The Dream of Democracy

"The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois." Gustave Flaubert

There is a serious side to that though, and that is if we are going to have a democracy with the people making decisions, the people should be as highly educated as possible. The libraries make that possible, with their scope for people to learn unconditionally.

What exactly is the 'dream of democracy', and where do the libraries fit in?

Stories

I like this quote:

"Storytelling is at the very root of what makes us uniquely human ... It is how we share our experiences, learn from our past, and imagine our future" Saving the Story at MIT

It seems to hit the head on the nail with what libraries are about.

Brave new library world cancelled

It looks like the brave new library world outlined by Andrew Burnham (see previous post) has been cancelled; 10 Downing Street read the bad press following and told the DCMS to rethink... ref. Discouraging from The Good Library Blog (aka Tim Coates).

Public Library Authorities conference

We have just had the Public Library Authorities conference here in the UK, during which the Culture Secretary made a speech (the fallout from which can be seen e.g. here). There is a lot being said in the public library world at the moment and the trick I think is to pick out the good ideas. Tim Coates has some good ideas, but so do the library reformers in the profession.

I think at the moment we are in a period where the libraries in the first instance became less salient than they once were as books became cheaper and more sources of information were to be had, with the libraries then very much finding themselves competing for the leisure time of patrons. So as issues and visits over the past 10 years take a dive, it is perhaps a good point to carry out an audit and say what
could we be doing better, or what should we do differently, given the changes that are upon us. How should we respond?

One approach is to say that we should make the libraries welcoming to all sectors of the community, allowing computer gaming, screening football matches, and so on. Also the idea of making the library the hub of a community with a cafe, allowing mobile 'phones and food, and even turning the IT suite into an Internet cafe (a noisy library is a joyful library). But as Caroline Moss-Gibbons reminds us, libraries are also places where many different communities have to get on
together: "It is important that there are no artificial barriers restricting use, although inevitably, as requirements will differ between various groups, trade-offs and compromises will be necessary."[1]
[1] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article4798653.ece

Tim Coates' approach to say let's take for e.g. the gardening section of 180 books, let's also look at a list of the top best sellers of gardening books, and fill that gardening section with 4 each of the 6 top best sellers, and 156 of the remaining best sellers. The result is a selection second only to that in the best stocked bookshop! He also has other ideas about how libraries should be run that largely
mimic how bookshops are managed (a 50% reduction in the overheads incurred by non-front line staff being one).

That about I think sums it up!

What is possible in libraries today

Have posted over on lis-pub-libs, illustrating what technology currently does, and could do, for us nowerdays:

The Holy Grail has a bug :|
Re: The Holy Grail has a bug :|

The subject is the public and subject indexes.

More on the purpose of libraries

"People wish also in the main, to give their fellows and themselves the opportunity for self-improvement. This wish is the vital fact at the bottom of the free, compulsorily supported public library. It is on these vital facts that we should keep our eyes and our thoughts, not on the feature of compulsion. Work then, for the extension of the public library from the starting-point of human sympathy, from the universal desire for an increase of human happiness by an increase of knowledge of conditions of human happiness"

From Library Daylight - Tracings of Modern Librarianship, 1874-1922, Edited Rory Litwin.

Three more quotes in this post.

I'd be tempted to temper also these somewhat 'classical' ideas on library purpose with those in Miss Gratia Alta Countryman's article: 'The Library as Social Centre'.

Purpose of libraries

"Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries." - Ann Herbert

From a Progressive Librarians Guild mailing list post.

I guess what this says is that we still need libraries even when we have money.