This needs a response. Last month there was an article in the Daily Telegraph saying that public libraries are no longer needed in the UK and should be closed (The Liberal whingers are wrong – we should shut our libraries).

The argument, as far as I can tell, is that nobody goes to libraries to read books these days, so they should be closed. The article goes on to say that: “Fast, cheap computing has spread to most homes, and to our whizzy mobile phones.” It then goes on to argue that: “The final defence of the public library is that it is a place for the pupil who has nowhere else to study (on a computer) and revise.”

Where do you start with this? First, “fast, cheap computing” has not spread everywhere. 33% of UK homes do not have an internet connection (Office of National Statistics, August 2011). That’s a lot of homes, mostly homes containing older people or people with very little money to splash out of the latest gadgets. People who might think that food is more important than Facebook I’d imagine. If you break the numbers down, 19% of people say the reason they don’t have an Internet connection at home is due to cost.

Second, let’s demolish this myth that all homes are so safe and quiet and it’s just a matter of plugging in a laptop in to do some relaxed study. Some homes are violent. Some are loud and full of distractions. Moreover, some pupils struggle academically and may need to ask a human being for a little empathy once in a while. Arguing that public libraries should be closed because people can access Google at home is like saying that schools should be shut down because pupils can use distance learning ‘solutions’ from home.

I’ve seen some data on who uses libraries and I can promise you it’s not people like the author of this article. Public libraries are primary used by young mothers with children who are often looking for companionship and likewise by older people that often live alone. In other words, public libraries are used by people that are looking for other people, as well as books, computers, safety and tranquillity.,

I’m just playing around with these thoughts. Any comments for or against would be most welcome.

There was a report in a newspaper a while ago about a mother whose six-year-old had asked her whether he should put a slice of bread in the toaster “landscape or portrait?” I mentioned this to my ten-year-old son and he said: “He should have Googled it.”

I mention this because I am interested in how spaces and places change how we think. In particular I am interested in how new digital objects and environments are starting to change age-old attitudes and behaviours, including how we relate to one another.

And this directly leads me to a very particular place, namely public libraries and the question of whether or not they have a future. In short, what is the role – or value- of public libraries and public librarians in an age of e-books and Google?

Now at this point I have to put my hand up and admit to being wrong. Some time ago I created an extinction timeline, because I believe that the future is as much about things we’re familiar disappearing as it is about new things being invented. And, of course, I put libraries on the extinction timeline because, in an age of e-books and Google who needs them.

Big mistake. Especially when one day you make a presentation to a room full of librarians and show them the extinction timeline. I got roughly the same reaction as I got from a Belgian after he noticed that I’d put his country down as expired by 2025.

Fortunately most librarians have a sense of humour, as well as keen eyesight, so I ended up developing some scenarios for the future of public libraries and I now repent. I got it totally wrong. Probably.

Whether or not we will want libraries in the future I cannot say, but I can categorically state we will need them, because libraries aren’t just about the books they contain. Moreover, it is a big mistake, in my view, to confuse the future of books or publishing with the future of public libraries. They are not the same thing.

Let’s start by considering what a public library is for. Traditionally the answer would have been a place to borrow books. This is where the argument that libraries are now dying or will soon be dead originates. After all, if you can download any book in 60-seconds, buy cheap books from a supermarket or instantly search for any fact, image or utterance on Google why bother with a dusty local library?

I’d say the answer to this is that public libraries are important because of a word that’s been largely ignored or forgotten and that word is Public. Public libraries are about more than mere facts, information or ‘content’. Public libraries are places where local people and ideas come together. They are spaces, local gathering places, where people exchange knowledge, wisdom, insight and, most importantly of all, human dignity.

A good local library is not just about borrowing books or storing physical artefacts. It is where individuals become card-carrying members of a local community. They are places where people give as well as receive.

Libraries are keystones delivering the building blocks of social cohesion, especially for the very young and the very old. They are where individuals come to sit quietly and think, free from the distractions of our digital age. They are where people come to ask for help in finding things, especially themselves. And the fact that they largely do this for nothing is nothing short of a miracle.

It is interesting to me that so much is made of the fact that most things on the internet are free. Indeed whole books have been written on the subject of this radical new price. But the idea of free information is nothing new and when free public libraries were invented the idea was even more radical because of the high cost of books.

Of course, there is the argument that virtualisation means that we will no longer need public libraries – or that if they continue to exist their services will be tailored to the individual and they will be capable of instantly sending whatever it is that we, as individuals, want direct to the digital device of our choosing. And perhaps some libraries will do this for a fee rather than for free.

Costly mistake. This would be a huge error in my view, partly because what people want is not always the same as what they need and partly because this focuses purely on the information at the expense of overall learning and experience.

Some people have argued that content is now king and that the vessel that houses information is irrelevant. I disagree. I believe that how information is delivered influences the message and is, in some instances, more meaningful than the message.

As I’ve already said, libraries are about people, not just books, and librarians are about more than just saying “Shhh.” They are also about saying: “Psst – have a look at this.” They are sifters, guides and co-creators of human connection. Most of all they are cultural curators, not of paper, but of human history and ideas.

In a world cluttered with too much instant opinion and we need good librarians more than ever. Not just to find a popular book, but to recommend an obscure or original one. Not only to find events but to invent them. The internet can do this too, of course, but it can’t look you in the eye and smile gently whilst it does it.

And in a world that’s becoming faster, noisier, more virtual and more connected, I think we need the slowness, quietness, physical presence and disconnection that libraries provide, even if all we end up doing in one is using a free computer.

Public libraries are about access and equality. They are open to all and do not judge a book by its cover any more than they judge a readers worth by the clothes they wear. They are one of the few free public spaces that we have left and they are among the most valuable, sometimes because of the things they contain, but more usually because of what they don’t.

Of course, we could put a Starbucks into every library – and we could allow mobile phone use and piped music throughout too – but then surely what we will be left with are more global outposts of Starbucks not local libraries.

What libraries do contain, and should continue to contain in my view, includes mother and toddler reading groups, computer classes for seniors, language lessons for recently arrived immigrants, family history workshops and shelter for the homeless and the abused. Equally, libraries should continue to work alongside local schools, local prisons and local hospitals and provide access to a wide range of e-services, especially for people with mental or physical disabilities.

In short, if libraries cease to exist, we will have to re-invent them.

Now, admittedly many younger people still see no need to visit a library. Many, if not most, will not have done so in years. But this could be because they still see libraries as spaces full of old books rather than places full of new ideas.

But this may change. In my view it is inevitable that the ongoing digitalisation of culture will lead to an ever-greater integration of cultural institutions and public libraries will shift from being book places to places that curate our cultural and intellectual heritage. Libraries will thus become memory institution like art galleries and museums. Indeed, why not physically combine all three?

This, of course, means that the role of librarians will change. The idea of professional librarianship will fade and in its place will emerge the idea of professional informational and cultural curators and this will embrace a variety of different skills.

But let’s bring it back to why the physical space that libraries occupy is so important. Again, libraries are not important because they contain books per se. They are, in my view, important because of how a place full of books make people feel. Great libraries, like all great buildings, change how you feel and this, in turn, changes how you think.

So what’s my idea here? Two thoughts. The first is that we should accept that a library without books would still a library because it would continue to be an important community resource – a neutral public space – where serendipitous encounters with people and ideas take place. This, surely, is an idea worth spreading.

My second idea is that we should consider funding libraries in new and novel ways. This could mean libraries going back to their philanthropic roots and asking wealthy individuals to buy or build libraries rather than football clubs or art galleries.

Or it could mean getting governments to impose taxes on certain leisure pursuits that are known to provide no mental nourishment or social cohesion and use the revenue generated to subsidise other, more useful, things like public libraries or good books.

There is a considerable amount of discussion at the moment about obesity. The idea that we should watch what we eat or we will end up prematurely dead. But where is the debate about the quality of what and where we read or write? Surely what we put inside our heads – where we create or consume information – is just as important as what we put inside our mouths.

Quite a fun article on public libraries by Alan Bennet in the current issue of the London Review of Books. The best bit – the hardest hitting bit – is at the end and echoes the library work I did a while ago in Sydney.

“I have been discussing libraries as places and in the current struggle to preserve public libraries not enough stress has been laid on the library as a place not just a facility. To a child living in high flats, say, where space is at a premium and peace and quiet not always easy to find, a library is a haven. But, saying that, a library needs to be handy and local; it shouldn’t require an expedition. Municipal authorities of all parties point to splendid new and scheduled central libraries as if this discharges them of their obligations. It doesn’t. For a child a library needs to be round the corner. And if we lose local libraries it is children who will suffer…..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.”

I’m not in the habit of cut and pasting things, but I’m going to make this an exception in this case. It’s from Seth Godin and I have his permission to do this. URL to the original (and something else worth reading) at end.

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 civilized 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 shlep 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 ebook 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 neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.

Librarians that 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 center for information. (Please don’t say I’m anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I’ve demonstrated my pro-book 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 understands the Mesh, 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.

URL http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/05/the-future-of-the-library.html
Also see http://janholmquist.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/the-future-of-libraries-why-seth-godin-and-bobbi-newman-are-both-right/

I’m sure this isn’t a new idea but I haven’t heard of it before. Manly library in Sydney is running a Lego in the Library event. Strikes me that this is a perfect fit with a key library audience (young kids) and also fits with the thought of developing a creative and inquisitive mind.

BTW, has anyone ever twinned public libraries in the same way that towns within Europe tend to be twinned? This could turn into a giant gravy train but done well it could be a great way of sharing ideas across cultures.

One other thing (for Steve). Yes, I am a reluctant futurist in the sense that I don’t necessarily think that every new idea (especially elements of digital technology) is good and I spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to prevent the future. In the case of public libraries this means that, whilst I appreciate the benefits of technological tools in a public library context, I also believe that we should, in some instances, fight to preserve what makes libraries increasingly special, which is non-digital and non-distracting objects and environments. This doesn’t mean that computers, social media and so on are banned – very far from it – but there needs to be a balance between the old and the new.

But that’s just my opinion.

This passage, also from Happiness by Theodore Zeldin, strikes a chord with me.

“A library was a place that suggested the most perfect order, with every book allotted its exact place, and a record kept of its every movement, in and out, and yet a library eventually converts its readers to the view that the world is not in perfect order at all, that most things are increasingly difficult to understand, that no two books ever quite agree; it seemed designed to be a polite hint that the god Chaos is still very present in the universe, unveiling new forms of chaos all the time. ….visitors who spent long enough in her library would become connoisseurs of misunderstandings, not just of authors and readers misunderstanding each other, but of the universal dither, of how people changed their minds about what they meant, of how words were used in ways no one could make sense of….a library was very far from being a place where nothing happened, for in it the world was rearranged a million ways; rigidities dissolved, and reformed and dissolved again; a library was a great mountain of lies as well of truth.”

A thought that occurs to me reading this is whether the universe is perfectly designed or not. On the one hand a beautiful order seems evident, especially in nature, while on the other hand everything seems to be in (or tends toward) chaos. The reason I bring this up is I’m wondering whether markets and politics are trending toward chaos or order at the moment. At a first glance chaos seems to be in the ascendant.

Being less busy these past few weeks I have had more time for accidents. One such accident was the discovery of an old copy of Happiness by Theodore Zeldin (Collins Harvill, 1988- out of print) in a bookcase, from which these lines come. They seem to sum up what libraries are all about.

“In paradise libraries (whatever kind of books they contained) might be recognised as holy shrines. In any case, she always approached libraries with a special emotion, half way between reverence and delight. However humble, however small, however poor, they were the only abode of faith, of the only faith she had, faith in the future.

As a tourist, she always tried to visit the library of every town she passed through, because that was where, she liked to think, the spirit of the town lived, even if the town did not know it, even if for the vast majority of citizens “book” was a four letter word, even if the library was a bus and came only once a week. She was keen to know how paradise could improve on what she regarded as the perfect haven of peace.

But a library was where she went to reduce the chaos in her mind; she was puzzled to find one that prided itself of reducing life to chaos……..there should be a library in every shopping centre, in every park, just like a bench to rest the mind, just like a waste paper basket to through foul thoughts into, just like a telephone kiosk to prompt a conversation with neglected friends. She had become so enthusiastic about the virtues of libraries that she had come to think that a library could be made into the very heart, the motor of her machine for making freedom. For a library was one of the very few things that had to be free; it incarnated freedom; it was where the mind was most free, where time ceases to be oppressive, where no book is penalised for being young or old, for the colour of its paper or its ink, where each has an equal voice, undisturbed by examinations of its precise beliefs, where no reader is accused of poking his noise into matters which do not concern him, where there are no secrets, where no promises are extracted, except to respect the right of everyone else, and of the books, to be there.”