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Camden’s new libraries chief Mike Clarke with Councillor Flick Rea |
‘We need new libraries worth shouting about’
‘Talking, please’: Controversial vision for traditional service will make them ‘like nightclubs’
NOBEL Prize winner and West Hampstead library patron Doris Lessing said “it is moving away from everything a library should be”.
Camden Town writer Jonathan Miller said: “You might as well turn it into a nightclub.”
But Camden’s new libraries chief Mike Clarke has a vision of what a Camden library should look and sound like, and believes that unless the “silence please” notices are torn down and mobile phones welcomed in, future generations will desert them.
“People expect to be able to carry on their normal conversations and life, and we don’t want to stop them from doing that in libraries,” he told the New Journal in an exclusive interview this week. Mr Clarke outlined his priority as getting rid of “that whole silence in the library ethos and the idea you weren’t supposed to do anything except come in and be very, very quiet”.
Younger users are to be welcomed in and made to feel relaxed, libraries will be open for a further 45 hours each week, and book borrowers – a shrinking group – will check-out their tomes from self-service machines similar to supermarket tills.
Mr Clarke said: “Whenever people say libraries don’t have enough books or the right type of books, I ask them what they think is missing and I’ve never had a clear answer to that.
“Books are very important, but so are other formats.”
And Mr Clarke, who joined Camden four months ago from his prestigious role as director of the London Libraries Development Agency, warned that, without changes, libraries would become out of date and increasingly fewer people would use them. He said some groups, particularly migrants and teenagers, already find them forbidding places.
Also on Mr Clarke’s list of aims are “getting rid of the shouty notices telling people not to do things and putting up notices telling people what you can do”.
He will need courage to push his vision to completion, not least because his opponents have a very different view.
Camden Town novelist Beryl Bainbridge said yesterday: “Why do they want them to be friendly places? They’re meant to be sacred. I bet you’d really impress young people if you had really old museum exteriors with lots of old books and silence. Make things accessible and people don’t want them. I hate modernity.”
Writer Jonathan Miller described the plans as “dumbing down”, while libraries campaigner and former Waterstones chief executive, Tim Coates, who lives in Chalk Farm said the proposals would turn libraries into airport lounges.
But Mr Clarke does have support from his elected boss, culture chief Councillor Flick Rea.
“People who make complaints about libraries are basing it on an older view of libraries,” she said, dismissing them as “purists” with whom she will “never see eye to eye”.
Alan Templeton, chairman of the Camden Public Libraries User Group (CPLUG), cautiously welcomed the changes.
He said allowing some chatting and wi-fi access was “going in the right direction”, adding: “I understand his thrust that he wants to make libraries friendly.”
Friendliness appears to be the key element, as Cllr Rea concluded.
“Libraries are the nice face of the council that provide information in a whole string of ways, through leaflets, the internet, through personal contact,” she said.
“It isn’t just about taking a book off a shelf – that’s what I want to push with our libraries.” |
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