Melville House Books

Will Self wonders what the hell David Cameron is thinking

Adapting to budget shortfalls has been a perennial issue for librarians in the United States since the beginning of the Great Recession. Case in point, just months after New York libraries avoided massive layoffs this summer by cutting services, according to the Wall Street Journal New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has just introduced another sweeping budget cut ($1.6 billion) that will put thousands of public employees including teachers, firefighters, cops, parks service employees, and, yes, librarians out of work and could potentially reduce library hours even more (check out Gothamist for the full breakdown). Needless to say, library administrators here live in a perpetual state of seige.

Not to be outdone by the US, the new conservative government in Britain has just proposed spending cuts that could put a full quarter of the United Kingdom‘s librarians out of work. According to this article in the Guardian by Benedict Page, even though 3.4% of librarians have lost their jobs in just the past year, and more and more libraries are relying on volunteers to pick up the slack, more cuts are needed to rein in deficits.

Some of the UK’s biggest literary stars such as Philip Pullman, Will Self, and Kate Mosse are speaking out against the proposed cuts. Even though the rate of volunteers has grown by over 7%, as Pullman says, they can’t be expected to maintain the service required:

“The librarian is not simply a checkout clerk whose simple task could be done by anyone and need not be paid for,” he said. “Those who think that every expert can be replaced by a cheerful volunteer who can step in and do a complex task for nothing but a cup of tea are those who fundamentally want to see every single public service sold off, closed down, abolished.”

As Mosse argues, without librarians, patrons could feel aimless and exposure to important works of literature will suffer. “Skilled librarians don’t simply say, ‘Go to the third aisle on the right,’” she said. “They can show people where to start, and that is not the same as a volunteer saying, ‘You might enjoy Danielle Steel.’”

Self was characteristically blunt: “Libraries are a cultural resource of universal benefit that shouldn’t be subjected to the crude calculus of cost-benefit analysis. What they should do is provide access to as many books as possible for as many people as possible.”