As in many parts of the UK my local council is casting about for the ways to save money that cause it least trouble. That is to say, it’s undertaking an exercise in finding the people with the quietest voices and then cutting their services. A little lateral thinking soon leads the to library where the hush between the shelves is surely heavy with the possibility of a financial stabbing.
It’s clear that ultimately libraries, manifest as roomfuls of books, are moribund. Modern public libraries were established as a means for information storage and dispersal and thus, hopefully, social and intellectual mobility. In that past age information was scarcer than it is now, or at least less nebulous, and making it available in physical form to everybody, to anybody, was liberating.
But they are close to no longer serving that purpose. Times have changed. The kind of intellectual wings previously offered by a library are now most easily available on the internet. What teenager hasn’t asked themselves “what would Socrates have said”? Once upon a time they would have visited the local library on a Saturday morning and read the dialogues. Really, maybe they would. But today they could just consult Wikipedia with their phone to appreciate the bones of the old Greek dude’s ideas.
So if the egalitarian dispersal of knowledge is a solved problem should we just shut them all down?
No, because they do still have users. Even if the number aren’t quite what they use to be there’s still a good number of people making good use of them in the way they always have. But not so many that the money spent on them looks immediately like good value.
No also because libraries are making a valiant attempt to keep themselves relevant by bringing the internet inside. Like an internet cafe but without the cafe part, the library has long been somewhere to get access to the net and to get help real-person help. That’s great, it’s a service that ought to exist, but it’s not enough and one day internet access will achieve complete ubiquity so the in-library service will no longer be necessary.
To return the to original purpose of the modern library, it was to give a means for people to improve themselves and their opportunities in life, to build their knowledge and to acquire know-how. If this is no longer provided by a repository of printed material, how could it be provided? But before “how”, let’s think about “what”, if it isn’t books.
The British economy is starting to move away from mass full-time employment. Instead, many people will have a succession of jobs, often informally, sometimes simultaneously. This change shows itself as the “gig economy”, as an increase in the number of people being self-employed and the rise of home-working “makers”. A key feature of this new working left is the need for a range of disparate skills, quickly available.
For a person thinking of starting a new micro-venture, or of taking on a contract to build a widget, information is easy to find. What’s harder to gain is hands-on skill and experience. It’s this gap that libraries could fill.
The coming world of micro-workers will be one of micro-making and the tools of this trade are 3D printers, desktop laser cutters, and small scale CNC. These aren’t things that are used in factories and sheds: they’re quiet (mostly) and clean and sit next to a PC. They aren’t cheap however and critically it takes time and access to acquire the skills needed to use them well. A library could provide this access and with some base-level training an assistant could set users on the path to building their skill.
Particularly in small towns and villages facilities such as this could provide a vital leg-up in left, in just the way provincial libraries always have.
Inopportune thoughts 