"The public library is in every sense an institutional descendant of the social library, but in its governmental relationships it represents an innovation. At Salisbury and Lexington municipal support was introduced to strengthen existing social libraries, but at Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1833, a library was established which from the beginning was truly a public institution and in all its relationships to the community was remarkably like the public library of today. The significance of the Peterborough Town Library, then, lies less in its primacy than in its modernity."
