Stop me if you have heard these words before.
“However, the current model of service provision is unsustainable.”
If you presumed that the presence of that “however” at the beginning of the quoted sentence indicates there was something of significance immediately before it, you were right.
It was this: “We know library services are highly valued.”
Yes we do. We know this because of the community protest and 500-signature online petition that was Birnam residents’ response to proposals they fear could lead to the local library’s closure.
But if library services were equally highly valued by Perth and Kinross Council, they would not have hived them off to an independent charity, Culture Perth and Kinross, whose spokesperson was quoted in The Courier.
‘Mindset within the council’
My first response to the story was to consider the mindset within the council that so undervalued libraries it decided to dump them in the lap of the charity along with the rest of the arts.
If you consult Culture Perth and Kinross’s website it lists various ways you can support these services, including donating money (suggestions of between £5 and £20 a month or, alternatively, as much as you like).
But surely that’s what council tax is for.
If the council’s presumption was by setting up Culture Perth and Kinross members of the public would be willing to contribute financially to the upkeep of libraries, where is their council tax rebate to cover that portion of council expenditure routinely allocated to libraries?
The reasonable assumption is the council’s assessment of the value of libraries is that it would like you to pay for them and volunteer to help to run them instead.
If you were to run through the profiles of the board members of Culture Perth and Kinross you would notice professional librarians are conspicuous by their absence.
And as they can no longer maintain the service at its existing level, the implication is we are on a slippery slope towards libraries that are no longer run by people who are professionally qualified to run libraries.
Priorities
Why do libraries rate so poorly in the council’s list of priorities, yet it would never set up an independent charity to look after, say, education?
What’s the difference?
What kind of government organisation, whether local or national, thinks libraries play no part in the educational process?
Right now, book publishing is a vigorous trade.
Independent bookshops are springing up all over the country. Book festivals are thriving from Shetland to Galloway and from the Hebrides to the North Sea shore.
People are reading more books.
Problem: books are also more expensive at a time when many people are finding it hard to make ends meet.
Solution: good libraries.
Which reminds me – I grew up in Dundee, a child of the 1950s who can still just about remember ration books.
Prefab life was basic, but my brother and I were read to.
And as soon as we were old enough we were introduced to the libraries in Lochee and the city centre.
We haunted them. We could read and read, despite the fact that there was very little money about. Now, it’s called austerity.
At school I was good at languages. At 16, I started working in this newspaper.
At 40, I wrote my first book and left the newspaper trade to write more books, and there are now more than 40 of them.
Not everyone who loves libraries will lead that kind of life.
But I guarantee that everyone who does lead that kind of a life will acknowledge that the igniting spark was libraries.
‘Not nearly good enough’
Libraries are that part of education, that part of culture, that part of community life, that you cannot put a price on.
My local council, which is Stirling, proposed last year to close all but one of its 17 libraries.
This is the city that hosts the Bloody Scotland book festival of crime writing, which is a bit of a local economic miracle, but no-one seemed to make the connection.
Wiser heads eventually prevailed in the face of community fury and the cull of libraries was abandoned.
My solution to the predicament confronting Perth and Kinross Council and Culture Perth and Kinross is a U-turn.
Scrap the charity, take libraries and all culture back into the council’s business and take responsibility for them, invest in them, raise the profile of libraries.
Deciding not to do things is easy; deciding to do the difficult things well is what’s worthwhile.
An investment in libraries is an investment in people’s awareness of their own place on the map and the world at large, in the broadening of young and old and middle-aged minds.
The spokesman for Culture Perth and Kinross was right. The current provision IS unsustainable.
Because it’s not nearly good enough.
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