Apparently there are about 5,000 public libraries in Britain, which was a statistic that I wasn’t aware of until I saw the BBC report about the Libri report (which I’d link to, but the site is using frames, ick) saying that they’re in terminal decline. Apparently we’re staying away in droves – half the numbers of 1984, and if this trend continues the last one will close its doors in 2024.
Which all seems like good, solid, alarmist stuff from a single-issue pressure group, and was rejected by other interested parties whose links I’ve lost in the bottomless pit of electrons that is my filing system. It certainly doesn’t match with my experience of places like Leeds and York – any time I’ve been in either they’ve been heaving, and the clientele aren’t all gentlemen of a certain age with interesting views on personal hygiene.
I’m not sure I’d go along with the argument that they’re becoming irrelevant – they’re my prime source of DVDs for example, and York seems to manage a pretty eclectic selection of music CDs as well. What’s interesting is the different approaches that the two places take – if you want a vast selection of paperback fiction, then the City Central library in Leeds is the place to go, but its collection of IT-related titles is pretty dire – nothing much since 1997 on anything other than Cobol. York on the other hand is giving Borders a run for its money in terms of the IT titles that it’s got shelved there – in the past few weeks I’ve seen stuff on PHP, the latest version of Dreamweaver, Linux, Mac OS X, Win XP etc etc etc. But whoever it is in York who’s responsible for science fiction has obviously got themselves severely confused between science fiction and fantasy. If there’s a epic-quest-in-mysterious-lands-where-hero-cleaves-dragons-in-twain series written in the last twenty years, then York’s got three of ‘em, but would seem to subscribe to the view that science fiction doesn’t get much beyond C for Clarke, Arthur C.
Incidentally, is it just me, or have Leeds City Council taken this whole website accessibility thing a bit too far? Since the latest redesign it’s looking less like a website and more like a multicoloured shopping list with obfuscated URLs…
