Librarians: 'We do so much more than shelve books and say shhh

The Tories clearly don't know how much libraries do. Cuts will threaten the very social bonds they claim to want to promote

John Harris, North Yorkshire guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 January 2011

John Harris travels from the Yorkshire coast to the dales to ask communities how they'll cope without their librabries.

Fifteen minutes south of Scarborough is Eastfield Community Resource Centre – opened four years ago, to serve one of the area's most disadvantaged communities. In addition to lending out books, what would once have been a mere library has obeyed the modern demand to transform itself into a "hub", and provides what might look to a lot of people like the raw materials of social mobility: internet access, parent and toddler groups, space and resources to help with school homework, meeting rooms and more.


On the day I visit, four staff members are seeing to the needs of a steady stream of people. The shelves bulge with titles that point to horizons well beyond these parts: David Remnick's Obama biography, The Bridge; a rich work of pop-cultural scholarship entitled Dylan's Visions Of Sin; and a coffee-table study of Matisse. "You can't learn everything at school," one local tells me; this place surely offers instant proof.

But for how much longer? Thanks chiefly to the clunking fist of Eric Pickles, Tory-run North Yorkshire county council must save £2.1m from a libraries budget of £7.5m by 2015. Thus, of 42 libraries, only 18 now have a guaranteed future: the remaining 24 – including Eastfield – will either close or somehow be handed to volunteers. North Yorkshire's fleet of mobile libraries will also be hacked down, from 10 to two.

After our initial call for on-the-ground intelligence, I came here thanks to online posts from a couple of Yorkshire-resident regulars on Comment is free, one of whom was adjusting to the possibility of a nearby library – the closest thing to a local community centre, they said – being shut for good. The thread they posted on, of course, reflected a nationwide story, now familiar to millions of us. In Somerset, 24 out of 40 libraries may soon close. In Doncaster, 13 of the 26 are under threat. The same applies to 20 out of 43 libraries in Oxfordshire, 7 of the 12 in Conwy, 23 of the 32 in Cornwall, and 9 of the 11 on the Isle of Wight. The noise of protest grows greater by the day: do not be surprised if pockets of local dissent soon fuse together, and cause no end of problems for both national and local government.

The threat to hundreds of libraries is being recast as an opportunity to bring in volunteers, and finally provide concrete examples of how the "big society" may work in practice – and, though any library is better than none at all, you have to wonder about what will transpire. How volunteers will convincingly step into the space left by trained librarians, or maintain six-day-a-week opening, remains unclear (witness a recent headline from the Swindon Advertiser: "Library hours cut due to lack of volunteers"). Moreover, when you spend time in a facility as ambitious as the one in Eastfield, one thought becomes inescapable: there is simply no way that unpaid staff could run it satisfactorily.

Still, this is the vision of the future to which Ed Vaizey, the minister who sees to libraries, seems enthusiastically pledged, with local stories to assist his case. "There are all sorts of ways of configuring the big society," he said in July last year. "The George and Dragon pub in North Yorkshire is now delivering a library service and a pint to the community in Hudswell. That sounds like a good partnership to me."

Read the full, distressing story at The Guardian.