level of care they themselves are owed.

Disrepair also belongs in a conversation about dignity. A user navigating disrepair is being asked to adapt to the institution’s deferrals. They have to find the least uncomfortable chair, the quietest corner, the working outlet, and the route around the barrier. That adaptation may become routine, but routine does not make it insignificant—after all, as Beer famously observed, “The purpose of a system is what it does.”³⁰ Hegde, Boucher, and Lavelle argue that academic libraries need to understand user needs in order to design responsive study spaces.³¹ The subtext to that being that institutions decide how much burden they are willing to shift onto users and workers. Neglected environments shift a great deal of it onto them.

Disrepair also says something about the library’s status within the institution (the university or city). Because libraries are often treated as visible proof of an institution’s commitment to scholarship and learning, a visibly undermaintained library can register as a contradiction: the institution still wants the cultural prestige of the library without accepting the obligation to maintain the space that makes the prestige credible. This tension is especially visible where mission language foregrounds student success, research excellence, inclusion, or community. When those values are not matched by the material and sensory quality of the building, users and staff may reasonably read the mismatch as evidence that some parts of institutional life are expected to endure more neglect than others.

The uneven distribution of disrepair also deserves attention. The race, class, and geography of which neighborhoods whose libraries receive funding is a question that cannot be avoided. If local funding capacity shapes whether repairs happen, then wealth gaps and systemic inequality will shape which library spaces are more easily maintained, and which are expected to endure decline. Existing research on public library service disparities has already shown that lower-income and rural communities often receive lower levels of service than higher-income or more urban communities. Small-town, rural, and high-poverty libraries face particular barriers to addressing maintenance and repair needs.³² The point, then, is not only does disrepair communicate institutional value once users encounter it, but also that the burden of disrepair may not be evenly distributed in the first place.

Seen this way, reading disrepair is an investigative practice in addition to an interpretive one. It is an invitation to interrogate the conditions that produce neglected library space. Which libraries are repaired quickly, which buildings are treated as civic assets, and which are offered well-maintained spaces as opposed to being asked to wait and accept diminished conditions are all questions that shift the argument from symbolism toward accountability. If maintenance is part of how libraries materialize access and belonging, then institutions that oversee and fund libraries must treat upkeep as a condition of equitable service, not just a cosmetic concern.

True accountability requires more than asking library workers to report problems as they arise. Despite the need for transparency, the GAO estimates only 33 percent of public libraries have conducted a facility condition assessment in the last 10 years.³³ In addition to these assessments, institutions should document deferred repairs, estimate the costs of continued delay, and report that information to the bodies responsible for funding the building. Such inventories should identify not only the price of repair but the effects of deterioration on equitable use. Public reporting creates accountability that will make it harder for consistent building failures to disappear into repeated empty promises of future attention. Further, funding structures and strategic planning must distinguish everyday upkeep from long-term capital responsibility. Routine maintenance can remain part of annual operations, but infrastructural repairs and rehabilitation should not be forced to indefinitely compete with day-to-day library operations that occupy an already constrained budget. These projects require multiyear capital planning and clearly assigned institutional responsibility. Treating major repair as a capital obligation acknowledges that the building is living, enduring infrastructure, rather than a collection of isolated operational problems. It also makes deferred maintenance visible as an accumulating institutional liability, rather than an inconvenience that library staff are expected to manage from year to year. At minimum, institutions should be able to transparently state what needs repair, who is responsible for it, how it is being prioritized, what continued delay will cost, and when the work is expected to occur.

Library scholarship has shown that buildings matter. Deterioration matters too. Disrepair makes tangible the implicit thresholds of acceptability. To read disrepair is therefore to read the library as evidence: evidence of institutional priorities, evidence of care, and evidence of the conditions under which users are welcomed and workers are expected to provide service. Interpretation alone, however, is not enough. Institutions that fund and oversee libraries must make the condition of their buildings visible through regular assessment and responsibility. Routine upkeep cannot be separated from library service, and major repairs must be recognized as capital obligations necessary to sustain access, safety, dignity, and belonging. While reframing maintenance in these terms does not eliminate the funding constraints facing public and academic libraries, it does clarify who bears responsibility for responding to them. Cleanliness, comfort, accessibility, and repair are among the ways institutions show whether libraries, the people who rely on them, and the workers who sustain them, are worth sustained care.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Taylor Pecktal for her insightful comments and constructive feedback, and to Lauren Ervin for copyediting the manuscript.

Notes

• 1. Government Accountability Office, Public Libraries: Many Buildings Are Reported to Be in Poor Condition, GAO-26-107262, December 18, 2025, https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-26-107262/index.html.
• 2. Danuta A. Nitecki, “Space Assessment as a Venue for Defining the Academic Library,” The Library Quarterly 81, no. 1 (January 1, 2011), https://doi.org/10.1086/657446.
• 3. James K. Elmborg, “Libraries as the Spaces between Us: Recognizing and Valuing the Third Space,” RUSQ: A Journal of Reference and User Experience 50, no. 4 (August 4, 2011): 348, https://doi.org/10.5860/rusq.50n4.338.
• 4. I consider public and academic libraries together while recognizing that their systems and infrastructure differ. Much of the existing scholarship on library space comes from academic libraries, while the most comprehensive recent evidence on building conditions and maintenance funding concerns public libraries.
• 5. Harold B. Shill and Shawn Tonner, “Does the Building Still Matter? Usage Patterns in New, Expanded, and Renovated Libraries, 1995-2002,” College & Research Libraries 65, no. 2 (March 1, 2004), https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.65.2.123.
• 6. Seung Hyun Cha and Tae Wan Kim, “What Matters for Students’ Use of Physical Library Space?” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 41, no. 3 (April 10, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2015.03.014.
• 7. Karen Antell and Debra Engel, “Conduciveness to Scholarship: The Essence of Academic Library as Place,” College & Research Libraries 67, no. 6 (November 1, 2006): 543, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.67.6.536.
• 8. Heather Lea Jackson and Trudi Bellardo Hahn, “Serving Higher Education’s Highest Goals: Assessment of the Academic Library as Place,” College & Research Libraries 72, no. 5 (September 1, 2011), https://doi.org/10.5860/crl-123.
• 9. Erica DeFrain and Miyoung Hong, “Interiors, Affect, and Use: How Does an Academic Library’s Learning Commons Support Students’ Needs?” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 15, no. 2 (June 15, 2020): 43, https://doi.org/10.18438/eblip29677.
• 10. Ruth Vondracek, “Comfort and Convenience? Why Students Choose Alternatives to the Library.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 7, no. 3 (July 2007): 292, https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2007.0039.
• 11. Harold B. Shill and Shawn Tonner, “Creating a Better Place: Physical Improvements in Academic Libraries, 1995-2002,” College & Research Libraries 64, no. 6 (November 1, 2003), https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.64.6.431.
• 12. Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care,” Places Journal, (November 20, 2018), https://doi.org/10.22269/181120.
• 13. Nitecki, “Space Assessment.”
• 14. Mattern, “Maintenance and Care.”
• 15. DeFrain and Hong, “Interiors, Affect, and Use,” 43.
• 16. Melike Peterson, “Libraries as Felt Spaces: Atmospheres, Public Space and Feelings of Dis/Comfort,” Emotion, Space and Society 49 (October 29, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2023.100986.
• 17. DeFrain and Hong, “Interiors, Affect, and Use,” 43.
• 18. Cha and Kim, “What Matters for Students’ Use.”
• 19. Vondracek, “Comfort and Convenience,” 292.
• 20. Jackson and Hahn, “Serving Higher Education’s Highest Goals.”
• 21. Mattern, “Maintenance and Care.”
• 22. Government Accountability Office, Public Libraries.
• 23. Government Accountability Office, Public Libraries.
• 24. Public Library Association, Public Library Staffing Report: Results from the 2024 PLA Survey, August 27, 2025, https://ala.org/news/2025/08/pla-releases-results-2024-public-library-staff-survey.
• 25. Fobazi Ettarh, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, (January 10, 2018), https://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe.
• 26. Kaetrena Kendrick, “The Low Morale Experience of Academic Librarians: A Phenomenological Study,” Journal of Library Administration 57, no. 8 (September 7, 2017): 846, https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2017.1368325.
• 27. Elmborg, “Libraries as the Spaces Between Us,” 348.
• 28. DeFrain and Hong, “Interiors, Affect, and Use,” 43.
• 29. Peterson, “Libraries as Felt Spaces.”
• 30. Stafford Beer, The Heart of Enterprise (John Wiley & Sons, 1979), 25.
• 31. Asha L. Hegde, Patricia M. Boucher, and Allison D. Lavelle, “How Do You Work? Understanding User Needs for Responsive Study Space Design,” College & Research Libraries 79, no. 7 (November 1, 2018): 895, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.7.895.
• 32. Government Accountability Office, Public Libraries.
• 33. Government Accountability Office, Public Libraries.

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• Beer, Stafford. The Heart of Enterprise. John Wiley & Sons, 1979.
• Cha, Seung Hyun, and Tae Wan Kim. “What Matters for Students’ Use of Physical Library Space?” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 41, no. 3 (April 10, 2015). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2015.03.014.
• DeFrain, Erica, and Miyoung Hong. “Interiors, Affect, and Use: How Does an Academic Library’s Learning Commons Support Students’ Needs?” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 15, no. 2 (June 15, 2020): 42–68. https://doi.org/10.18438/eblip29677.
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• Hegde, Asha L., Patricia M. Boucher, and Allison D. Lavelle. “How Do You Work? Understanding User Needs for Responsive Study Space Design.” College & Research Libraries 79, no. 7 (November 1, 2018). https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.7.895.
• Jackson, Heather Lea, and Trudi Bellardo Hahn. “Serving Higher Education’s Highest Goals: Assessment of the Academic Library as Place.” College & Research Libraries 72, no. 5 (September 1, 2011). https://doi.org/10.5860/crl-123.
• Mattern, Shannon. “Maintenance and Care.” Places Journal. (November 20, 2018). https://doi.org/10.22269/181120.
• Nitecki, Danuta A. “Space Assessment as a Venue for Defining the Academic Library.” The Library Quarterly 81, no. 1 (January 1, 2011). https://doi.org/10.1086/657446.
• Peterson, Melike. “Libraries as Felt Spaces: Atmospheres, Public Space and Feelings of Dis/Comfort.” Emotion, Space and Society 49 (October 29, 2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2023.100986.
• Public Library Association. Public Library Staffing Report: Results from the 2024 PLA Survey. August 27, 2025. https://ala.org/news/2025/08/pla-releases-results-2024-public-library-staff-survey.
• Shill, Harold B., and Shawn Tonner. “Creating a Better Place: Physical Improvements in Academic Libraries, 1995-2002.” College & Research Libraries 64, no. 6 (November 1, 2003). https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.64.6.431.
• Shill, Harold B., and Shawn Tonner. “Does the Building Still Matter? Usage Patterns in New, Expanded, and Renovated Libraries, 1995-2002.” College & Research Libraries 65, no. 2 (March 1, 2004). https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.65.2.123.
• Vondracek, Ruth. “Comfort and Convenience? Why Students Choose Alternatives to the Library.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 7, no. 3 (July 2007): 277-293. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2007.0039.