#british libraries

A love letter to public libraries

Earlier this month, the UK celebrated Libraries Week, with libraries all across the country joining in with a range of fun, creative events and activities. If I had planned my life better, I could have been a part of one of these, but I had to content myself with visiting my local library and borrowing The Library Book, which was full of essays geeking out about the importance and magic of…

I found this (bloated but ultimately informative...she waffles too much in the beginning) article in the Guardian. It’s pretty old being written in 2009, but this stood out:

Expenditure on books in our libraries is below 8% of the total public library funds, and in inner London that figure is just 5.7% (across the country, councils spend just 1.6% of their funding on children's books; several councils, Hackney and Doncaster among them, spend less than 1%). As a consequence, many libraries now have extremely poor book stocks. In 1996/7 there were 92.3m books available for lending in the UK; in 2007/8 that figure fell to 75.8m.[...]

"Many councils regard a library as a building," says Tim Coates, the former MD of Waterstone's, who now writes an impassioned library blog, and acts as a consultant to several local authorities. "But a library is not a building; it is a collection."

That last line in particular can sum up my experience today. When I visited my local at it’s old premises, it seemed to have far more stock. Older titles certainly, but for a space a tenth of the size of the new library, it had a greater range of subjects. I could put it down to teething issues, in that it’s only been open for 7 weeks, though I would have thought stock would be plumped long before opening.