The remorseless destruction of our national public library system continues. Librarians are sacked, books sold or thrown away, and buildings closed. Unison estimates that nearly 500 of the country’s 3,100 libraries are being cut. No one expects things to get better, or even to stop getting worse. But it did not need to happen like this. The collapse marks a failure of will and imagination not an inevitability.
The failure of the public library system is usually understood as a consequence of technology and economics leading to the collapse of old-fashioned literacy. Fewer young people read books at all: a third of UK children do not own a single book and three-quarters claim never to read outside school. Perhaps we should be cheered that only one in five children surveyed by the National Literacy Trust said they would be actively embarrassed to be caught with a book but it is a grim consolation indeed to know that most of them don’t read from indifference rather than active repulsion. People on the fringes of literacy, including prisoners, lose most from this contraction.
Perhaps some of this was inevitable. The growth of electronic media will eat into the time that anyone has for reading. What was not inevitable is the way that libraries have handled the growth of digital media. This is not a technical problem. Libraries are as well equipped as anyone to distribute digital media and some have done this the right way. The excellent work being done by the Bodleian Library, the British Library and the Wellcome Trust to digitise their collections and make them available is only a tiny fraction of what needs doing, but shows it can be done.
Much more is possible. The Norwegian government demonstrates this best. The Norwegian state library system is digitising essentially everything it owns or has access to and will make most of the results available to anyone with an IP address in Norway. Obviously it helps to be as rich as Norway to do this but what was really decisive was the national will, and the sense that the library holds part of the soul of Norway, with which all Norwegians should be in touch as part of their citizenship.
This vision of public libraries as an essential part of a functioning literate nation was lost here before we realised it was gone. In the great general turning from the state we failed to understand that one of the things that taxes ought to fund is a general, unglamorous and reliable access to culture for everyone. Libraries could have provided a means of collective payment for digital goods. They could have paid for electronic access to journals for everyone, had they been properly and imaginatively funded. But this would require a government committed to a vision of human flourishing that was wider and deeper than the hellish paradise of a global shopping mall.
