by Anita Anand
The business of closing libraries isn’t a straightforward political fight. The local authorities shelter behind the demands of central government which in its turn pretends that local councils have a choice. It’s shaming that, regardless of the party’s proud tradition of popular education, Labour municipalities are not making more of a stand. For the Tories privatising the libraries has been on the agenda for far longer than they would currently like to admit. This is an extract from my diary:
22 February Switch on Newsnight to find some bright spark from, guess where, the Adam Smith Institute, proposing the privatisation of the public libraries. His name is Eamonn Butler and it’s to be hoped he’s no relation of the 1944 Education Act Butler. Smirking and pleased with himself as they generally are from that stable, he’s pitted against a well-meaning but flustered woman who’s an authority on children’s books. Paxman looks on undissenting as this odious figure dismisses any defence of the tradition of free public libraries as ‘the usual bleating of the middle classes’. I go to bed depressed only to wake and find Madsen Pirie, also from the Adam Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable.
That was written in 1996. It’s hard not to think that like other Tory policies privatising the libraries has been lying dormant for fifteen years, just waiting for a convenient crisis to smuggle it through. Libraries are, after all, as another think-tank clown opined a few weeks ago, ‘a valuable retail outlet’.
THE FUTURE OF THE LIBRARY
SETH GODIN
What is a public library for?
First, how we got here.
Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.
This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn’t have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.
Only after that did we invent the librarian.
The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.
Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilised member of society by reading at night.
And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.
Which was all great, until now.
Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you’ve seen and what you’re likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.
This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don’t schlep to the library to use an out-of-date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won’t unless coerced.
They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.
When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it’s not that the mall won, it’s that the library lost.
And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An e-book costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbour. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.
Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.
Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.
The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve centre for information. (Please don’t say I’m anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I’ve demonstrated my probook chops. I’m not saying I want paper to go away, I’m merely describing what’s inevitably occurring.) We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now (most of the time), the insight and leverage is going to come from being fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.
The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.
The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user serviceable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it’s fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.
The next library is filled with so many web terminals there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight – it’s the entire point.
Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousand things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.
We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.
GOING TO THE DOGS
VAL MCDERMID
I would not be a writer if it were not for the public library system. Books were a luxury we couldn’t afford when I was growing up, but the working-class culture of my time and place was that education was the way you escaped your history. And education came courtesy of books.
My mother used to take me to the public library to look at picture books years before I could read. She would find a quiet corner of the children’s section and tell me the stories, pointing out the pictures. I couldn’t even pronounce the word – I used to say we were going to the Labrador. My mother says I’ve been going to the dogs ever since.
When I was six years old, we moved house. My parents couldn’t have chosen a better location as far as I was concerned. Our new house was right across the road from the imposing sandstone building that still houses Kirkcaldy Central Library. The other half of the classically styled self-improvement centre is the Museum and Art Gallery, which is home t
o an impressive collection of Scottish Colourists. The whole thing was the gift of one of the linoleum manufacturers who got rich on the hard graft of their workers. I’m not sure whether this municipal munificence was a thank-you or a means of keeping us out of trouble. Either way, I welcomed it.
The library became my home from home. Its image is as clear in my mind’s eye as the reality was at the time. High ceilings, cream paint, wood panelling and shelves stained a shade that usually appears on colour charts as ‘antique pine’. The room was divided by waist-high wooden walls, with a wooden swing gate on either side of the central issuing desk. On one side lay the books for borrowing. On the other, long tables with hard chairs where, until closing time at 6.45, you could read the reference collection and the handful of worthy magazines the library subscribed to. There were no comics. Of course there were no comics. Libraries were for self-improvement, not frivolity.
To get into the section with the books, you had to have a library ticket. If you didn’t have a ticket and you weren’t returning a book, the librarian wouldn’t let you in. It was simple.
I read voraciously, diving into the worlds of other people’s imagination and emerging with my own vision enriched and inflamed. I could happily get through two books in a day. I read everywhere. At the table, in the street, in bed, at break time in school. Once I gave myself a black eye by walking into a castellated garden wall during my paper round while I was busily poring over the hockey reports in The Scotsman.
I read all of Enid Blyton except for the Secret Seven, who irritated me for some reason. I read Just William, Jennings and Darbishire and Biggles. I adored the Chalet School series and dreamed of being sent to an Alpine boarding school. I worked my way through the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and coveted her little red roadster. I read the Moomintrolls and Worzel Gummidge and Robert Louis Stevenson. I read The Secret Garden and Oliver Twist. Even though I was on the plump side myself, I read Billy Bunter.
My big problem always came at weekends. I used to spend part of my weekends and school holidays with my grandparents in a nearby mining village that had no library. And although we were allowed to take out four books at a time, two of them had to be non-fiction. After all, this was Presbyterian Scotland in the 1960s. Heaven forfend we should have unmitigated pleasure.
I did my best. I worked my way through poetry and drama, natural history and history. I even gritted my teeth and read some of the geography and travel section. But a lot of it was dry as dust or else incomprehensible. So more often than not, I ended up at my grandparents’ house in a state of intense frustration at not having anything to read other than the two novels I’d just finished.
My grandparents were not readers. They had a copy of the Bible, because back then everybody did. But I had enough of the Bible at Sunday School, and besides, it was hard to pick out the good bits from the begats. They only had one other book in the house, which I’ve always assumed a visitor left behind. It was The Murder at the Vicarage, by Agatha Christie in the old Fontana edition, featuring an old-fashioned telephone with separate ear-piece and speaking trumpet.
It was love at first sight. And I suspect it stamped its influence on me for life.
Linguistic experts tell us Christie’s prose can be read by anyone with a reading age of nine, and I was certainly a precocious reader, so I was probably working my way through it by the time I was seven or eight. I was captivated by it. This was the first Miss Marple, Christie at the peak of her powers. The plot is complicated by sub-plots and red herrings, and even though I knew after the first reading how the mystery was resolved, the book still retained its power to fascinate me.
What was almost more exciting was that there was a list of other books that Christie had written. I was desperate to read more. But now I came up against an insurmountable problem. Agatha Christie’s books were not for children. They were in the adult library.
They might as well have been on Mars.
Some of the librarians were frankly terrifying, but others were friendly and helpful. But there was no way that even the kindest of them was going to let me loose in the adult library. I’m not sure what they thought might happen if a child wandered willy-nilly through the adult fiction, but they were not going to chance it.
I puzzled over this for a while. Then it dawned on me that compassion might succeed where all else failed. Early one morning, before my parents were awake, I opened the drawer where my mother kept her rarely used library tickets and helped myself to one. That evening, I turned up at the library and chose my own books. Then I went through to the admissions counter of the adult library. I put my mother’s ticket on the counter and looked as piteous as I can manage.
‘My mum’s not well,’ I said. ‘I’ve to get her a book.’
My luck was in. The librarian on duty was not one of the dragons. She frowned and consulted one of her colleagues. They looked at the ticket and then looked back at me. ‘That’s fine,’ she said, handing the ticket back.
The adult library was awesome. Fiction stretched all the way round the outer walls, with the non-fiction shelved on free-standing units in the middle. To either side was an impressive card index, one for fiction and one for non-fiction.
I made a beeline for Agatha Christie and found three of her books with the distinctive colophon of a masked gunman that marked the Collins Crime list. It was the start of a journey I’m still making through the genre I love. From Christie, my reading spread tree-like through classic British crime fiction. Conan Doyle, Allingham, Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Michael Innes led me to contemporary writers such as Ruth Rendell and P.D. James. My English teacher pointed me at Raymond Chandler, which opened up another raft of writers to savour. I plundered the library, and when it couldn’t satisfy my appetites, I came home with armfuls of scabby paperbacks from jumble sales and second-hand bookshops.
Being a reader turned me into a writer. It fed my imagination and revealed worlds far beyond my own experience. When I took the mighty leap in the dark to abandon my well-paid and secure job and attempt to make a living as a writer, I was too poor to afford books or music, and again it was the library that saved me. When I was starting to make my way as a writer, it was the support of librarians that helped me gain a readership.
Now I am a mother myself, I am proud to say my son also takes pleasure in libraries. Of course, his experience is rather different from mine. Open shelves beckon children to explore where they will. Almost unlimited borrowing allows them to read as much as they want to. And these days, author events give readers the chance to interact with their favourite authors in a way I’d have loved as a child.
Of course, sometimes author events do have their downside. A few years ago, I was invited back to Kirkcaldy Library. To my surprise, a couple of the librarians were still around from when I was younger. My mother, who still lives across from the library, is in her eighties now, but she had come to the event with me. I introduced her to the librarians. One seemed taken aback.
‘Oh, Mrs McDermid,’ she said, the words tumbling out before she thought better of them. ‘I thought you must be dead by now.’
‘Dead?’ My mother sounded outraged. ‘Why would I be dead?’
‘Well, with you being a bed-ridden invalid all those years …’ Her voice trailed off as she caught the look my mother cast my way.
Never mind. I still love libraries. And I’m still going to the dogs.
I LIBRARIES
LIONEL SHRIVER
One of my earliest memories from Raleigh, North Carolina, is of being led by my mother’s hand into an awesomely big building downtown (it was doubtless very small) to acquire my first library card. Let loose in my personal version of a sweet shop, I scurried about amassing a stack of treats – Curious George Goes to School, Where the Wild Things Are, Bartholomew and the Oobleck. We were a frugal family, and these books were all for free!
Thus the campaign launched last month by a public–private partnership of publishers, library organisation
s, and the Department for Culture is wasted on me: ‘Love Libraries’? I already do.
In some respects, this is admission against interest. As an author, I make much more money when you buy one of my books; if you borrow one from a library, I make 3p. Still, I’ll happily take the 3p. (Indeed, in the US writers enjoy no equivalent of Public Lending Rights, and I consider earning anything at all from borrowing perfectly fabulous.) For readers – and I myself read loads more books than I write – libraries offer a host of advantages over a bookstore.
When you’ve bought a book, you feel obligated to finish it, just to get your money’s worth. But when I borrow the adult equivalent of that Curious George trove, I’m free to start a disappointing novel and discard it. Paying nothing for the book itself, I can place a higher premium on my time. The quality of the books that I do finish tends to rise.
In most bookstores, too, salespeople will look at you askance when you sprawl in the aisles with the new Ian McEwan. Libraries provide chairs, in which you can loll around reading Saturday, unharassed, for hours.
