Understanding today's public libraries

As noted in the previous chapter, the public library of today is complicated for various reasons. The role of the library in the twenty-first century in the face of advances and changed leisure habits and reading preferences, not to mention the fundamental technological shift from analogue fixed print to digital fluid content, must change. But how? There is a need to diversify into, on the one hand, different products to lend and on the other different services to offer. At the same time there is a tension between the principle of universal access and the need in these days of market-driven segmentation to appeal to discrete groups. For example, the demands of readers of adult crime fiction set against the demands of borrowers of Italian opera place destabilising forces on the already tight library budget. So while the role of the public library is changing - exploring new territory, evolving new roles, finding new justifications - throughout this change process there is a steadfast harnessing of the library movement to the book which in many ways serves as its protective cloak. In this chapter we consider the public library against the backdrop of the book and its iconic value. The notion and role of library leadership set against the backdrop of local democracy are discussed, and various dilemmas are identified.

It is worth perhaps starting with the book - the item that remains most identified with the library despite diversification. Held as one of the fundamental icons of civilisation and the most reliable medium to transmit ideas, the book is one of the greatest and most enduring pieces of engineering constructed by man. The whole system - the chapters, the pages, the paragraphs, sentences, words, letters and their language and meanings - is ingenious.

Perhaps it is the literature that is revered, while the book is simply the carrier of that literature. Either way, books themselves represent order, being the units or tokens of a well-functioning society. Many perceive a great threat to society with the emergence of digital communications. Certainly information has exploded in this digital age, and, as we will see later in this chapter, media storage systems have required public libraries to keep up with the times while also providing opportunities to diversify.

The key reason for this reverential attitude society has to the book is probably its 'technology' proving to be functionally and aesthetically unsurpassed for centuries. Additionally, books came from mythical and religious origins, and this has contributed to a sense of reverence.

Significantly, when Britain and Ireland adopted (and adapted) the Latin alphabet to write down their Celtic vernaculars, that innovation took place in an ecclesiastical setting. Early Christian Ireland bears witness to the fruits of this literacy in a prolific and distinctive literature composed in both Latin and Irish and transmitted in manuscripts. (Ó Néill, 2006: 70)

These manuscripts were not only magical and commanded respect, but were also rare, a characteristic that ensured their worth over and above their artistic value.

One is struck by the paucity of surviving manuscripts. Only twelve manuscripts of date older than AD 1000 have survived in Ireland, all of them copies of Gospels or the Psalms or missals. They probably owe their survival not so much to their religious contents as to their quasi-magical associations with important monastic saints such as Colum Cile; significantly, many were preserved in special boxes (Ir. Cumdach), indicating that they were objects of veneration rather than study. (Ibid.: 71)

They were also extremely rare and guarded with great care. But one of their greatest characteristics was their portability. Using a book, it was possible literally to spread the word.

Over fifty other manuscripts (or fragments) that were probably written in Ireland before 1000 have survived on the Continent in libraries of monasteries founded or frequented by the Irish, notably Bobbio, St Gall and Reichenau. (Ibid.)

If it was the religious influence that laid the impetus for the book, it was the academics and their need to spread learning that sustained production through to the sixteenth century.

A library was central to the purpose of an academic institution in a way that it was not for a monastery. Of course, books were fundamental to monastic life; the tag 'claustrum sine armario castrum sine armamentario' ('a cloister without a book collection is a castle without an armoury') embodied a deep truth derived from the words of St Benedict himself. Yet monastic attitudes to books, characterised by the annual distribution envisaged in many customaries, were not at heart those of academics. For monks, books were an aid to devotion; for scholars, they were of the essence. Within the university environment books multiplied rapidly. University study was distinctively based on the close reading of texts and their comparison with other texts. The most characteristic form of academic writing was the commentary on another text. (Lovatt, 2006)

From the early days of the printing press the book became a key medium of the state, used sometimes for sinister means and sometimes for improvement and progression.

The printed book was one of the major instruments in the furtherance of the Reformation: people were encouraged to read the Bible for themselves and there flowed from the new presses all over Protestant Europe works of theology, philosophy, and biblical exegesis. (Welch, 2002: 701)

This in turn generated an appetite for reading. Of course, this printing technology provided the opportunity to make copies more easily. This is a simple point but an extremely important one, as we will come to see later in our digitised, globalised world. Printing supplied the written word on a scale never seen before, and the distribution of that word had impact.

The Protestant concept of individual liberty, structured and authorised by a nation-state free of Roman manipulation, promoted a widespread appetite for reading, thinking for oneself, and the expression of personal conviction. (Ibid.)

For example, Foxe's Book of Martyrs had widespread influence: by the end of the seventeenth century 10,000 copies were in circulation, it was serialised and was, after the Bible, the most widely available book in England.1

Venice was one of the great European centres of book-production and design. Such was the production of printed books that it became necessary to install some kind of regulatory system to control an exploding free market hungry for all kinds of self-expression in printed form. In this flow of energy it was quickly recognised by all persuasions that books could corrupt as well as enlighten: notoriously there were the erotic prints of Aretino.2 (Ibid.: 702)

In more recent times it has been said that the days of the book are numbered, that the print format is doomed because of the internet; this hypertextual environment where the familiar linear arrangement of data similar to that found in a book could be replaced by a fluid, more intuitive arrangement of information allowing the linking of ideas in a non-hierarchical way and benefiting the lateral thinker.3 While certainly the internet, or more precisely the World Wide Web, has opened large vistas of information and knowledge, it appears not yet to have been at the cost of the demise of the book. In fact it is not the new structure or 'linked-ness' of the web that is competing with the book, but rather the ease of duplication of data within a digital environment that seems to be the key advantage over the printed book. If we accept that the digital manifestation of the book is evident and unavoidable, we might also presume that we are currently in a period where both digital and print coexist. A process of changeover is taking place. This process may last for decades, giving an overlap, a period of adjustment where various factors such as the marketplace, the publishing industry, the book trade, the media, reading habits, paper and the public library all change, merge, expand or simply disappear.

Currently the importance of the book as an icon remains strong, as does the reverential attitude society has to literature and education generally. Not only are books treated with piety, but buildings used to house collections - the great libraries, from Alexandria to the British Library at St Pancras - are held in high regard. Certainly, in terms of their grand scale and the industry employed to develop these libraries, there are no comparisons within the world of websites. Many websites show innovative design features, yet few would, all things being otherwise equal, hold a match to, say, Panizzi's vision and subsequent design of the Reading Room at the British Museum. With its then impressive capacity to store 24,000 reference volumes, which by today's standards is pretty miniscule, the British Museum library demonstrated a near-perfect marriage of the aesthetic and the functional. While losing out on a byte-pertype comparison in its storage capacity, where in fact the web is seen as almost infinite in its ability to extend the boundaries of what it contains, the physical library building caters for its users'...