The Library Book

"This book is in a somewhat similar vein to Eric Klinenberg’s, in that it’s concentrating on public libraries and trying to reignite a sense of their power and function. But it approaches this in a very different way. It’s solely about the Los Angeles Public Library. It tells, essentially, two narratives. One is about the destruction of the LA Public Library in 1987, through a fire. The other is more of a historical account of the evolution of the library and the librarians who worked in it, the kinds of things that they did for their community and what it’s like today. I like the way that it’s arranged with old-fashioned catalogue cards at the start of each chapter, which broadly identify the themes. It’s a little gimmicky in that way, but I fell for it. It’s really well written. She writes for The New Yorker and is an absolutely terrific writer. “The public library is evolving from being simply a place for self-service, to being a place which is much more proactive in communities” Particularly in California—which is a very digital world in the second decade of the 21st century—why would a public library in a great metropolis still have value? Why would its stories still be of interest? The answer is that the stories are gripping: how the LA Public Library responded to the First World War, or how particularly female librarians rose to the top of their profession and became the directors of the LA Public Library in the middle of the 20th century. It’s a great reminder of the power of a civic institution, even though it’s written by an outsider—or perhaps because it’s written by an outsider, somebody who wasn’t employed by the library. This is something that I worry about a lot. You’re speaking to someone who’s written a book about libraries and archives, who is a librarian and an archivist. Are we too inside the world we’re writing about to write objectively and dispassionately? Or are we bringing a sense of the complexity of the role, particularly in the 21st century, that somebody outside might not be able to comprehend so readily? You’re absolutely right, and thank you for picking up that quote. One other thing that’s going on at the moment that I try to address sensitively in the book is that my profession has been through a period where its emphasis has moved away from the collection to the service. There’s a librarian in America called Scott Walter who coined the phrase ‘the service turn’ that libraries have gone through. The main focus is, ‘What are the needs of our readers? We’re not going to obsess about the collection and building it and owning things, or preservation and those kinds of things, we’re going to focus on getting the books to the readers.’ I simplify grossly, but that’s certainly something I’ve lived through in my profession. Something that we in the Bodleian have tried to do under my leadership and my predecessor’s leadership is to try and be much more user centric. That’s the phrase we use a lot. There is a danger that if you’re just interested in preservation or acquiring collections, you’re not going to get advancement in your career because it’s not what the bosses of libraries think is important. In the profession people aren’t focused on the preservation side of things, you even see people boasting about getting rid of collections. They’re moving resources and funding away from preservation in order to make access better funded and resourced. My response to that is that we must recognize what preservation does for society, and I try to use the phrase ‘preservation as a service’. It is not just something that people do in the back room to try to keep things away from readers and say, ‘This is all mine!’ There was a bit of that in the past and I think that’s partly why the service turn came about. There were librarians who felt that the collection was theirs and didn’t mind if it took 30 years to catalogue it. I’ve tried to give talks about preservation as service for communities. We did a project with the Ethiopian and Eritrean communities in the UK, because we have great Ethiopian and Eritrean collections. They were grateful to us for having preserved these things and kept their culture alive in the UK, where they had ended up, and that they can access it. They could see the colors and hear the language again, and it was incredibly moving. So, preservation as a service. That’s what motivated Thomas Bodley to re-found the Bodleian Library. He recognized the losses of the Reformation . The generation before him had plundered the libraries, including the one which he re-founded. He went to Duke Humfrey’s Library and set his staff at the library door “being thoroughly persuaded, that in my solitude, and surcease from the Commonwealth affairs, I could not busy myself to better purpose, than by reducing that place (which then in every part lay ruined and waste) to the public use of students’. He basically disinherited his family and poured all his money into it Yes. Unfortunately, the endowment that he gave the university to fund my post was loaned to Charles I in the 1640s to fight the Civil War and was never returned. It was recorded as a debt in our annual accounts until 1798, when it was written off."