Despite Google, we still need good libraries

A good statement to make amidst the excitement of new Google technology. I'm sure there's a way between balancing the traditional elements of knowledge with the new. At least I hope so cause' I'd be very sad if libraries ceased to exist!


Despite Google, we still need good libraries

GEORGE KEREVAN


GOOGLE, with whom I spend more time than with my loved ones, is planning to put the contents of the world’s greatest libraries on line, including the Bodleian in Oxford and those of Harvard and Stanford in America. Part of me is ecstatic at the thought of all that information at my fingertips (assuming my mouse is not greasy, or the damned computer is not flashing incomprehensible "error" messages). Another part of me is nostalgic, because I think physical libraries, book-lined and cathedral-quiet, are a cherished part of civilisation we lose at our cultural peril.

My love affair with libraries started early, in Drumchapel in the Fifties. Glasgow Council neglected the shops and amenities but somehow remembered to put in a public library - actually, a wooden shed - for the 60,000 exiles packed off to the city’s outer fringe.

That library was split into two - an adult section and a children’s section. This was an early taste of forbidden fruit. A lifetime of hating bureaucratic rules was born. Not to mention much useful human reproductive knowledge gained from certain books examined surreptitiously in the adult biology section.

The first lesson here is that on-line libraries are valuable, but they are only as useful as the electronic librarians let them be. Don’t count on the Chinese authorities being Google-friendly.

At university, I discovered the second great secret of the library as a physical space: its serendipity. Glasgow University has a skyscraper library, built around a vast atrium stretching up through the various floors. Each floor was devoted to a different subject classification. Working away on the economics floor, I could see other students above or below - chatting, flirting, doodling, panicking - each cocooned in their own separate world of knowledge. Intrigued, I soon took to exploring what was on these other planets: science, architecture, even a whole floor of novels.

Lesson two: the unique aspect of a physical library is that you can discover knowledge by accident. There are things you know you don’t know, but there are also things you never imagined you did not know (to paraphrase the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld).

There is a stock response to my love affair with libraries: that I am being too nostalgic. That the multi-tasking, MTV generation can access information from a computer, get cheap books from the supermarket and still chatter to each other at a thousand decibels. Who needs old-fashioned library buildings? And why subsidise what Google will provide for free?

There is proof for this line of argument. In 2003, the number of people in Scotland using their local public library fell for the fifth year running, with just under a quarter of Scots now borrowing books (admittedly, that was 34 million books). As a result, local authorities have reduced their funding on new books by 30 per cent. Of course, fewer new books mean fewer library users, so guaranteeing the downward spiral. And, yes, I do know that of the 20 most-borrowed books in British libraries, 16 were written by one person, the children’s author, Jacqueline Wilson.

One erroneous response to this state of affairs has been to turn traditional public lending libraries into glorified community centres full of broken-down PCs and dog-eared popular novels which you can find in better condition in the local charity shop for ten pence. That is not a library: that is a politically correct con trick.

It may well be that public demand and technical change mean we no longer need the dense neighbourhood network of local libraries of yore. But our culture, local and universal, does demand serious city libraries where one can find science, history, reference texts, foreign-language works and art books - precisely the material that is too expensive for the ordinary person to buy, and for the most part too complex to find on-line. Such facilities are worth funding publicly because the return in informed citizenship, civic pride and enhanced skills is far in excess of the money spent. Better a few good public libraries than a host of tatty community centres. City libraries also have that undervalued resource - the trained librarian. The ultimate Achilles’ heel of the internet is that it presents every page of information as being equally valid, which is of course nonsense. The internet is cluttered with false information, or just plain junk. The city library, with its collection honed and developed by experts, is a guarantee of the quality and veracity of the information contained therein, in a way that Google can never provide.

Libraries have another function still, which the internet cannot fulfil. Libraries, like museums, are custodians of knowledge - and should be funded as such. It has become the fashion in recent decades to turn our great national museums and libraries into entertainment centres, ostensibly to justify their public expense. As one of the original founders of Edinburgh’s highly successful Science Festival, I have every enthusiasm for popularising esoteric knowledge. However, the world of knowledge cannot be reduced to the level of a child’s view of the universe.

FURTHERMORE, we have a duty to future generations, especially in the nation that gave the world the Enlightenment, to invest in the custodians of our culture, above all of its literature and manuscripts. Besides, the desire by politicians to turn museums and libraries into theme parks has less to do with modernising access to knowledge, and more to do with courting cheap publicity.

Fortunately, there are still some adventurous minds, defending the notion of libraries as workshops of the future rather than tombs of the past. Witness Aberdeen University, where the principal, Duncan Rice, has just launched an appeal for a major new library facility, in part to re-house the university’s glorious medieval-humanities collection.

Professor Rice’s inspiration is the famous Beinecke Library at Yale University. One of the largest buildings in the world devoted entirely to rare manuscripts, the Beinecke has no windows but is constructed of thin marble panes which filter light so that the fragile materials can be displayed without damage. Inside, the golden effect is extraordinary. Let’s hope some benefactor comes up with the cash for Aberdeen so that the project is not held back or reduced in aspiration, architecturally or intellectually. (By the way, the price is one-tenth of one Scottish Parliament building.)

Of course, I can’t wait for Google to get on-line with the Bodleian Library’s one million books. Yet here’s one other thing I learned from a physical library space: the daunting scale of human knowledge and our inability to truly comprehend only a fraction of it. On arriving at Glasgow University library, I did a quick calculation of how many economics books there were on the shelves and realised that I could not read them all - ever, never mind before the time my degree course was over. From which realisation comes the beginning of wisdom, which is different from merely imbibing information.

The internet, on the other hand, is still in its Messianic phase. The new Google library reminds me of a short story by the science-fiction writer, Frederic Brown, where all the knowledge of all the computers in the world is finally available on one giant, Google-like application. To celebrate, the computer is asked the ultimate question: "Is there a God?" After a few whirrs and clicks, the machine answers: "Yes, now there is."


This article:

http://news.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=1434442004