Anonymous Patron writes
“Check out Times2 –“The personal library — now there’s an idea” by Helen Rumbelow, political correspondent for The Times of London.
“http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-2421 353,00.html
There must have been a moment when the last of Britain’s Victorian public bathhouses closed down, when a caretaker turned the key in the lock and set off home for a soak in his own tub, saying “that was a good idea at the time but now it’s over”.
When I stood in the Idea Store; the tarted-up library in East London that was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for architecture this month; I thought exactly the same thing. The public lending library, another great Victorian institution, has had its day. To pretend otherwise is like bursting in on a woman luxuriating in a private bubble-bath and telling her to take her behind out to a public washroom for a good old hose-down. She has no need of that now, thank you.
The same goes now that we can afford our own books. Some might even say that the widespread affluence that caused the end of bath-houses and libraries is a good thing, but I may be pushing my luck here. I had better keep my voice down; I am in enough trouble as it is.
You see, people get in an awful tizzy about libraries. With each passing year they decline: in the past decade, book-borrowing has dropped by 40 per cent while the cost of the service, now at 1.3 billion, has risen by the same proportion. But the response to this failure is always a new bout of hand-wringing, a new set of celebrities pleading for the public to return. This is because to be anti-library is thought to be anti-book, literacy and all nice, decent British virtues that come with being shushed by a lady in a cardigan. Well, I am daring to report that books are booming in Britain, with sales up by 3 per cent a year since 2001. If you want the truth, it is that books have killed libraries.
Anonymous Patron writes
“Check out Times2 –“The personal library — now there’s an idea” by Helen Rumbelow, political correspondent for The Times of London.
“http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-2421 353,00.html
There must have been a moment when the last of Britain’s Victorian public bathhouses closed down, when a caretaker turned the key in the lock and set off home for a soak in his own tub, saying “that was a good idea at the time but now it’s over”.
When I stood in the Idea Store; the tarted-up library in East London that was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for architecture this month; I thought exactly the same thing. The public lending library, another great Victorian institution, has had its day. To pretend otherwise is like bursting in on a woman luxuriating in a private bubble-bath and telling her to take her behind out to a public washroom for a good old hose-down. She has no need of that now, thank you.
The same goes now that we can afford our own books. Some might even say that the widespread affluence that caused the end of bath-houses and libraries is a good thing, but I may be pushing my luck here. I had better keep my voice down; I am in enough trouble as it is.
You see, people get in an awful tizzy about libraries. With each passing year they decline: in the past decade, book-borrowing has dropped by 40 per cent while the cost of the service, now at 1.3 billion, has risen by the same proportion. But the response to this failure is always a new bout of hand-wringing, a new set of celebrities pleading for the public to return. This is because to be anti-library is thought to be anti-book, literacy and all nice, decent British virtues that come with being shushed by a lady in a cardigan. Well, I am daring to report that books are booming in Britain, with sales up by 3 per cent a year since 2001. If you want the truth, it is that books have killed libraries.
To show why, let’s go back to the heyday of the 1980s. In a modest South London reading room I whiled away the hours before adulthood, bringing home tracts of vegetarian propaganda; the more lurid photographs of tortured animals, the better; that I knew would annoy my parents. But then the Nineties, and the internet, happened. The visitors to the library of my childhood drifted away. Almost anything you could want there, the computer could do better.
The man who shuffled in with an embarrassing medical condition to research? Far more information online, and in the comfort of your own home. Ditto almost any research project.
What about those people; it sounds impossibly quaint now; on the waiting list for a new bestseller? For a few quid Amazon will deliver to your door. The other day I bought a second-hand book from Amazon for 90p; with postage it was the cost of a bus ticket to the library and I don’t have to hand it back after three weeks.
What about those who, like me, used to enjoy exchanging juvenile comments with others in the margins of library books? Well, the internet can do that kind of thing too. It’s called blogging.
Even with the internet, our appetite for books grew. As prices fell, people became rich enough to afford the convenience of buying their own, and educated enough to want to. Those with a social conscience buy in Oxfam, using it as a kind of library in which they give money to charity to buy books and donate them back. Those with less conscience simply go to Borders, select a pile of books from the shelves to splatter with cappuccino in the cafe;, then go home empty-handed.
So why do people go to libraries now? To judge from the scene I witnessed at the Idea Store; and the statistics back this up; books are decreasingly the draw. This flagship centre (they don’t call it a library for fear of putting people off) has escalators delivering people from the street straight into the brightly coloured halls. I stopped by the toy-filled play area, went up in the groovy lift to peruse the massage and dance classes, and had a cup of tea with a fantastic view of London through jewel-hued glass. The place looks great and it is thriving, except for those poor neglected shelves.
At the Idea Store I had a radical idea. Let us admit that people can buy their own books if they want to. The one exception to this is children; libraries are vital for encouraging reading and literary tastes. Children’s libraries should be lavished with funding but could be located in the kind of places where they go anyway, such as play centres or after-school clubs; all the better for helping with homework. For everyone else, we should completely redefine what we want.
If the Government decides to compete with 1-an-hour internet cafes, fine. If it wants to provide shelter on a rainy day, somewhere for those at a loose end to sit and read the newspapers, good. The book stock could then be centralised and if you wanted one you could order over the counter or online, to be picked up or delivered to your home in 24 hours, just like at the best independent bookshops.
Don’t think of it as the end of libraries, just the start of millions of personal ones. The library is dead, long live the library.”
But, consider the US experience…
The decline in circulation in UK libraries has not been matched in the US. Of course, libraries do more than circulate items but consider the data below. These are figures for total circulations at US libraries for the fiscal years given. There are also circulations per capita to take into account increases in population in the US.
Other figures indicate similar increases and, alas, declines in budgets. I did a summary article reviewing some of these trends for those interested.
Source: http://www.nclis.gov/statsurv/NCES/pusum/index.htm l
Re:But, consider the US experience…
Drdata gets it right (thanks!), but I’d revise that first sentence:
Circulation in U.S. public libraries continues to rise, both in absolute and per-cap terms. Whatever’s wrong with UK public libraries–and if you believe the stories, it’s a lot–is a UK situation.
Re:But, consider the US experience…
I’d be willing to bet that much, if not all, of the increase in U.S. library circ over the past decade is attributable to what I call “plastics”: talking books, videos, CDs, CDROMs. Book circ has been static.
So: do we provide more “plastics” than U.K. libraries, which results in our flourishing, and their decline?
And what will the universal downloading ease of “plastics,” not five years hence, mean for the millions of U.S. library patrons whose preferred media play in machines, people who have boosted our usage as we spend quarters or thirds of our budgets on nonbook media?
Re:But, consider the US experience…
Three responses:
1. “I’d be willing to bet” only counts as evidence in casinos. Got proof?
2. If true (which it might be): to the extent that libraries are all about stories (fiction and nonfiction alike), is there some reason to believe that media other than print books are incapable of telling stories effectively, in ways that also serve to broaden and educate library users? (For a Shakespeare play, actually, isn’t a DVD of a play’s performance more appropriate than the book?)
3. While circulation is one of few convenient measures of a library’s impact, no good library is only about circulation. Nor have libraries ever been/should they ever be the only (or even primary) source of information, entertainment, stories.
Well-run libraries (a phrase which means different things at different times) should continue to prosper in a variety of roles. Fortunately, every indication is that print books–still the best way to tell many kinds of stories–are doing just fine in America’s public libraries. As for UK libraries: Whatever’s going on there (and I’d expect CILIP to be releasing some studies), it’s not an inherent problem with books or other materials.
The Library is Dead ,etc with programing and signage. Rearrange video collections by topic, year, actor/actress, director etc to emphazise other ways of looking at films. Increased outreach is becoming increasingly important to areas of our society that do not have a computer at home or money to join book clubs. Bookmobiles, outreach to assisted living facilities, educational and informational assistance to immigrants. In many cases, those we term ‘problem patrons’ are really the users we need to target. All of this takes new insight, sometimes new employees and new definitions of who we are. But make no mistake, take a look at the new information world and ask yourself if it is not improperly managed and distributed. Then ask, “who could do a better job”?
Well my experience in a public library for 14 years in a fairly well to do suburban community by the Hudson River ceertainly wasn’t an example. High book circulation, crowds of people, lots of programs. Circulation of books may drop by previous frequenters of libraries who can afford their own books or know how to use the internet but there is a world of people out there who are using our public libraries everyday. High school students wont usually buy books even when they can afford them and many teachers (maybe not enough) are not accepting internet only sources. Primary source material is still locked up by the profit market so many types of research still have to be done by the middleman (librarian). Perhaps our target audiences need to change from time to time. If we are out there still trying to entice Middle America to check out the latest mystery, I agree, we may have a problem. If we aren’t instructing students on how to do research on the internet, since many schools and teachers have abandoned this, then we are certainly missing the boat. The abundance of free information should not daunt us librarians. We are supposed to be information specialists. People still need advise on where to go for information. Don’t assume that everyone looking for information on medical issues isn’t going to walk away with a web page that was created by a 10th grader or a student researching a history topic isn’t viewing an unidentified white supremasist page. We have to become the information handlers and specialists and not just information distributors. Tired of luring the public in by becoming another video store. Start incorporating the history of film, criticism
I believe it is the new information specialist – the Librarian. I really believe, that despite what we might feel about it, that if we don’t start acting now, someone else will fill the gap and we WILL become obsolete.