Public libraries are not just repositories of books – they are sacred spaces Sam Leith
S AV E THE B OR R OWE R S In the disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, a group of survivors shelters from an abrupt new ice age in the New York Public Library. They burn books to keep warm. It’s a cute joke. It makes one feel more warmly towards not only libraries but, oddly, ice ages. I grew up in suburban Surrey, and if ever civilisation vanishes in a giant snowstorm, I like to think Dorking library is where I’d take shelter. I’d be selective about what I burned. Library excitement never leaves you: the smell of the plastic-coated books, their unceasing novelty and seemingly limitless numbers, and the promise of being able to take a whole armload away and read them. . . In no other area of life was an eight-year-old offered such abundance. Every bookish adult in this country, pretty much, will have a similar story. For some, the library was a ladder — the means by which kids from deprived backgrounds were able to get their hands on the books that transformed their prospects. For the more privileged, like me, a public library
didn’t represent the difference between placement at a call centre and a Cambridge college. But it shaped the experience of books, and enabled wide and greedy reading, in a way no other institution could. You’d have to be very privileged indeed to have parents who could afford to buy new the three, four, five or more books that a thirsty child can go through every week; or whose home would contain enough books to anything like supply the thirst. My house now is full of books — stuffed with them. My three- and one-year-olds are well supplied at home. But still, our local library in north London is a resource we can’t begin to match. The arguments that all this must come to an end are getting louder, though, and they come not single spies. Libraries are a luxury we can’t afford, some say — that’s an argument, effectively, made by the many local councils whose response to funding cuts from central government has been to cut provision or close libraries altogether. Another argument, less often heard 40
but propounded last month by the Horrible Histories author Terry Deary, is that the very idea behind public libraries — ‘an entitlement to read books for free, at the expense of authors, publishers and council tax payers’ — is actively pernicious. He professes himself baffled at the many published authors who campaign against library closures, ‘when libraries are cutting their throats and slashing their purses’. Still another is that in an age when books can be stored and transmitted digitally, it’s simply eccentric to invest time and money maintaining great barns of perishable physical books in order for perishable physical humans to pick them up, take them away and bring them back again. It would be obtuse to pretend that none of these cases has any merit. The digital era has huge implications for both public and research libraries, and publishers and authors are entitled to make a living. But we can concede the diagnosis without agreeing that the cure is the steady or abrupt disappearance of the library as an institution. We know that publishers are suffering. But the problems facing publishers and the problems facing libraries aren’t the same ones. The idea that the book is an object that can be reproduced and shared an infinite number of times for next to no cost, for instance, is kryptonite to publishers (and authors). For librarians and library users, though, it’s bliss. An extreme statement of the position would have it that a single copyright library (i.e. one like the British Library, which by law gets a copy of every book printed), fully digitised, could also be every single lending library in the country. That is, I admit, to shelve the unanswerable point that anything bad for publishers is bad for libraries in the long run: but it does point to some real room for manoeuvre. It’s also worth noting that libraries have always been both physical and virtual spaces. What is a footnote, after all, but a sort of hyperlink — a wormhole between one text and another? What is Google but a superfast descendent of the card catalogue or a Dewey Decimal filing system — a way of organising information? In some ways, you could see libraries as pre-adapted to the digital age. There are already mechanisms by which
Illustration by Mitch Blunt
LIFE
ebooks can be borrowed — though there are headache-inducing inconsistencies, too. At present, Public Lending Right, which ensures that authors get a fee when their books are borrowed, doesn’t apply to ebooks. Nor does the leading e-lending mechanism, OverDrive, serve certain platforms such as Kindle. Take-up is patchy — the number of public libraries lending, or planning to be lending, ebooks by the end of the year is less than three quarters, and figures even in established schemes are still tiny compared with the number borrowing deadtree books. Some publishers simply won’t play; others want to be paid. Some ebook lending schemes — Amazon last autumn launched its Kindle owners’ lending library for premium users — bypass public libraries altogether. And to confuse things further, Amazon has applied to patent a technology that allows people to sell secondhand ebooks (get your head around the implications of that, if you will). But we needn’t fold our tents yet. Some
It’s not simply as repositories of books to be borrowed by individuals that libraries have their value. They matter as physical places too
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or all of these issues will, one way and another, shake out — not all, probably, to advantage; but as the ground firms it’ll be easier to see a path forward. The culture minister, Ed Vaizey, has ordered a review of issues around e-lending. And we are not without models. The New York Public Library — which is both a high-end research library and an ordinary public lending institution — has a whole programme of digital engagement and — mirabile dictu — actually turns a profit; as its librarian Christopher Platt’s piece (adjacent) explains. As one admiring recent report has it, ‘The New York Public Library is a social network with three million active users.’ That emphasis on communality seems to me to go to the heart of it. It’s not simply as repositories of books to be borrowed by individuals that libraries have their value. They matter as physical places too: the process of going to a library and coming back, checking books out and checking them back in, makes a habitual connection
LIFE with what they represent. They aren’t just a place for tramps to keep warm in winter and kids who’ve been grounded to get access to videogames. Libraries are our cultural memory. To have a relationship with one is to have a relationship with the culture itself — and to feel, in its (relative) orderliness and calm, something of what it is to inhabit a civic space. That includes the paying of fines. Here is a child’s first encounter with the social contract: the idea that a communal good is made available to you, but
FUTURE S H E LV E S Christopher Platt
A quiet revolution has been taking place in public libraries in the United States. The adoption of ebooks has raised questions about the future of publishing, booksellers and libraries. Yet for many libraries here, the future in question began years ago. Rather than waiting to be rendered obsolete, we are recognising opportunities to engage with readers in new ways. The New York Public Library, where I work, has offered popular downloadable ebooks since 2004, years before Amazon launched the Kindle, which influenced so much growth in e-reading. What began as a boutique service to a few dedicated online users has grown eightfold in just the past five years. In 2012 we exceeded 875,000 checkouts, from a 95,000-volume collection. While this represents only a tiny percentage of our total 28 million annual checkouts, it is one of the three mostused collections in all of our 90 libraries in the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island. Our collection has grown to serve the needs of a diverse community. Fifty Shades of Grey can be found alongside ebooks on science fair projects, civil service exams and how-to guides for new parents. For our users,
To have a relationship with a library is to have a relationship with the culture itself – and to feel something of what it is to inhabit a civic space
that certain obligations (taking care of the books, returning them in a timely way and so on) are expected in return. Yes, pace Terry Deary, books are a form of entertainment — and there are few enough forms of entertainment that we expect the state to connive in giving away for free. But they are more than just entertainment: they are the pith of our culture and the incubator of its future. It is not too much to see them as sacred spaces. In a chilly world, more simply put, the library is a very good place to keep warm.
ebooks are no longer a boutique service. It is partly for this reason that the president of the library, Dr Tony Marx, has charged the institution with examining how best to serve library users in the digital age and how to develop the ‘virtual library’ of the future. This strategy aims to determine what we offer online, what expertise is needed, how we incorporate a social media presence; essentially, we are designing an effective set of services of the sort every public library should be offering to online users in years to come. While the task is complicated, especially for a library that offers both popular and specialist research collections, it has become obvious that, as with the internet generally, much of the value for users is to be found in the users themselves. Last year we had more than 30 million visits to our website; our social media following grew from under half a million to 1.2 million followers. The first step was to improve our catalogue, which gave us the means to invite these users to engage with us and with each other. In the old days of card catalogues, it would have been anathema for a library user to pull out a card and jot ‘I loved this book!’ on it for others to see. Today, we invite them to do just that and more. Nypl.bibliocommons.com lets users rate, tag, share, comment, insert favourite quotes, and upload video content right into the title display. Furthermore, it lets users create and share lists of favourite books. As a true online forum, New York Public Library users can engage with users at other Bibliocommons client libraries such as Boston and Seattle.
Our way forward is to develop this virtual experience into a truly indispensable ‘intellectual home’ for New Yorkers — a starting point for all things reading-related: browsing, recommendation, discussion, as well as purchase. For example, imagine you are online at home one evening, looking at a title by your favourite author in our catalogue, and you see a link in the display to a talk they gave at the library last month. As you take a few moments to watch a streamed recording of the event, you see other titles pop up that the author mentions, with links to check them out. You see an online discussion has begun about one of the titles, so you join the group, which introduces you to more users. The title you are most interested in has 50 people in the queue ahead of you, so rather than wait weeks to read it, you choose a ‘Buy Now’ link affiliated with the library — an e-tailer or local bookstore — which lets you download the title immediately. Now imagine that every public library offered a similar experience. As bookstores close, if more libraries were to develop robust intellectual websites for their willing and ready users, this would encourage a diverse and innovative reading environment, in which the library was integrated into everyday life and achieved its most fundamental goal: to connect good readers with good books. Christopher Platt is director of collections and circulation operations at the New York Public Library.
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