How to destroy a library
Ophelia pointed to a story in The Independent about the proposals of Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, laying out his views on how the library service needs to proceed. These include plans that aim to make libraries into ‘social hubs’, places where you can do just about anything other than read a book in peace and quiet. Mr. Burnham prefers that the libraries across our land transform themselves: A spokesman at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said the Government wanted to transform the atmosphere of libraries to make them more similar to Waterstones stores
. How? Well, the traditional “silence” in libraries be reviewed and opening hours extended
, Libraries should be a place for families and joy and chatter. The word chatter might strike fear into the heart of traditionalists but libraries should be social places that offer an antidote to the isolation of someone playing on the internet at home
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In other words, the government plan to turn public libraries into publicly-funded Starbucks-esque “third places”. Behind this is the usual ‘communities’ buzzword. Jeff, a librarian commenting on this blog post says: Libraries always have existed for their communities… As a former library administrator, I can confirm that libraries must find ways to meet the needs of their communities in order to secure funding.
I’m afraid, I don’t understand this ‘communities’ thing. Does the National Gallery exist to serve ‘communities’? The British Museum? Thankfully not. They exist to hold, preserve and make available items that embody that which is best about the human experience and human culture. Libraries and, to a lesser extent, universities can do the same thing but on a much more widely distributed scale. Most books, unlike ancient statues and Rembrandt paintings, are not limited by their distribution. It is possible with only a small amount of financial outlay and work to have essentially a National Gallery of the greatest works of literature, and every other subject, in every town and village. Obviously, there will be a scaling effect: a library in a tiny, rural village will not house the quantity of books that the Bodleian can.
What the ‘community’ thing does is a divide and conquer strategy. It’s survival of only those who can be put in an identifiable interest group. So, story time for young children is serving the community of young mothers. Replacing Plato and Euripides with popular psychology, astrology and chick lit - who is that harming, other than few cranky eccentric readers? And, well, who cares about readers? I think this is why we need to actually have a group of readers, self-identified readers, who can lobby the government on matters like this and say “Actually, we don’t need coffee machines, MTV and mobile phones - we want more books, and we want better books”.
The sort of libraries that Mr. Burnham imagines would end up being like every other public space: like airports, train carriages, cafes, shopping centres, Disneyland, cinema foyers, gyms and the high street. And if you actually want to think, the distractions of life can be bloody infuriating. Last time I flew to the United States, I had an hour and a half to wait at Heathrow Terminal 3. There is a sort of giant atrium at Terminal 3 (or used to be - I haven’t been to Heathrow since), with lots of seats in the middle, shops all around and corridors off to the boarding gates. Right in the middle of the atrium was a Starbucks Coffee outlet. I sat quite a distance away, but all I could hear for an hour and a half was a bloody espresso machine every few minutes. And a few thousand other people all milling around. This is what the government wants to turn libraries into.
As a counter-point, the other day I had to get hold of some obscure journal articles, and I couldn’t find them on the online databases. So I went into my university’s library, and eventually got to an extremely large room housing the humanities journals - or, rather, the journals for Philosophy, Law and Literature. The room must have been sixty foot long, twenty foot wide and twenty foot tall - with journals stacked from floor to ceiling on every row. I eventually found my journal articles and sat down to read in this room. It was completely silent, and most of the time, I was the only person in there - two people entered during the hour I spent in there. That is the sort of library one could spend a few days in. Unlike my train journeys - plagued as they are by teenagers and business executives using their mobile telephones to look and sound like utter twats, and small children screaming and crying and clambering around - a library is a place that brings with it some of the solitude that readers and writers need to function.
Let me illustrate: I was in the library the other day, and there was a man sitting across the table from me, and he was sniffing. I was working quite hard on trying to understand something, and every single thought that went through my mind was interrupted by “Sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff-snifffff!” every few seconds. It was - sniff! - like hav-sniff!-ing a conv-SNIFF!-ersation with-SNIFF!-a very stupid person - snif! - only that stupid person is you. SNIFF! Every time you thought something - SNIFF-SNIFF-SNIFF! - it was interrupted. Fortunately, I had a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, and I put on some very quiet, ambient music to just drown out Sniffman. Thankfully, a few minutes later he wandered off. I mean the man no harm, and his sniffing may be a nervous tic or a medical condition or he may not be conscious of it at all - but he managed to turn me from being completely focused and in the zone in only a few seconds. The government wants to implement similar focus-sapping distraction as national policy. The wide availability of the Internet put the first nail in the productivity coffin - now the Department for Culture, Media and Sport are about to knock the second one in by making public libraries completely useless for anyone other than small children and compulsive Facebook addicts. (Incidentally: unlike the Department of Health, if nobody were to turn up for work at the DCMS on Monday, do you think anyone would actually notice?)
Apparently, though the kind of position I have outlined above makes me an elitist who is stuck in the Dark Ages. I wilfully admit to the former - I am an unashamed elitist: I think that a person with a Ph.D generally knows more than the average random person, and are part of an ‘elite’ of people (you probably are an elitist too, in that if you were to get cancer, you’d probably want to see an oncologist and not just some random bloke in the pub). I am not elitist in one sense: I think that, within reason, anyone should be able to go into any library. If by ‘elitist’ what is meant is someone who thinks libraries are places where there should be lots of books, and people go into the library to read those books, not to, oh, watch MTV and sip lattes, then yes, I’m also an elitist on this very weird definition of elitism. And I’m most certainly not in the Dark Ages. It is the government who want to turn libraries, beacons of Enlightenment, into glorified coffee shops. At the same time as they waste money on this pointless fluff, an actually useful library - Senate House Library in London - is facing a very uncertain future after losing funding. I have absolutely no idea how it can be justifiable that a major academic library faces closure because of funding shortfalls, while the government plans to fund lots of pointless community feel-good fluff for public libraries. No amount of community outreach bullshit gets dissertations written or research produced or ideas explored.
I’ve got a long post that’s not quite finished all about anti-intellectualism. While Mr. Burnham is probably not explicitly anti-intellectual, the shoe does fit rather conveniently. If you care about libraries, be sure to speak out: write to your MPs, to the DCMS, to Mr. Burnham, to the newspapers and on blogs. If you want to understand where the kind of thinking that the Government is putting forward comes from, be sure to look at a report published in 2003 called Better Public Libraries. It gives the whole game away. I won’t narrate it here - it’s getting late, and I’ve got books to read, plus I have said more than enough about the wretched thing in the comments at Butterflies and Wheels.
Whatever happens to our libraries, be sure to keep going to them and keep reading books and digesting the ideas contained therein. If you keep doing it properly, you’ll hopefully end up better off in life than the anti-intellectuals at the DCMS.
