The Importance of Libraries

Recently, it feels that libraries everywhere are under siege. A recent BBC story reported that  343 libraries in Britain have closed in the past six years, and 111 are slated for closure in the next year. Britain has lost 25% of its library staff in that same period, and there is a worrying trend that professional librarians are being replaced with volunteers. In fact, 174 public libraries in Britain are now run entirely by volunteers. A year ago, I would have said that this couldn't happen in Canada, but we recently learned that the government of Newfoundland and Labrador plans to close 54 of their 95 public libraries in the next two years.

In the midst of all of this doom and gloom, it's important t remind ourselves that there are people out there who feel that public libraries provide vital services to our communities, and they are willing to stand up and say so. One of these is the author Neil Gaiman. In a speech for a U.K. charity called the Reading Agency in 2013, he talked about the importance of reading and how visiting his local public library as a child turned him into a lifelong reader. He writes:

I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children's' library I began on the adult books.
They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader - nothing less and more - which meant they treated me with respect. 

Gaiman goes further and outlines what he feels is the central role of a public library.  Libraries, he says, are places that people go for information, free information.  Books are just "the tip of the information iceberg":

 A library is a place that is a repository of, and gives every citizen equal access to, information. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world. It's a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

It's a wonderful speech and worth reading in its entirety.  You can see it (or listen to it) online here. It's time we all spoke up for libraries.