I’ve worked, on and off, in public libraries in London for the last three decades. I’ve worked for the same library service since 1999, and ironically I’m now working in the same building where I started off in 1980. It’s been a long trip and taken in a fair range of the capital, and in truth – and with certain provisos – it’s been a disheartening experience. I’m pretty sure I’m now coming to the end of my library career and I can’t say that I’m that unhappy. The demise of public libraries over my lifetime has been a shameful episode, in which many parties can share the blame, but there’s little doubt to my mind that’s what’s done for them is their connection to local government.
From when I was a child I knew clearly what a library was. The St. Albans Library stood on Victoria Street. There were two rooms downstairs – adult and children’s libraries - and a reference library above. It’s currency was books, and secondarily, information. The one time I remember going upstairs was to find names of African tribes; I recall being given, or finding, a book with a page full of them which I assiduously transcribed. Later I used the Bristol Library on College Green; mainly to borrow records (jazz and folk, no pop, no rock) which we painstakingly examined through magnifying glasses and noted down all visible scratches.
The point was we understood what these places were for; reading and information. We went to school and school was where we were taught and where we learned. The library, and there was a good one at school too, supported and supplemented that learning. The librarians, and we called them all librarians, helped us to find what we required, but they weren’t our teachers. In a way they were helping us to cheat by giving us more, extra, information.
Public libraries were funded by local government, but local government stayed at arms length. It let the appointed Chief Librarian, Borough Librarian, whatever the title, get on with it. He (usually he, despite the predominance of women in the workforce) was a professional and he could be trusted. So long as the books balanced, and there were no obvious complaints, and often even if there were. Libraries, as providers of books and information, were understood to be a good thing. And so they were, these repositories with collections that grew and grew, that held on to the important titles from past in their special collections. That devised a country-wide co-operative system that meant that if a book were needed in St. Albans and it were in Aberdeen it could be obtained.
There was much that was smug and middle class about libraries but then there was much of that about all of UK society in those times. But the cultural changes of the 60s and 70s did, albeit slowly and unevenly, work their way into the public library system. So that when I first worked in them they were approaching, at least for the user, the aspect of a free zone where all ideas stood equal and could be accessed. You could find a comprehensive range of politics of every hue. You could find avant garde literature. You could find masses of foreign language material. You wanted something odd and you could find it. And the music section had started buying rock, pop, and punk. And still local government; the councillors and the chief executive; didn’t impose a view, and kept the funds flowing. But things were changing – and to that I will return.
1 comment:
last year or so they shut hornsey library (a beautiful 1950's designed building in crouch end for a major refit...i said to my daughter at the time something along the lines of "you watch when it opens again there will be hardly any books left" and so it came to pass. the whole upstairs was converted into a space for thirty computers.. so rather than spend £1 going to any of the internet cafes dotted around the area people could instead go here and book an hour for free....downstairs the dvd and cd sections had been expanded...so what had once been a great library was now basically a blockbusters with an internet cafe...the cost of this was most of their book stock...there were skips full of junked books in the car park behind the library...a policy that seems to have swept across all the libraries in haringey since then...remember when if you needed something trivial like a bath plug or pictures hooks the confident thought was always woolworths will have it and how that all changed in the eighties to the point where woolworths was the last place to look...well bookwise that sums up haringey libraries. im all for keep up with the times but installing huge ugly automatic book return machines so the library assistants can stand behind the counter watching you feed books into the open maw of a machine seemed like a spectacular waste of money. Being a comic book fan who long ago was priced out of reading comic books i welcomed with open arms the arrival of a graphic novels section. except the stock was chosen was so arbitary and done with so little respect...pointless repackages of old hack written comics from the seventies rubbed shoulders with volume twos of on going series (but never volumes one or three)oh and fifteen comic adaptations of hacked out bible stories that nobody seemed to have taken out since they arrived..the section is a pointless insult mostly..and because after a couple of months theres nothing left to read,the section is now like a stagnent pond...every six months or so two or three new graphic novels are added, generally more of the same wrong choices...its all so thoughtless and pathetic...thats why ive got an islington library card...at least islington still has well stocked libraies.....harigay are bloody useless
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