Won't Someone Think of the Librarians?
Alix Mortimer mounts a passionate defence of librarians and the work they do to help people in their communities.
6 Aug 2011, 20:56
Librarians: Unsung heroes
The trouble with highly educated, bookish people (weirdies, in other words) proffering their childhood experiences as a defence of the library service is that only the other weirdies, like me, understand them. To everyone else they sound frankly precious, not to say bats. Newspaper commentators speak of libraries as having sparked their “glorious addiction” to reading; libraries are part of “the wonderfulness of childhood” ; libraries were a “world on the doorstep” even (as opposed to the actual world on the doorstep, yes?). But those lonerish, wordy little souls, perched in some remote eyrie with their first ever James Joyce, are not really an argument for anything other than text circulation. And paradoxically that is not where the true value of state-funded libraries lies.
A new Local Government Association report suggests books could be lent via other community facilities, like shops and churches, which sounds to me like a good idea. It wouldn't really be surprising if access to the actual books turned out to be a relatively easy fix in the new age of austerity. It's only logistics, after all. But what shops and churches are presumably not going to start providing is librarians. And librarians are what make libraries worth defending, because their expertise in sifting information is put at the disposal of anyone who comes in off the street with a problem. Anyone.
My mum was a library assistant for most of my childhood, and the stories of quotidian job satisfaction she brought home were not about fostering quasi-mystical experiences in embryonic broadsheet journalists, although this may have occurred. They were about helping ordinary people do ordinary, but necessary, things. People go to libraries clutching benefits forms, solicitors' letters, planning application notices, half-formed CVs. They go to libraries knowing that a certain book exists, but being unable to name title or author. They use library workers as human catalogues, reference manuals and even quickfire translation tools, which is how, one Valentine's Day, my mum came to be saying down the phone on a busy Information Desk, “'I love you for ever and ever'.” People use libraries when they want an answer and can't think of anywhere else to go, perhaps can't even formulate the question. Some will be among the least educated and most vulnerable in society, and what they need, on top of the books, is a person to guide them through forests of information.
Marilyn Johnson's lovely book This Book is Overdue! argues that without a librarian, these people would be lost. There are unemployed people who have to complete a CV and who don't even know how to use capital letters. There are people who don't understand why they need an email address to look for work, much less how to set one up. There are people who want a book on Buddhism but have never seen it written down and think it's spelt “bootyism”. How are they going to find answers without a living, breathing information worker to help them? Johnson herself, bless, was cutting and pasting web pages into her word processor until 2006, when a librarian showed her how to Save As Web Page:
I could have gone to Google and typed in save webpages and received similar instructions, and perhaps had an equally profound epiphany, except that I didn't know that saving webpages was what I was looking for. I didn't have the vocabulary to ask Google what it knew...
Her point is that the internet is only an effective information sifter if you know how to interrogate it – and the better your education level, the better you'll be able to do that. Librarians and information workers can help to level this inequality. They can provide the human nudge towards what you need to know. Until the advent of AI, the library worker remains the most sophisticated search engine on earth. Providing that capacity, for free, to allcomers, is one of the best and most characteristically liberal uses of state funding I can think of.
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Alix Mortimer
Alix Mortimer is an award winning LibDem Blogger from the People's Republic of Mortimer.
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Comments (7)
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Well, sort of. Except the staff of our local library, when faced with difficult questions, send the enquiring member of the public round to our office (we publish a small local news paper) to find out where they can get such-and-such a piece of information.
I then have to tell the member of the pubic that the information they require is housed in the Local Studies Library, which was about ten feet from the (dis)information desk at the library they were just at. All without making the library staff seems useless, of course.
07/08/2011 01:08Y'know, I'd never thought of it in that way. If you use the internet at home, you're stuck with your own abilities, and I suspect everyone has had to help friends/relatives out with what seem to us to be basic online tasks. Let alone those of us with access to site traffic logs that see the sort of search terms that cause people to end up on websites that are completely useless for their target.
Go to a library, people can actually help you find what you're looking for, even online. They can also point you at reference books and give you access to books for the kid you can't afford to buy.
I'm currently working through the local history pages on Wikipedia, and adding to them--need local history books for that, which means a library.
07/08/2011 03:06Excellent post and exactly what we at Voices for the Library. We have shared a plethora of posts demonstrating why people value libraries and librarians. People forget that not everyone has the Internet or even the literacy skills needed to navigate the Internet. In this era of mass information, libraries AND librarians are needed more than ever.
07/08/2011 08:16Whoops, I meant "exactly what we at Voices for the Library have been arguing for some time." Must check before hitting submit!
07/08/2011 08:18Your statement, below, is anathema to me :
"A new Local Government Association report suggests books could be lent via other community facilities, like shops and churches, which sounds to me like a good idea."
You are doing the public library service and all those who work in it no favours by expressing any approval whatsoever of this government's appalling proposals.
07/08/2011 11:33Why is that proposal appalling and/or anathema? Make a case and I might even agree with you.
08/08/2011 14:30I was that Library Assistant. Oh! the tales I could tell – though I have no memory of the “I love you” incident. Our library and information service in Surrey was indeed excellent and very well used. The information staff verged on obsessive; they would find something out for you if it killed them. On Friday evenings and Saturdays, we had queues out of the doors. Unimaginable now. So where did it all go wrong? Well, in the bad old black & white days there were public libraries and public baths. The public baths adapted and metamorphosed into Leisure Centres. Why didn’t the libraries join them? Because Librarians were always a little bit sniffy about having anything to do with other services: they didn’t want themselves or their books to be contaminated or devalued. They have learnt the lesson now – you see libraries alongside museums, Children’s Centres, cafés and for all I know, betting shops and kebab vans. They try to think of other names to call themselves: I believe there is one in Brixton called “Think!” or “Whateva!” But it is too late; they have failed to find a relevant niche. And a lot of the readers who used libraries and made them seem a worthwhile spend to Councils, now get their books from Amazon. Luckily, in a very rare case of successful trickle-down benefit, this means that charity shops are full of a huge variety of second-hand books at very low cost. They have notices up saying, please, no more books. There are boxes of books on offer in all sorts of places – DIY stores, doctors’ surgeries, railway stations: take me and read me, they say, and preferably don’t bring me back. We are ankle deep in books - they will soon be a bigger problem than discarded MacDonald’s cartons. So we are OK for books, but what we stand to lose if the libraries go is, as AM points out, information - delivered to the right people in the right way when they need it. And with so much information available to people who do know how to access it, this is going to widen the gaps existing in society even further. A simple example would be good: a couple of years ago in Cornwall I listened into a conversation between two women in their thirties. One was saying that when she visited her sister in London she always went by coach even though it took eight hours, because rail travel was much too expensive, the fare to London being about £140. I wanted to tap her on the shoulder and say, get to the library, they’ll sort you out an email address and show you how to book train tickets in advance. I have to curb these mad old lady tendencies anyway, but soon there will be no libraries to direct them to.
08/08/2011 19:41