Introducing...
Libraries
End of shelf-life
Marian Pallister
Under threat: mobile libraries in rural Scotland
Photograph by Islay McLeod
More than 80 protest events were held on 5 February. They were mainly led by authors and they were intended to change the collective minds of those local authorities that believe closing libraries is a way forward in these troubled times.
The BBC's Radio 4 headlined protests in Oxford, but there were people with placards chittering in the chill winds of Edinburgh and young and old tweeted their pro-library messages from all around the UK.
Here in Argyll, there was a letter in the local paper about the proposed loss of the library van to the village of Skipness (a beautiful but out-of-the-way spot south of Tarbert, Loch Fyne). And behind the scenes there was a furious exchange of emails about the proposed closure of the library in Tarbert itself.
I've seen a lot of those emails but they weren't mine, so I'm not at liberty to quote the detail of their content. They sparked through the ether between a person high up in Argyll and Bute's library service and an avid library user. Having taken a pop at rural schools in desperate efforts to reduce its outlay, Argyll and Bute Council has also targeted libraries (and free fruit for primary school children, but let's not be side-tracked).
A mobile library bus operating in the Oban area is on the hit list. So are Tarbert, Lochgilphead, Rosneath and Cardross libraries. The message from the library service is: 'Sadly, given the scale of saving required, there can be no happy ending'.
Main libraries and their internet access (which costs £63,000 a year) are to be protected. But libraries such as Tarbert, which costs around £11,000 a year to run, are to have their doors closed forever and if the mobile library is to go too, then it's goodbye to books on the Kintyre Trail. This despite 57% of those who responded to a 'consultation' process demanding that Tarbert library remain open.
The library in Lochgilphead, some 14 miles along the shore of Loch Fyne from Tarbert, was only recently refurbished but the hours are now so limited that unless there’s an 'R' in the month, a spring tide and the moon in Capricorn, you'll miss your chance to borrow a book. Suddenly, it too has appeared on the closure list.
Throughout Argyll, library staff are admirably helpful and knowledgeable. I know – as an author, I have picked their brains and asked them to track down obscure tomes and they have always come up trumps. What is going to happen to them in the compulsory 15% cuts? It isn't just the facilities that will go, but the expertise.
A mobile library as a lifeline rather than a quaint part of a Highland
holiday backdrop is probably not something George Osborne could get
his head round.
With the best will in the world, if the Cameron-Clegg Big Society concept is supposed to move in and provide library services, forget it. If I'm short of affordable reading material I can choose from an amazing array of 10p volumes in the local charity shops. But the volunteers who give so generously of their time to man these shops are rarely qualified librarians and certainly don't have at their fingertips a knowledge of specialist material held in libraries around the country.
Nor would volunteers running a Big Society library.
It takes expertise to know where to track down ancient documents, the records of a parish school in the 1880s or an obscure recording of a Thomas Tallis score – not an enthusiasm to be part of the Big Society. A Big Society library can be no better than a repository for second-hand books and that's not what we want of the library service. Nor should people have to travel 50 miles to a 'main library' to access what they want or need.
Every cut that is made will hurt someone, but it makes no sense to me to slash and burn access to knowledge.
Of course, there are those who tell us that books are history. They could be right. But downloading e-books isn't possible for lots of us out here on the western fringe. As a tutor in a college where e-learning is our main modus operandi, I find that students often can't watch a four-minute Youtube clip at home because the superhighway is something of a dirt track around here. We have a long way to go before the library as we know it is redundant.
Google and Wikipedia cannot take the place of the library and nor can the most enthusiastic of volunteers replace trained librarians. We could exist without them, but the fabric of our society is enriched by our existing library services and they are used by a surprising cross-section of the community.
Contrary to the perceptions held by some of our politicians, even in the most rural areas the library is not a place of dusty Dickens, but one where you can borrow a book, a DVD, a CD, or book an internet session. It's where your toddler can have a fun introduction to reading and your grandpa can indulge an otherwise unaffordable passion for opera. It's where reference books that cost hundreds of pounds second-hand on Amazon are available at the flash of a library membership card. The writer and Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan said: 'Libraries mean so much to so many people and to a sector of people that fly under politicians' radars'.
So much of our lives seem to be a foreign land to our politicians. Cameron with a library card in his wallet is not something I can believe in. Student Clegg spending hours swotting in his local public library is not a scene I can conjure up. A mobile library as a lifeline rather than a quaint part of a Highland holiday backdrop is probably not something George Osborne could get his head round. He should try, however, because we really do want to keep our libraries – and every library that closes will cost him votes next time around.
Marian Pallister is a writer and college lecturer
