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Internet café model is no good for a public library
• I DISAGREE with Mike Clarke, the new libraries chief (‘We need new libraries worth shouting about’, September 11).
If libraries are to be for “normal conversations and life”, what need for public reading rooms?
Deprived kids in noisy homes will have no chance to educate themselves.
Peace and quiet are necessary for many to absorb, critically, another’s mental world. Migrants, the elderly and women already feel safer here than in most other public spaces and staff ensure a friendly environment.
An analogy with supermarkets is ominous. Self-service, with fewer staff, to advise and maintain an egalitarian ambience? Maximising paid internet and DVD hire, at the expense of non-profit, quiet, study areas? Is this Mike’s hidden agenda?
The internet café model has problems, from the fact that they are awash with food and drink, which is damaging to books, to the fact that they are loud, boisterous and noisy places.
What chance is there for prolonged concentration and thinking?
Maybe Mr Clarke thinks we’re not capable of this, or simply not worth it.
Show that it’s cool to back down, Mr Clarke, and change your mind. Listen to the old pros, who’ve spent lifetimes in libraries, and us, the daily users.
Investment would be better spent on nursery facilities, safe internet use and demonstrations of the unique qualities of archives, reference collections and local studies etc. Most of us have no quiet for uninterrupted thought and study at home. Such city havens are to be treasured, not trashed. They become rarer daily.
Words can heal and within such centres of peace and calm, equality and tranquillity and new, more human-centred visions of the future will form and flower.
LISA AMIT
Gilbey’s Yard, NW1
Silence!
• MIKE Clarke, Camden’s new of head of libraries, wants to make it his priority to get rid of “that whole silence in the library ethos” (‘We need new libraries worth shouting about’, September 11).
Is that really number one on his to-do list? Whenever I go to my local library in Kentish Town, the atmosphere is far from an overbearing, funereal silence.
Fellow users do not cower in fear of a librarian’s hush, decidedly unsilent children play at the front and the place has only ever felt friendly, not intimidating.
I have noted that when it has been raining, my trainers tend to squeak on the new floors, but I can assure Mr Clarke that Camden’s library staff have accommodated even this decidedly annoying intrusion into the imagined acoustic sanctuary which is Kentish Town library.
One gets the feeling that on his appointment, the new head of libraries is concentrating more on raising a racket in the local newspaper than seriously addressing the issues surrounding our library services and the funding they receive.
If we are to have more chatting in our libraries, perhaps Mr Clarke should get out into the local branches and listen to what current users enjoy about the service.
He may be surprised to discover that our local libraries are not really as unfriendly as he is leading us to believe.
CHARLIE MAYOR
Kentish Town Road, NW5
Study space
• WHY not have both? Why not have friendly noise and studious silence (‘We need new libraries worth shouting about’, September 11)?
Your article pointed out that book borrowers are a shrinking band so why not separate the bookshelves from the people who want to study in quiet?
There used to a thing called a “reading room” and, now that schools no longer have their own library space, Camden libraries are full of teenagers needing to study for their important exams, as well as other people of all ages who want to read, study or type on their laptops in a quiet place.
You could remove the reading tables, put them in a separate place, and fill the available space with shelves.
And, while we are on this subject, how about removing the Swiss Cottage branch children’s library to the ground floor with a separate entrance so that the shouts of happy toddlers enjoying the library would not echo round the whole building, disturbing the people who want/need to study?
CLAIRE DESENCLOS
West Hampstead
No phones
• I WANT to say to Mike Clarke: “Please don’t allow people to use their mobile phones in the library.”
It is one of the few places left where I can ask someone not to use them.
Public transport is bedlam these days with people telling their friends in very loud voices that they are on the bus.
I find one side of other people’s conversations really annoying. I cannot understand why they want me to know their business.
I don’t have a computer at home so use the ones in the library and people usually go outside to use their phones.
My library, Queen’s Crescent, is already a friendly place with helpful staff.
“Migrants and teenagers”, from which I assume Mr Clarke means people from different cultural backgrounds from his own, are numerous and seem not to find the place “forbidding”. When I ask for books which are not on the shelves I have always received them.
Please leave the staff to get on with providing a good service.
For me, my library gives the locality a real sense of community.
VAERIE DUNN
Weedington Road, NW5
Quiet please
• I WAS deeply depressed by the vision of the future outlined by Mike Clarke, head of Camden’s library service.
Libraries are, at present, one of the few public places where there is a degree of quiet for reading and thinking. It appears that they are to be so no longer.
Thinking and serious reading cannot take place in a noisy atmosphere, with teenagers playing video games and jabbering on their mobile phones. Schoolchildren themselves often seek out libraries as the only places where they can do their homework, away from the noisy environments of their homes.
No survey of library users has been taken to see what proportion would want them to remain quiet.
The views of those council taxpayers who want quiet libraries are deemed to be unimportant.
So Mr Clarke’s predictions for the future will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as fewer people who read books will visit a library environment which they find unpleasant.
PETER BENSON
Walm Lane, NW2
Buy books
• COUNCILLOR Flick Rea and Michael Clarke tell us that they cannot think of any more books that could benefit the public libraries in the borough (‘We need new libraries worth shouting about’, September 11).
In 2006/2007, according to their published figures, less than 0.6 per cent of the £8.2million annual budget was spent on new books for children to read.
Perhaps the council should employ a new chief librarian and a councillor who do know what books to buy.
TIM COATES
Parkhill Road, NW3
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