More noise please
Libraries are ‘out of touch’.
Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, will today launch a consultation on changing the face of libraries which he believes are out of touch…Noise bans will also be reviewed…”The popular public image of libraries as solemn and sombre places, patrolled by fearsome and formidable staff is decades out of date, but is nonetheless taken for granted by too many people,” he will say, adding that the sector would have to “think radical” to modernise.
Too many for what? Why should the sector modernize? Why does Burnham (apparently) think it’s a bad thing that libraries are out of touch?
If you ‘save’ or ‘preserve’ or ‘rescue’ libraries (or anything else) by turning them into their own opposites, then what is it that you have saved or preserved? What, in short, is the point? What is the point of modernizing or transforming or changing the face of libraries by turning them into something altogether different? Why not just forget all about libraries? It would surely be cheaper.
In Camden, north London, the council will lift a ban on mobile phones in its libraries this month and users will be allowed to bring in snacks and drinks…A spokesman at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said the Government wanted to transform the atmosphere of libraries to make them more similar to Waterstones stores.
Why? Why not have two different kinds of things instead of just one thing? Or why not save public money by selling libraries to Waterstones and letting them make the former libraries more similar to Waterstones stores?
[Burnham] suggested that the traditional “silence” in libraries be reviewed and opening hours extended. “Libraries should be a place for families and joy and chatter. The word chatter might strike fear into the heart of traditionalists but libraries should be social places that offer an antidote to the isolation of someone playing on the internet at home.”
Why? Why should libraries be a place for families and joy and chatter? There are already lots of places for families and joy and chatter (also families and irritation and chatter). There are shops and community centers and sports facilities and parks and living rooms and gardens and stadiums and McDonalds – there are lots and lots of places. Why do libraries have to stop being what libraries are good at being and be something else instead, when the something else is already abundant and easy to find?
The reason seems to be (at least I can’t think of any other) a vague background idea that libraries are a good thing and so people should be motivated to come into them. But the background idea that libraries are a good thing can’t have been thought about with any care, because the reason they are a good thing is that they provide things (books and a place to read and study and think about them) that are incompatible with motivating people to come into them by making them places where it is impossible to read and study and think about books. Do you see what I’m getting at here? You might as well try to motivate people to come into museums by filling them with mounds of rotting garbage. You might as well try to motivate people to go for hikes in the mountains by transforming the mountains into replicas of Las Vegas. You might as well try to motivate people to play tennis by removing the net and the boundary lines.
My library would bring a smile of delight to the Secretary of State for ‘Culture.’ We’re way ahead of him here in Seattle. My library is very much a place for families and joy and chatter; what it’s not is a place where it’s possible to read or think or study. It’s a fucking zoo. It’s one big room, divided into areas but with no walls, so all the noise is freely available for the hearing. The children’s section (which is surrounded by adult books) provides toys as well as books, including wooden toys, which fill the air with clatter. Everyone talks in an unsubdued voice, and many people talk in a frankly loud one. Children run around screaming with gay abandon. It’s like a pleasantly-run summer camp; what it’s not like is a library.
Everyone I know detests this situation, but we’ve all given up complaining about it. It’s official policy. This is all the more bizarre because there is a community center two blocks away, packed with recreational opportunities. Why the library too has to function as a day-care center and all-purpose rumpus room is beyond our understanding, but so it is. It is official policy. ‘Libraries should be social places.’
Going off an a related tangent here, but as someone with musical training this reminds me very much of efforts over recent years to promote classical music to ‘the masses’. If you want people to listen to something deemed culturally good for them it does make sense to make it appear approachable and attractive, but you can only go so far before you lose the essence of the thing you were promoting in the first place.
Packaging classical music into short, superficial, tuneful confections may get people listening but it doesn’t help them concentrate on the longer, mroe complex (and thus more rewarding) works, the apparent goal of such an approach. You just end up with people with a fairly shallow tastes who still dismiss these harder works as boring/elitist/rubbish/delete as applicable.
Same for libraries – you can’t promote something by fundamentally changing what it is in the process; you’ve failed before you’ve even started. I’m just re-iterating OB’s point here really but y’know it does annoy me!
The last minister of culture didn’t like the Proms as they are classical music and so aren’t “inclusive”.
One, of many libraries, which I often frequent (in the heart of the city of Dublin), is in the middle of a busy shopping centre. Incidentally, underneath its old-fashioned, low-roofed, impractical premises, is a chapel – where prayers, by shoppers, are diligently said during the course of their shopping sprees.
Not a sinner is allowed to either drink water or eat food. One crucial element behind the reasoning of the food ban, I am told – is that due to the library’s proximity to town, the propensity for problem drinkers is gross.
There are special uniformed security men on call who constantly walk around the premises to see that attendees are obeying the rules. They are very strict – one day I accidentally left my water bottle on the table and I was immediately reprimanded by a security man. “Can you not read the sign on the wall? You are not allowed to drink water in the library?” I quickly pointed out to him, “1) yes, I can read the sign, and, 2) I was not drinking water – because I know from having read the sign that you are talking about that it is not allowed’. I continued asking him (quite assertively, in the same tone of voice that he was employing) as to whether he ‘actually’ saw me drinking water. He succumbed to me and said “no”. I politely reminded him then “not to jump to conclusions – just because he saw the water on the table” It was then I learned from him about all (what he considers) unsavoury drunken characters who daily come into the library and who put their alcohol in water bottles to disguise it – they can be found slouching over the library books/newspapers trying to get some sleep. Sad indictment on society – I know too that if I was in their shoes and worn out and weary the first place I would go to for sanctuary would be the library.
If the ethos of libraries – which are places of learning and quiet where shall we retreat to – chapels of the ilk of the one nestled in the Ilac Library?
If you want to see the sort of thing the DCMS has in store for us library patrons, look up a 2003 report by the (UK) Museums, Libraries and Archives service called “Better Public Libraries”. I think, but can’t confirm, that it’s at the following URI – http://www.mla.gov.uk/resources/assets//I/id874rep_pdf_6757.pdf – as the extension suggests, it’s a PDF. Beware.
It makes interesting reading, and shows that the government have been planning this kind of idiocy for a long time.
Some gems from the report:
1. It describes an architectural shift from “Bookshelves requiring ladders” to “Bookshelves at human scale”. I don’t remember ever seeing a bookshelf requiring a ladder in all the time I’ve used public libraries. I did have to climb a ladder the other day in my university library. It has something of a useful purpose: it means you can stock more books. In this case, being able to access on open shelving almost every issue of all the significant journals in my field going back for most of the last century outweighs the fleeting inconvenience of rolling a metal ladder along a corridor and climbing it.
2. “The new library at Stratford in East London, has a meeting area and chill out lounge at ground floor level, where young people and students can watch MTV, read magazines and listen to CD selections on listening posts”. Way to go on cultivating the next generation of scholars! That’s what the Library of Congress and the British Library have been missing all along: MTV! Seriously, isn’t the point of a library to try and pull you out of yourself and show you a form of mental life that’s higher than the one you are currently wallowing in? I guess it can do that in a little bite-size chunk, if it’s got enough MTV videos wedged around it.
3. It also describes how they want to see a change from the library being a “Temple of knowledge” to being a “living room in the city”. Which is rather pointless. If I want to sit in a living room, I’ll sit in my own living room.
What bloody irritates me is that Senate House Library, the main humanities, philosophy and social science library for the University of London is currently short of £600,000 (and facing closure) – it is a unique scholarly and research collection used by students, academics and many others. Meanwhile the government are perfectly happy to spend money on these pseudo-libraries, following some bizarre social justice treasure trail – if you make a building with not many books in and lots of crap to appeal to the ringtone-addled people, that’ll solve the problem. As someone who spends many hours in a library each week, the idea of spending it in a place with kids screaming and lots of young kids on mobiles is absolutely terrifying from a productivity perspective (the Internet is bad enough) – I can get that by trying to work on the damn train. I try to use my local library, and it’s pretty crap to start with – what the government is proposing is taking all the things which makes it crap and increasing them.
Also: when was the last time you saw someone inside a bookstore actually writing a book or doing research? What the government seem to be saying is that libraries are for everyone, except scholars.
Looks like my first job tomorrow morning is to write some complaints to the DCMS, my MP etc.
On the subject of improbably-placed houses of worship, when I was last in Boston, MA, I went into a shopping centre in the Back Bay area (the Prudential Center) and found that it had a Catholic chapel right next to a Dunkin’ Donuts (for your post-communion sugar-and-caffeine hit). This was, of course, a few minutes walk from the HQ of the First Church of Jesus Christ, Scientist, the purveyor of what religious scholars used to call “Eddyism”.
This policy reminds me of the ideas produced in the old-fashioned churches 30 years ago, to try and get people back in the pews.
One of the (possibly intentional)side-effects I’ve seen to making ‘modern’, ‘all inclusive’ libraries is most previous users can no longer get in.
I well remember sitting in my town library to study in between split shifts. Some of the regular winter ‘co-users’ were the town’s homeless, who the old fashioned librarian simply turned a blind eye to.
Didn’t affect my studies adversely in the slightest, and probably advanced my ‘life education’ in small town hypocrisy immensely – especially the Sociology A Level!
“Also: when was the last time you saw someone inside a bookstore actually writing a book or doing research? “
I remember being in a second-hand bookstore and copying down a quotation from one of the books. I was ejected with the words, “This is not a library.”
This is pretty much happening to my town library. The only patrons who ever come in for the books anymore are either parents of very young children, or very old people. Everyone else comes for the computer lab.
If it were up to me I would ban MySpace and all forms of Flash games from all library computer labs immediately, since it essentially turns a library into a video arcade from the minute school lets out to closing time. The few children and adults who are trying to do actual work get pushed further and further aside every day.
Tom has a splendid post on this –
http://tommorris.org/blog/2008/10/10#When:22:19:54
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