I feel a bit sad about this.

[MathsMadMummy]

my mum is a librarian and told me about the budget cuts to libraries (fair enough, everyone's suffering, no reason they should be excluded) but she's quite sad that the majority of the cuts are specifically from children's services.

isn't that a bit backwards? I thought children were the future, aren't they worth investing in?

not that mum really gets to do much librarying anyway - too much time teaching people how to use computers and helping people do their NHS choose-and-book thing etc... hardly any books in the library anymore

well yes, none of it is good obviously. Libraries are not vital, of course not. But I wonder how many libraries will be re-opened when the country is solvent again. It's a worry that, once we learn to do without some of the things that are naturally taking cuts like libraries, music lessons, free sports etc, will we ever prioritise them again?

But yes, I'd rather have a functioning NHS on balance.

we just have the most fantastic local library & it forms part of our social life - we rarely go in without meeting someone we know. we live in michigan, one of the worst hit states for recession (detroit has entire suburbs which may get bulldozed, so many people have left, there is barely enough money to keep schools open etc). BUT the libraries are all so busy round here - but then, it's a v left wing, liberal, academic area, even the parking meters are solar powered.

"and the Landmark Good Childhood report found that poorer children often had fewer than 5 books in the house and didn't visit libraries."

The barriers to wider uses of literacy aren't only, or even primarily, financial, though. If they were, library use would be higher amongst the disadvantaged, which it manifestly isn't. It's trite to suggest that even in the absence of libraries, you can buy a couple of books in Oxfam for the price of a packet of cigarettes. But given smoking is often held up as one of the reasons why health outcomes are poor amongst the disadvantaged, it's not entirely trite. Oxfam know their own market, and that I was able to pick up three different translations of Sophocles' Theban Plays in my local one a few months ago says they aren't targeting those in desperate need of cheap books.

It's not uncommon to see discussions about issues like this break down into an assumption that disadvantage means benefits and everyone else spends their time reading German plays in the original, but it's obviously not true, and there are vast swathes of the population who don't own many books and yet pay for Sky TV. That's not about material disadvantage, it may not even be about educational disadvantage, it may genuinely be that they'd rather watch football on the telly than read an Anthony Powell novel. Which is a choice. It may be a choice many find odd, foolish and/or incomprehensible, but merely making books available more cheaply isn't going to change it.

In the end you run out of other people's money, and it seems dubious to raise council tax, levied on all, in order to fund making books available to people who wouldn't choose to spend their own money on them. Because unlike opera, parks, roads and hospitals, books have reached a situation where individuals of modest means can row their own boat, and replacing the entire local lending library system with £lots per year of book tokens for everyone in receipt of means-tested benefits might be better all around.

I love libraries, and have been known to visit them when in other cities on holiday, but I'm very suspicious about the arguments around libraries as eternal necessities. We live in an era when books are fantastically more available than they were even a generation ago: the rise of Amazon (et al) and the end of the net book agreement mean that you can buy both minority books easily and popular books cheaply.

Big libraries, reference libraries, may still have a role, and university libraries certainly do. But I can't imagine the things I used a reference library for doing my O Levels thirty years ago wouldn't be better done on-line these days, and for undergraduates and postgraduates journals are now available online, even historic ones. My supervisor says that he hasn't ventured from the department to the library in ten years, and I certainly felt when I used the university library last year whilst doing an OU Arts course that I was paying my last respects to a dying process (and I used it more as a quiet place to work on a Saturday morning that anything else).

thank you for all your replies.

but I think some of you have somewhat missed my point - of course the libraries shouldn't be immune from cuts, and of course things like SS/NHS are more vital.

what I was complaining posting about really was the fact that within the library budget it is the children's library service which is taking most of the cuts rather than all the adult services. that's what I don't understand, as I personally would prioritise investing in children because we need them for the future.

I totally agree about income not being the only barrier to literacy. we are very low income but DD has around 200 books because we ask for them as presents and my librarian book-mad mum scours charity shops etc - I've hardly bought any new for her.

I also agree that just giving people books won't help much. I think it was in the US that there was an experiment attempting to raise literacy levels/enthusiasm where children were given one free book a month until they were 5 - 60 books per child! IIRC, it made no difference so it was binned. what a waste of money!

I wish I knew what could be done to raise enthusiasm etc but I haven't got a clue.

toyko, I agree generally that students etc just don't need libraries in way that we used to - when I was a student in the 90s we were sent off with our reading list of articles every week and used to spend hours finding them and photocopying them - what a waste of time that now seems in retrospect!

But libraries aren't just about access to books - even aside from the paid for services such as songtime etc, they provide a quiet space to do homework, access to computers and, where I live, a focal point for the community that costs nothing for its users. Children from poorer backgrounds might be less likely to go but they are taken there by their schools and the children's librarians regularly go into the schools. It would be a great shame if these services were lost.

"But libraries aren't just about access to books - even aside from the paid for services such as songtime etc, they provide a quiet space to do homework, access to computers and, where I live, a focal point for the community that costs nothing for its users."

Although what you're describing there is essentially a subsidised Starbuck's. Which is not such a bad thing: co-op coffee shops "plus" seem quite a compelling proposition.

Of course there are other barriers to literacy. But my point is that if children's access to libraries is reduced or removed or if efforts to engage children with reading and library use are cut, it will often be disavdvantaged children that are most affected.
Not because they are more likely to use the services in the first place but because they are much less likely to have other ways to access books and computers.

Agree about libraries not being used for study or reference though. I ordered a book for my degree at my local library, paid a pound to have it transferred and am still waiting 2 years on. They don't seem set up for academic work any more.

Yes, but that requires further investment, not cutting services - eg, the brand new central library in Newcastle has a cafe and is a fantastic resource but cost several million. Meanwhile, some local libraries around Newcastle have been shut down, hence cutting off access to those who can't travel into the centre eg, very young and the very old who might otherwise use a library regularly.

Libraries are wonderful places and really should be preserved.

I know they are not as important as the NHS and SS but they say something about our society as a whole.

They are a reminder of our philanthropic past. Like well kept parks in poor inner city areas, they say we care about people.

The libraries round here always seem to be full of kids. Lots of them are using the computors but at least they are around books.

Children are always the first to suffer when cuts are made.

"But my point is that if children's access to libraries is reduced or removed or if efforts to engage children with reading and library use are cut, it will often be disavdvantaged children that are most affected.
Not because they are more likely to use the services in the first place but because they are much less likely to have other ways to access books and computers."

But that's where the research needs to be done, and it's not to the library services' credit that they haven't really done it. Yes, free access to computers (etc) is a good thing, and is on the face of it most useful to the disadvantaged. But are they actually using? Because if they aren't, cutting it may remove opportunity, but it doesn't actually remove utilisation. The same goes for literacy in the large: libraries clearly offer the most utility to children who don't have large piles of books at home, but if they don't actually go there, then the whole thing's a bit of a waste of money. Do people with no books at home take their children to libraries? I don't know, but I'm not convinced there's much solid evidence anywhere.

There are other issues, as well. The claim's often made that libraries, even local ones, offer valuable reference facilities. Is that true? Wikipedia is rubbish, but it's vaguely up-to-date rubbish: if you could construct a metric for "wrongness", which is more wrong, wikipedia or the books of uncertain age and provenance in your local library? I suspect Wikipedia would look pretty good compared to the resources available in a local lending library.

My daughter got a book out of the library about dinosaurs which was clearly written before the Alvarez work on the KT Boundary, which is simply hopeless, no matter the flaws in the Wikipedia article (which is actually pretty good in this specific case). It didn't quite have brontosaurus being too heavy to walk and therefore living in water, last seen in school books circa 1970, but it wasn't far off. It did feature dinosaurs being driven extinct by fast, adaptable mammals, which is almost certainly nonsense.

"very young and the very old who might otherwise use a library regularly"

Might being the key word. Do they?

Community libraries are rarely of use to students/academics - I am a student and can never find anything remotely relevant at my local library, which is fine because I have my uni library and a network of other academic institutions that I can access, as do most people studying in a formal capacity.

I think it's one of the gaps that Cam & Co are hoping will be filled by private enterprise/volunteers, I saw an interesting link here which talks about "Open Books" an informal local library system. Looks interesting, not sure of commercial viability but if economically proven this would be something I am sure plenty of people could/would do.

sigh< I want to get involved in this, sort of. I am a recent library management greaduate. Sad fact is, libraries are not valued in Britain. Full stop. Schools don't have to have them, public libraries are cutting children's programs, and most of the time, 'librarians' are not actually qualified for their job roles, so don't know how to budget/market/promote effectively enough to draw people in. There are hosts of problems.

Public libraries were created on the premise of self education that ALL PEOPLE had access to. The vision should be the same. Libraries are socially levelled...anyone can go, use the services, get help, and become more information literate. Children can have experiences with books, and parents can go for free...literacy costs nothing when you have access to a library.

But, they will die because people don't think they are important...literacy doesn't matter 'they have schools for that'. Sad. Really sad.

Yes, I would argue that the older generation eg, 60+ are very regular users of libraries as are children if the service is local enough and easy enough to use. For example, schools use libraries a lot - as I said, even though our own (inner-city London state) school has its own library, reception children go once a week, hence exposing children whose own parents don't take them. Likewise our local library works with SureStart and the BookTrust to give out free books and offer reading schemes.

And reference doesn't have to be high-minded - I use my library for knitting patterns, cookery books, Spanish language courses, lit.crit. - yes, all available online but the first two subjects at least are better , or at least as well served, by hard copy.

hmm. I do sort of agree about the internet being more accurate overall, or at least more up to date. although when children are young I'm really not sure that matters very much, unlike when you're doing a biomedical science degree or whatever and therefore need cutting-edge research.

what I mean is, I think it's a much more valuable activity to go to the library, browse the kid's reference sections for a few scruffy books on the Solar System, even if there's a few inaccuracies in the books (Pluto anyone?) that will be picked up on by a decent teacher. the child can learn so much about consolidating/rewriting/condensing information etc that they are unlikely to learn from sitting at home tapping 'solar system' into Google and printing off a few pages.

this may be going into a different issue now but the rise of the internet is surely exacerbating the demise of the library/books in general. makes me really sad.

"I think it's a much more valuable activity to go to the library, browse the kid's reference sections for a few scruffy books on the Solar System, even if there's a few inaccuracies in the books (Pluto anyone?) that will be picked up on by a decent teacher"

Or, alternatively, you could pick up a similarly scruffy book about evolution and it would be significantly wrong in ways that a decent teacher would find hard to unpack (certainly at primary level). Pluto's problematic status is not a matter of fact (it's still the size it was, where it was), it's a matter of nomenclature. There are any number of issues in evolution which have changed or been radically questioned in the past twenty years (to take simple examples: what's the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans? Why did dinosaurs die out? Where do birds come from? How do species arise?) and it's silly for children to be taught things that we're now pretty sure are wrong, or at least a great deal more complex, for want of recent books.

yes, but at primary level learning HOW to learn is more important than learning exactly how the dinosaurs died out etc. IMO.

my stepdaughters barely have a clue how to use a book to learn something because from the start at school they have been explicitly told to use the internet for all their research. their new secondary school is the same, it's all about computers, books have no value.

obviously I don't dispute that having up to date books is important - and hey, maybe we would have more if people placed more importance on books.

"my stepdaughters barely have a clue how to use a book to learn something because from the start at school they have been explicitly told to use the internet for all their research. their new secondary school is the same, it's all about computers, books have no value."

Have you challenged the school about it? My children's school has a very well resource library with decent librarians, and teaches the use of books as a key part of study skills.

"learning HOW to learn is more important than learning exactly how the dinosaurs died out"

It is. But are primary school children in a position to critically assess books, which is one of the key skills? And fundamental misconceptions are very, very hard to shift, which is why people shouldn't learn from books that are wrong. Quick: tell me why the sky's blue. I bet (unless you're a physicist) that the answer's something you were told at primary school.

yep, the school is just shit in every way TBH. if DH had any say they would've moved by now.

I'm probably coming across as a bit of a dinosaur myself, I'm such a traditionalist

I'm not saying there's no place for the internet BTW I just feel that if books were more valued then we WOULD have more up-to-date ones anyway! kids must be taught to use all types of resources and critique them - my DSDs haven't learnt this, they just take wiki as gospel

I don't really know why the sky is blue... but I know how to find that information either by internet or from a book

This is why a qualified librarian is a good thing, Maths...I am trained to help kids to EVALUATE their sources...not just find information. I TEACH them how to use google as a tool, same as I teach how to use books. Both have equal value, and in one lesson with students, both can be equally as accurate (or inaccurate), and quick.

Just because information is on the internet does not mean it is MORE accurate than info found in a book.

"kids must be taught to use all types of resources and critique them - my DSDs haven't learnt this, they just take wiki as gospel"

Which is a stupid as taking books as gospel. Worse, because publishers usually provide some vague quality filter.

"but I know how to find that information either by internet or from a book"

Except a lot of the books are written by people who don't know. Like this one. The wikipedia article is, on this occasion, bang on. I've not yet seen a book aimed at children which doesn't have multiple problems (in the book I've cited, the trick isn't finding the mistakes, the trick is finding the things that aren't wrong).

yes, I get that, and I know that you shouldn't take books as gospel either. I just think it's not as important at such a young age as fostering a love of books and not fostering an utter dependence on google.

" I just think it's not as important at such a young age as fostering a love of books and not fostering an utter dependence on google."

Quite so. Which, as a parent, isn't too hard, is it?

But be honest, when you need to find something out, do you (a) pop down to the reference library, figure out the Dewey/Library of Congress class mark for your topic, pull a few likely books from the open shelves and request something else from the stacks, and start ploughing the indexes or (b) whack a query into Google or, if you have access to it, your local university's library keyword search? There comes a point where teaching children to use books for straightforward factual queries - and, to be clear, my house has rooms that are unnavigable owing to the piles of books, and I have crates of books in the utility and the garage, and the children are encouraged to rummage - smacks of teaching them how to process 35mm black and white film in a hand-tank: morally uplifting, but not really the point.

of course I'd do (b) when it's a quick question but when I was still studying essay-requiring topics it was all from books (I'm 23 so most of my peers were internetting for everything). or if there was something I wanted to learn about in depth, I would be using books.

again I'm not disputing the usefulness of google et al! far from it. but a problem has arisen in our culture, IMO/E, whereby googling has become the norm, so much so that children sometimes don't know how to use books for research. if they grow up with computers as the norm, they are quite unlikely to want to then start researching from books because is it slow and too much effort. it is much better to go the other way round surely - get them good at reading/critiquing/consolidating info from books first, then they can learn how to search the internet properly.

"Which, as a parent, isn't too hard, is it?"

indeed. in my family, books are very important and that attitude is already rubbing off on my DD
but to return to the subject of my OP, for a lot of parents it is too hard. my DSDs are a prime example again (as they live with their mum)!