The Guardian view on librarians: guides to life, not just to books
The closure of libraries due to council cuts has been well documented. But the loss of staff in remaining branches is equally serious
Wed 31 Jul 2019 18.30 BST
It is often only when we lose things, or risk losing them, that we realise how much we value them. As public library budgets have shrunk and doors have closed – with around 500 branches shut in England since 2010, and around the same number handed over to volunteers – people who had not given libraries much thought have been stirred to action. High-profile campaigns against closures have been fought, and in some cases won. Cressida Cowell, the new children’s laureate, is urging that school libraries be made a statutory requirement. But the fate of librarians has largely escaped notice.
This is a mistake, because they are the guides and curators without whom a library, whether standalone or in a school or institution, is simply a collection of books. At their best they can reshape not only the skills and knowledge of users, but their whole perspective: “How many times I’ve been told about a librarian who saved a life by offering the right book at the right time,” the American author Judy Blume has said.
Yet 10,000 jobs in council libraries have been lost since 2005, with about 15,000 remaining. Technology has displaced some, with the creation of unstaffed branches, and has transformed the role of others; computer access is now an important aspect of the service, and librarians routinely help people with online benefits applications.
* 2005 년 이후 협의회 도서관에서 10,000 개의 일자리가 사라졌으며 약 15,000 개의 일자리가 남아 있습니다. 기술 발달은 일부를 대체했으며, 직원이 없는 분관이 만들어졌습니다. 또한 사람의 역할을 변화시켰습니다.
There is no reason why libraries should not offer this kind of support, as long as staff have sufficient resources and training. The baby and book groups, homework and play clubs, English and IT lessons hosted by libraries are a positive extension of their role. But such activities must not come at the expense of the librarian’s task of championing books and literacy, which is even more important in an age of information overload and fake news.
Shrunken budgets inevitably make this service harder to deliver: when libraries no longer have budgets to buy new publications, readers can’t access them, which may in part explain a recent fall in lending. Such cuts affect all sorts of people, but are particularly damaging when children cannot find books to suit them. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Summer Reading Challenge, a scheme offering incentives to children who sign up to read a book a week during the holidays; especially valuable to those who don’t go away or have shelves full of books at home. It is also a reminder of the kind of one-on-one engagement that has become a rarity. The ideal librarian is a skilled maker of recommendations.
*예산이 줄어들면 필연적으로 서비스를 제공하기가 더 어려워집니다. 도서관에서 더 이상 새로운 출판물을 구입할 예산이 없으면 독자는 해당 출판물에 접근할 수 없으며, 이는 최근 대출의 감소를 설명할 수 있습니다 . 이러한 삭감은 모든 종류의 사람들에게 영향을 주지만, 어린이가 자신에게 적합한 책을 찾을 수 없을 때 특히 피해를 줍니다.
*공공 도서관에서 대출 된 도서의 수는 10년 안에 거의 절반으로 줄어들어 사서들이 온라인 서비스와 어린이 활동에 너무 집중하고 있다는 비판을 불러일으켰습니다. 대출 비율은 미국이나 호주보다 훨씬 빠른 속도로 떨어졌으며 영국의 사람들은 1 년에 평균 3 권 미만의 도서관 도서를 빌리게 되었습니다. 많은 도서관 사서들은 지방 당국 예산 삭감에 따른 대출 대출 부진을 비난하고있다. 이로 인해 의회가 돈을 우선 지출 우선 순위로 돌리면서 수백 개의 도서관이 문을 닫았다. (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/libraries-told-to-focus-on-books-as-lending-slumps-tdsvjdj7j)
Librarians can be much more than book experts. Libraries are community as well as knowledge hubs, and should promote and harness civic activism. The 50,000 people now volunteering in English libraries have much to offer. But any government with a serious commitment to expanding educational opportunities for young and old would invest, not only in libraries, but in the people who work in them.
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Britain’s infrastructure is breaking down. And here’s why no one’s fixing it
Aditya Chakrabortty
There’s no lobby for public assets like the National Grid. That goes too for our libraries, youth clubs, parks and pubs
Wed 14 Aug 2019 06.00 BST
Whole swaths of Britain experience a blackout and the country lights up with fury. Cabinet minsters, the press, members of the public rightly demand answers: why was Newcastle airport plunged into darkness? Who is responsible for rail services being halted for hours? Threats are issued of a whopping fine, an official inquiry, heads rolling. Days of rage for a power cut of less than an hour.
When it works, infrastructure is invisible. Point out the crumbliness, by all means, and lament the dangerous compromises – but as long as the wretched system judders on, voters shrug and politicians look the other way. Until the day the bridges collapse, the trains seize up and the lights no longer come on. By which time it is too late for anything but blame in 24-point headlines.
Between these two extremes lies a much rarer phenomenon, which blights Britain today. We are right in the middle of an infrastructure breakdown – we just haven’t named it yet. You’ll know what I mean when we list the component parts. More than 760 youth clubs have shut across the UK since 2012. A pub closes every 12 hours. Nearly 130 libraries were scrapped last year, and those that survive in England have lopped off 230,000 opening hours.
Each of the above is a news story. Each stings a different group: the books trade, the real-ale aficionados, the trade unions. But knit them together and a far darker picture emerges. Britain is being stripped of its social infrastructure: the institutions that make up its daily life, the buildings and spaces that host friends and gently push strangers together. Public parks are disappearing. Playgrounds are being sold off. High streets are fast turning to desert. These trends are national, but their greatest force is felt in the poorest towns and suburbs, the most remote parts of the countryside, where there isn’t the footfall to lure in the businesses or household wealth to save the local boozer.
When I am out reporting it is not uncommon to go into a suburban postcode short of money yet still bustling with people – but the banks have nearly all cleared out, the church has gone and all that’s left of the last pub is an empty hulk. The private sector has buggered off, the state is a remote and vengeful god who dispenses benefits or sanctions, and the “big society” never made it out of the pages of a report from a Westminster thinktank. I’ve seen this in the suburbs of London and in the valleys of south Wales, and the word that most comes to mind is “abandoned”.
Politicians bemoan the loss of community, but that resonant word is not precise enough. A large part of what’s missing is social infrastructure. It can be public or private. It is often slightly dog-eared and usually overlooked. But when it vanishes, the social damage can be huge.
The American sociologist Eric Klinenberg lists some in his recent book, Palaces for the People: “People reduce the time they spend in public settings and hunker down in their safe houses. Social networks weaken. Crime rises. Older and sick people grow isolated. Younger people get addicted to drugs … Distrust rises and civic participation wanes.” A New York University professor, Klinenberg’s observations hold as true for Brexit Britain as they do for Trump’s America. How often have you read about a grandmother found dead in her own home, with no one popping by for days? How many news stories do you read about teenagers experiencing mental illness as they compare themselves to the images on their screens? And how many times have you complained that everyone is so stuck in their own bubble that politics is hopelessly polarised?
In ripping out our social infrastructure, we are outraging a wisdom that goes back centuries and spans countries. Millions of Britons will spend part of this summer on a plaza or a piazza or people-watching on the public square outside Paris’s Centre Pompidou. The architectural historian Shu
mi Bose points out that library designs proliferated during the Enlightenment, alongside blueprints for monuments “to the exercise of the sovereignty of the people”. During the second world war, the Mass Observation collective wrote of the British pub: “Once a man has bought or been bought his glass of beer, he has entered an environment in which he is participant, rather than spectator.”
When it comes to transport or energy or sewage, Britain has a National Infrastructure Commission that monitors the country’s needs and guides parliament on where to direct spending. After all, the quality of such hard infrastructure influences where multinationals set up shop: it is money-making. But parks and libraries don’t generate cash. Social infrastructure has no lobby, no registry of assets and certainly no government agency. No Whitehall official monitors how much of it has closed or withered away – that relies on civil society groups to file freedom of information requests or badger town halls with survey. Everyone knows we need it, yet just as our economic model prizes shareholder returns over investment in the National Grid, so our politics relies on drawing in the voters with unfeasibly low taxes. Until one day, something breaks and all hell breaks loose.
So here is a suggestion for Jeremy Corbyn or Nicola Sturgeon or Adam Price or whoever else fancies it. Talk about the importance of social infrastructure. Promise to set up a commission explicitly to audit what we have and help protect it. Commit public money to it, alongside gentle pressure on the private sector to do its bit. That way, we can publicly mark the public institutions we all know we need – and show the esteem due to the people who keep them going and use them. The spirit we need is that summed up by the librarian who rhapsodises to Klinenberg about his branch: “The library really is a palace. It bestows nobility on people who can’t otherwise afford a shred of it. People need to have nobility and dignity in their lives. And, you know, they need other people to recognise it in them too.”
Our people deserve palaces.
• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/14/britain-social-infrastructure-money-national-grid
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