Even with support, public libraries' future in doubt

In response, the city government said that around NT$60 million was spent each year acquiring around 200,000 new books that were shared between the city's 55 public libraries — meaning they now have an average of 2.06 books for each citizen — and that a further NT$150 million had already been earmarked for a three-year makeover of their buildings and equipment.

This, in local-government speak, probably means that the councilors have a point. Who knows? Maybe they were just helping make it clear — or perhaps appear — that the general public is keen that money is spent and library services and facilities are maintained and improved.

But are people keen on libraries? After all, many of libraries' traditional functions are now also done — or are better done — by computers, the Internet and other IT developments. With education, health, housing, leisure, transportation and numerous other public services competing for slices of national and local budgets, perhaps the information revolution is rendering libraries a beloved but costly irrelevance. That will be for future historians to decide. At the moment, the question facing politicians is whether to keep funding libraries, and that facing librarians is to find imaginative and innovative roles to justify their institutions' continued existence.

That libraries have a proud history is beyond dispute. Starting with the private collections of emperors and kings, through the semi-public libraries of religious and academic institutions, to the truly public and publicly-funded libraries of the last century or two, libraries have made major contributions to most fields of human endeavor, and the European and North American practice of providing tax-dollar supported libraries in every city, town and even village, which were free for everyone to use, is a tradition that rightly spread around the world.

And even in the 21st century, while it is true to say that hardly anyone makes the trek to his or her local library to thumb an encyclopedia or check a telephone number in a far-off city as they would have done just a decade ago, it is equally true that hardly anyone downloads an entire novel from the Internet or reads it on a computer screen. So while libraries' reference sections are probably a thing of the past, their literature, humanities and popular science sections still have a great deal going for them. When public libraries in two U.S. cities closed their doors recently, local people opted for a slight increase in taxes to fund their re-opening, albeit with reduced hours.

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