UK will pay high price for slashing library budget
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- Published on Friday, 10 February 2012 16:37
- Written by John Battle
As a great fan of libraries as places to retreat to, whether escaping shopping excursions or spending hours in the British library at Kings Cross while waiting for a train, I cannot let National Library Day pass without comment.
Of course, the first libraries were in the monasteries and churches, not least those scattered throughout Yorkshire, and I have been trying to find out when people in the county first took up reading and writing.
In 55BC, well before the era of the monasteries, the occupying Romans brought their literary culture with them. As well as bringing an army, they built forts, towns, temples, baths, public squares and public buildings and worked with compliant local leaders who took to learning Latin and even wearing togas.
Apparently, the most common ‘find’ for archaeologists of Roman England is the writing tablet – evidence of a literary culture. The ‘Age of Bede’ saw the development of the monastic scriptorium – the patient copying and illuminating of sacred books – and the establishment of schools for prospective monks and the families of the ruling elite.
There was, therefore, a strong literary culture in England well before Caxton’s printing revolution.
Today there are more books published in English than the libraries can possibly hold and it would be premature to claim that the Kindle and e-book will replace them anytime soon.
The man of the day, Charles Dickens, wrote 19 novels (and the half-written Edwin Drood), all of which have remained in print for well over 175 years, ever since his debut The Pickwick Papers came out in 1836 in serial form.
Most have been converted into films and all are still selling well in hard copy and as e-books. The book is not dead yet, despite rows over current copyrights.
As a person who has accumulated far too many books, I have also sustained a commitment to using the library regularly.
I once heard the story of the former
director general of the Jesuits, Fr Hans Kolvenbach, who, having had his personal library literally blown away in his flat in Beirut on two occasions, had abandoned a personal book collection and had taken to signing on at the library wherever he was stationed. That struck me as a better way to ensure that if you ordered a book, read it and returned it, it would be there on the shelf, inviting another reader.
In other words, by using a library you could widen the book choice of other readers to material you found interesting and important.
Nowadays, certainly in Leeds, you can take a book out of your local library and
return it to any other city library; you can renew over the phone or internet and the speed of ordering and getting books you ask for is down to a couple of days.
However, perhaps surprisingly, it is estimated that four million children in Britain do not own a single book and one in six adults have real difficulty with basic reading. Five million adults cannot read job
application forms.
Of course, libraries nowadays don’t just process books; most have myriad computer terminals. The highly skilled staff at Leeds Central library are available to answer an incredible range of research and technical enquiries and give out personal advice.
Furthermore, librarians tend to be local community workers, knowing their local area well and running their libraries as local advice and support centres to families and the elderly. They also organise childrens’ events and generally support community activities.
In some communities, they provide computer access for people who need to do homework, pay bills or communicate with family members far away.
As a result of reductions in local government budgets, some 600 libraries are under threat of closure.
Some, it is proposed, should simply be converted into private internet cafes. There are campaigns to save them and some
proposals for local people to run them as volunteers, but as opening hours and budgets are cut back, there is a genuine fear
that basic literacy in our culture will be further undermined. In other words, there is a danger that the basic value of our libraries is being fatally under-estimated.
Already the Education Secretary has cut the funds back for one-on-one tuition to the poorest five and six-year-old readers, even though the cost to the UK economy of the resultant scale of adult illiteracy is currently estimated at £81bn a year.
Ensuring people can read not only enables us to compete in educational and training terms with the rising economies of China and India, it actually helps to ensure our economy grows. In other words, rather than close libraries it would be more economically beneficial to invest in them for the good of our economy.
Rather than palming off the issue to local government while at the same time reducing its budget capacity to respond, the Government ought to be adopting a positive library policy which addresses the digital future and not scrap the previous government’s plans to extend the Public Borrowing Right to e-books, which at least would ensure the physical book has a future role.
In practice, our libraries will depend on the ‘use it or lose it’ principle but reasserting their real value to our communities and economy is crucial. That at least the monks clearly understood.
Meanwhile, perhaps ordering a Henri Nouwen or Jean Vanier book at our local library would add to the spiritual reading sections.
