My colleague Phil Doty just pointed me to an interesting article in the Financial Times describing the new public library built in Birmingham, England, one of many such new libraries popping up in major cities around the globe. One important aspect that is discussed here is the willingness of municipalities to invest heavily in such constructions even as the basic public library infrastructure of a nation is crumbling. Britain has made a wave of cuts to their library system in recent years and the data suggest visits and circulation are in decline. The language is telling. New construction is justified in terms of the value of safe public space, education, and related important values of investing in a community even as the ironwork facing for this new architectural wonder, intended to celebrate the city’s traditional skills, has been outsourced to Germany.
One of the leaders in this new project speaks eloquently of the need to move libraries on from a transaction function of finding information and borrowing books to one of education. “The transactional function is withering as there are now so many more media than just the book” he says. Wonderful as that sounds, it tends to jar a little with reality and with the expenditure on new buildings in other cities which seem to emphasize a role for the library in cultural records management more than education, though of course these boundaries are blurred. One wonders if the building program is a boon to architects and the construction industry more than the outcome of any real effort at improving cultural life.
It is worth comparing this articule with “How Low can our book budgets go?” in this month’s LJ by Steve Coffman. The data he presents from the US are quite telling: Public libraries spend 11.4% of their funds on their collection, the lowest level seen on record. And this at a time when book sales in general have been increasing. Public libraries account for only 1.31% of the market in new books, which renders the threats often made to publishers to pay attention to libraries seem hollow. He also points out that despite the growth in the book sales, public library circulation rates are declining, countered only by an increasing usage of DVDs, audiobooks, and games (31% of all checkouts were for videos of one form or another in 2010). Coffman argues that we have real problem (OK, Steve writes provocative pieces all the time but he makes good points), and that diverting money from primary collection building means that libraries are less able to deliver on their primary mission, which might or might not be education but it sure ain’t competing with Netflix.
This is an important topic and one that is not helped by rhetorical flourishes about paradigm shifts from transactions to transformations. Even as the ALA Annual Reports encourage us to believe that more and more people visit libraries regularly, their own data points suggest there has been a significant drop in recent years (in 2008, 76% of respondents claimed to have visited a library in the past year, but in the most recent survey last year, this rate had dropped to 53%, and this leaves out the worry that any question of this kind carries a certain social desirability bias that inflates the answers). Perhaps we are moving to a period of libraries now being great statements of municipal pride, with elaborate new buildings and plentiful architectural awards but little real effort being placed on funding the kind of services that led to the creation of the public library in the first instance. Perhaps the only new part of this is the belief in creating the great statement, so one might be grateful.