New library: lots of new books, but where are they?

I’m sitting in the new Shepherds Bush Library. Modern libraries don’t really do books. Books are certainly knocking around the place, but you get the sense that they serve as waiting room literature rather than the core purpose of the place.

In fact I’ve brought my own books to the library and I am using it as a place to work. Looking around it seems most people in here are doing the same. Libraries now are really not about books as artefacts; they are more about access and use of information. Indeed, this was the case when books happened to be the principle source of information. But I am wondering if an important secondary source of information is being neglected by the disappearance of the book from libraries, namely the librarian.

The first library I ever used was Crosby Library. The librarian at the reference library for many years was a man called Roger and his ability to find the most obscure pieces of information was legendary. But it wasn’t just his primary skills as an archivist and researcher that were important to me, it was also his enthusiasm and his ability to teach me about sources, their provenance and context which was important in helping me learn how to read in the widest sense of that word.

It isn’t that good librarians no longer exist – the good people of Hammersmith and Fulham libraries are excellent and very helpful when approached – it is that with an emphasis on self-study and data instantly available on a screen, the need for and use of an intermediate librarian who can not only find information but help understand and interpret the data, and therefore gain knowledge, is lost. The democratisation of data has not necessarily improved general access to good information. The paradox is that it was the restricted technology of books, making data scarcer than it is today, which meant that we had to engage with each other and find expertise to help us in our search.

This sounds like I am hankering after a time when access to knowledge was a privilege of the few. I’m not. I would just like guidance – around reference material on the internet especially – to be readily and easily available. In fact public libraries in Britain do excel in the online age in giving guidance on family history research. This is a subject for which people still feel comfortable approaching experts. I’m not sure if this is to do with the nature of genealogy or the age of its amateur practitioners (older, acquainted with the skills of librarians and confident in using them). It would be great if kids doing homework on Wikipedia – which gives them ready access to data that was difficult to find in the books and journals in the reference library – had the skills of a good librarian available to help discern its validity and usefulness.