Public Libraries Today — Reading

Passage

A The public library was an argument before it was a building. When Britain's Public Libraries Act passed in 1850 it was opposed on grounds that now read oddly: that reading would make labourers discontented, that ratepayers should not fund the leisure of others, and that anyone who genuinely wanted a book could buy one. The Act passed narrowly and permitted councils to levy a halfpenny rate — enough for premises, but pointedly not for books, which were expected to arrive as donations. The compromise reveals what the institution was for: not the provision of reading matter, which the market already did, but the removal of price as a condition of access. B Andrew Carnegie industrialised the model. Between 1883 and 1929 he funded more than two and a half thousand libraries across the English-speaking world, on terms that were unusually shrewd. Carnegie paid for the building; the town had to supply the site and commit public money to running it annually, typically a tenth of the construction cost. The condition mattered more than the gift, because it converted a benefaction into a permanent civic obligation. Many Carnegie buildings still stand, and a great many still function as libraries. C The prediction that digital access would make all of this redundant has been made continuously since the 1990s and has not come true, though not for the reasons defenders usually give. Physical lending has indeed fallen substantially in most countries. What has risen is everything else. Visits have held up far better than loans, which tells you people were coming for more than books, and digital lending of e-books and audiobooks has grown steeply from a low base without replacing the printed collection. D The clearest modern function is one nobody planned. As government services moved online, the assumption that every citizen has a device, a connection and the confidence to use both turned out to be false, and no compensating provision was made. Libraries absorbed the gap by default. Staff who trained as librarians now spend a substantial share of their time helping people apply for benefits, complete tax returns and book medical appointments — work that is essential, unfunded and largely invisible in the statistics used to justify library budgets. E Other roles have followed. Many libraries now lend objects rather than only texts: tools, kitchen equipment, musical instruments, board games. Some house makerspaces with 3D printers and recording equipment. During recent winters, several hundred British libraries operated formally as heated spaces for people unable to afford to warm their homes. Each addition is defensible individually; collectively they describe an institution being asked to compensate for the withdrawal of others. F This creates a measurement problem with real consequences. Loans are easy to count and are what funding formulas historically counted. The activities that now occupy most staff time — advice, assistance, simply being somewhere warm and free to sit — are not readily quantified, so a library can be busier than ever while its official statistics decline. Closures have often followed, in the countries where they have followed, on exactly that evidence. G What survives is the 1850 principle rather than any particular service. A library is a public building that a person may enter without paying, without buying and without explaining why, and that has become rare enough to be worth defending on its own. Whether it is the right institution to be running digital inclusion, warm banks and youth provision is a fair question. It is answering it by default because nothing else was offered. H The staffing behind this expanded role has changed as fast as the role itself, and not always in ways that match it. Many library systems have responded to reduced budgets by shifting toward a smaller core of professionally qualified librarians supported by volunteers and paraprofessional staff, a change defended on cost grounds but criticised by professional bodies on the grounds that the skills involved — safeguarding awareness, mental health first aid, de-escalation, as well as the traditional reference and cataloguing expertise — are not ones volunteers can be expected to hold without substantial and costly training. Some library authorities have responded by formally training frontline staff in exactly these areas, in effect converting library assistants into a hybrid role somewhere between librarian and social worker, without necessarily adjusting pay to reflect it. Staff surveys in several countries report rising levels of work-related stress specifically linked to this expansion of duties, particularly the emotional labour of engaging daily with visitors in crisis. A profession that trained for cataloguing and readers' advisory now increasingly requires skills closer to frontline social care, largely without having chosen to.

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