Libraries in crisis

It's a problem everywhere, it seems -- though the situation in older American cities gets rather complex where the "public" library system is actually a private nonprofit:

When David Lammy, the culture minister, wrote to local authorities at the beginning of the year, urging them to keep public libraries open, about 50 were threatened with closure. His words, supported by no more tangible help, seem to have had a negative effect, for today the figure is more than 100, out of a total of just over 3,000. This is a crisis.

Councils, more heavily reliant than ever on central government funding, flounder in attempts to balance their budgets. First, they closed public lavatories; now it is the turn of public libraries, as an "easy option". Yet nothing could be as harmful to the people that councillors purport to serve.

Even in areas such as Buckinghamshire, where villagers have volunteered to take on the running of their libraries, they have done so with the galling knowledge that the proportion of the council budget spent on libraries has fallen by 60 per cent in the time that council tax has risen by 140 per cent.

Posted by David on June 14, 2006 10:49 AM