18th April 2011

Libraries have become the windmills against which all the Don Quixotes of the big society project are currently tilting.

Libraries are set for closure. Given a choice between cutting services for the elderly or the very young, local councils are seeing spending on Libraries as the easier and less controversial way of reducing expenditure.

The commentariat are united in their view that this is neither fair nor reasonable.

In communities local people are stepping forward to maintain their libraries, volunteers are emerging to stamp books out and check them back in. The society of authors is heard complaining of the cuts that mean fewer books will be borrowed and read. It would seem that these particular cuts are energising a big society response.

Above the grand staircase of the City library in Stoke -on Trent is a quote from Samuel Johnson: 'Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it', the quote of course referred to the libarary and specifically to the library in Stoke on Trent, which is in Hanley.

But if it had been invented in the C18th Johnson could have been describing google.

If you don't know: google, he might have said instead.

Or as Donald Rumsfeld had it: There are things we know we know, things we know we don't know and things we don't know we don't know, the famous unknown unknowns.

If you know great, if you know you don't know google, if you don't know you don't know surf.

So we have to ask, what are Libraries for?

As depositaries of knowledge? As places of reference? To borrow books from? For many people the library, and even more importantly for older people, the mobile library, is a crucial resource it maintains a steady supply of books, keeps folk reading and thereby excercising their minds as they enjoy a new story, try to solve a new mystery or just excercise their neural signalling mechanisms as their eyes stray across the printed page.

Students and researchers like to study original documents on the original yellowing parchment but the rest of us, well we google.

The Samuel Johnson quote 're-tweeted' in the C21st might read: 'Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know how to google it.'.

My first school was St Mary’s, a Church of England primary school.

Of this school I have only one memory.

When we started we were given loose sheets of paper to practice our handwriting. As we progressed we graduated to an exercise book. I cannot now remember how long I attended the school but when my family moved I was still writing on loose sheets of paper.

In my new school, under the tutelage of a young, attractive and gifted teacher I made rapid progress as both a proficient writer and reader.

I joined the library and recall taking Puck of Pooks Hill as my first title, challenged by the Librarian I had to read two pages to her to satisfy her that I would be able to read and understand the book.

But having started I stopped using libraries years ago and started buying books, I reasoned that it was cheaper than paying the fines.

When I have popped into my local library on a rare occasion I recognise that it is a great local resource for information, the reference section; for catching up with the news, the reading room; for surfing, free internet access; for borrowing books and CD's and DVD's, the lending library, but I am also convinced that its time has passed.

The internet, google, wikipedia, ipads and iphones are raising questions over the need for the continued physical existence of the public library.

At a recent conference organised by the Catholic Church one of the Archbishop's advisers stated:

'The political question that hangs over the Big Society is its provenance ... Has the Conservative part of the Coalition simply seized the economic crisis as an opportunity to push through the unfinished neo-liberal agenda of the last Conservative administration?

We should not forget the enormous social division that was entailed in this. It signalled the end of a humanist and humane consensus in British society.

And that is true, no matter how much information and how many books are digitised, the library is a sign of a humanist and human society.