Love your local library please!

We have had some hot weather of late and our local library has had more people in there than usual. Yes, it also happens to still be school holidays so there were plenty of children around.

The same thing will no doubt happen once the temperature once again heats up over the weekend and into next week. There will be harassed parents, grandparents and other carers who will head to the library for at least a short time. They will heave sighs of relief as they walk into a cool space and see their charges rush off to the parts of the library which cater to them. There will be at least a few minutes of quiet before they need to help with choosing picture books for the youngest and "a book about..." for the next youngest and telling those who headed for the "teens" section they can or cannot borrow something.

All this will be done around adults reading newspapers, books or magazines. There might be more than one person working on the part-done jigsaw puzzle that is always on the high table in the centre of the shelves...between the M shelf and 700's. In the small carrels on the side there will be people working on their lap tops. At one end there will be people using the public computers or doing some photocopying. You can get water, tea or coffee.  You might find three or four people huddled in a corner and talking to each other, planning an event. 

Look across the passage and the meeting rooms might be full of people playing chess or Scrabble, planning an event, interviewing people, learning French, building robots or just about anything else. (We even have a knitting and crochet group.)

The library gets used. It gets used a lot. Once school begins again there will be groups of children in there for all sorts of events.

I imagine most people who have just read all this will think this is what libraries should be about. Why then did someone tell me yesterday, "We don't really need libraries any more. Most people can use computers. You don't need books. You can read them online if you want to. People who want to go somewhere cool can go to the shopping centre."

Really? Using a computer is nothing like using a book. Yes, I can look for almost limitless information - not always information I want - but it is there on the computer. What is not there is the ease of skimming the page with a finger to find something, flipping back to the index or tearing an envelope into pieces in order to find that page again. I don't want to go into the shopping centre and be forced to buy an unwanted drink so I can sit there in a "cool" but noisy spot where people will expect conversation rather than reading.

I am sitting at a computer right now in order to write this. I suppose I could take my laptop to the shopping centre. I could take a book too but someone would soon interrupt. It is nothing like visiting the library. It is nothing like being surrounded by a comfort of books.