Libraries: Do we really need them?

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Yes.  I certainly think we do need libraries, and now let's think of good reasons for keeping them.

First of all, what are they?  In the abstract, they're collections of books or documents in various forms (paper, microfilm, and today, electronic documents), but they're also buildings or rooms in which these materials are kept, and in which (or parts of which) there are places where a reader can sit and read, and also places where a reader can browse: the so-called stacks.  In today's libraries, there are also people who are adept at finding information: Librarians; and of course, there are other library users, and programs for younger people and special categories of people, such as those looking for work, or school kids researching a paper.

What strikes you right away is that Libraries take us in the direction opposite to that in which most other modern institutions and technology are pushing us, namely to pursue solitary activities, such as browsing the web, watching movies at home on our video monitors, or engaging in pseudo-social activities, such as FaceBook.  Information is certainly available, even on a mobile telephone ("cell phone"), but we don't have the opportunity to browse, to talk to others who are interested in the same information, to use more sophisticated channels to obtain more sophisticated information and analysis than just a query in a search engine.  In a library, you appear to be on your own, but you're really surrounded with people with whom you could interact spontaneously at any time, not least the Librarians, who are arguably the most peculiar people in our society, both eager to engage with you, but also longing to be left alone.

I think I can make a case for the idea that the browsing in a Library is quite different to browsing the Web.  In a browser, you look up something, and you may or may not find something relevant to what you're looking for, but each destination provides other links, which may take you in any number of other directions.  In a library, in contrast, you see things adjacent to whatever you're looking for, all of which might be interesting.  (On your browser, to mimic this, you have to retrace your steps to the original inquiry, and look at adjacent items; possible to do, but not somehow the same.)  In a library, a book that you might never actually look for may catch your eye; it hardly takes a second to pick it up, and look through it, or leave it aside.  You walk through the library, to the shelves in which new acquisitions are displayed, and you could pick up something you might never think of actually chasing down in an online resource.  Could this be the reason why older people, accustomed to using libraries, might have such a variety of reading experiences, in contrast to younger people who seem to know exactly what they're interested in, and nothing else?

Talking about Library buildings, though, we begin to see some of the problems.  They are typically old, beautiful buildings, whose upkeep is expensive.  I'm all in favor of maintaining old, beautiful buildings, but the question of public support for Libraries is certainly confused by the peculiar fact that so many of them need such great investment in maintenance.  Fiscal Conservatives want to eliminate as much routine spending as possible from the budgets of Government at all levels, which means that as soon as support for libraries is seen to be a mix of upkeep of an aging building and support for acquisition of new information technology and materials, their immediate reaction is to reduce or deny funding.  In other words, it is easy to view a Library as a Money Pit.  Obviously, funding sources for maintaining beautiful old buildings are going to be entirely different from funding sources for increasing literacy or for education and cultural extension.  The way things are, Libraries are at the mercy of having to find funding for both sorts of expenses.

It is probably the case that Libraries habitually inflate their budgets, to attempt to ensure that they have sufficient money even if the request is cut down.  On the other hand, those who control the funding expect the grant requests to be inflated, and so cut down the grants even more than they otherwise would.  Matters are aggravated by the need Libraries perceive to increase usage of their facilities, and so Libraries tend to spend even more just in order to establish that there is a need for them.  Library funding, in other words, tends to spiral into a game, in which it is the Libraries themselves that are the losers.

When a funding agency has to choose how to divide grant money between different libraries, there is a tendency to fund big, well-established Libraries with sophisticated services over small local libraries with only basic services.  On the face of it, from the point of view of objective bang for buck, it seems as though supporting large Libraries with big delivery engines is a better choice, in important but intangible ways, the decline of small libraries is a bigger tragedy than that of holding back on the spending of big libraries.  A small library in a rural town is a more important part of the quality of life of that place than an already established library in a big city.  Why, you say, is it important to enhance --or keep from eroding-- the quality of life in small communities?  If you've ever deplored the drift of population into the big cities, you know exactly why.  To remove resources from small communities is to encourage the crowding in big cities; it's a no-brainer.  People are going to move into the cities no matter what; what we need to do is to ensure that we do not help that trend along in senseless ways.

Libraries are, of course vulnerable to the inexorable decline of literacy.  They're one of the first defenses against illiteracy, and particularly badly hurt when general readership declines.  Ironically, if literacy in a given region is in rapid decline, it is both a strong argument for increasing library funding, as well as decreasing library funding.  Since there are fewer readers, they're not going to need the library as much.  But if the library curtails its operations, literacy will decline still further.  The library is one of the most acceptable instruments of social engineering, behind public eduction.  If you want a literate and knowledgeable workforce and electorate (well, perhaps an ignorant electorate is all to the good, as far as some people are concerned), you must support the libraries.

Let's talk about how Libraries keep their book collections up-to-date.  Libraries continually look to replace older, out of date books, older editions, book that do not circulate, with newer books.  This is the job of the Acquisitions Librarian and his or her staff, for which they have an Acquisitions Budget.  Unfortunately, of course, there are a million idiots out there, spewing out valueless books, alongside fascinating new books that deserve to be read.  The job of the Acquisitions Librarian is difficult, but of course there are numerous "authorities" who are only too willing to make the choices --or most of the choices-- on behalf of the Acquisitions Librarian.  It is probably hard to resist ready-made book lists that a library can order from, without going to the trouble of hand-picking the new acquisitions.  If a Librarian is reading this, they would furiously challenge me to select books from the trillion whose publication they are notified of each week.  "It is humanly impossible!" they're probably crying, even now.

This is probably true.  So the agencies that must support libraries (in the absence of government support) are doomed to have to support the acquisition of books and other materials that may or may not have been filtered carefully by the library staff.  No doubt there is a principle that librarians must abide by, that the selection process must be objective, somehow.  I'm curious to know whether there are inappropriate ways in which the lists that libraries are offered are influenced by the publishing-house equivalent of that most vicious category of criminals: Congressional Lobbyists.

In summary, while I am, in principle, very much in support of libraries for the usual cultural reasons --especially for medium-sized libraries in medium-sized town, as one of the repositories of local culture-- I am getting increasingly suspicious of how well this public money is spent by these institutions.  I know that some Libraries make brilliant use of the few dollars they're given.  But is this the rule or the exception?  Must we fund Libraries at any cost?  How can we push libraries towards modernizing their buildings so that they require less, and less expensive, maintenance, and use energy and technology more efficiently?  And above all, how can we evolve a new sort of library that is less of a burden on public funding, but which still provides the same sorts of physical resources that traditional libraries do, of paper books, and physical spaces for meeting, and browsing, and community activities?  There are benefits in multipurpose facilities such as libraries, in contrast to numerous single-purpose facilities.

Arch

Music of the Christmas Season

All the music that floods the air during the season (especially the shopping season, gotta love it) brings out strong reactions from listeners, usually bad reactions. 

Let me start at the beginning. As a child, my earliest Christmas memories were the most common carols and hymns:
Adeste Fideles (“O come all ye faithful“, from a medieval Latin poem, evidently by a British monk during the Roman occupation);
Stille Nacht, hurriedly composed by Francis Grüber one night when the organ was out of commission, and they had to have carols accompanied by a guitar;
“Ding dong merrily on high”, played on our ancient His Master’s Voice gramophone (phonograph). [Note: “Ding dong merrily on high”appears to be sung to a French (dance) tune, Branslé Officiél.] 

There were also local carols, hardly ever heard outside a 100-mile radius of where I grew up. As I grew older, I found myself participating in actually singing these carols, and since my mother was the local musical impressario, I began to learn unusual carols, taken from the pre-eminent scholarly carol book of the time: The Oxford Book of Carols, edited by the venerable Martin Shaw. To this day, some of those carols remain relatively unknown, and as such the book remains an excellent source for ‘new’ carols. 

Eventually I got old enough to sing in the school choir, and I came under the influence of the celebrated carol festival of King’s College, Cambridge. This influence, felt throughout the Episcopal Church, had both good and bad consequences: the use of boy trebles and male altos, the use of the organ to accompany everything, the use of Victorian harmonies, and a strict metrization of the carols, and the canonical nine readings from the bible. The choir was moderately small, consisting of sixteen trebles, and about four each of the other parts. The director of the choir for many years had been Sir David Willcocks, and his personal influence over the Christmas Carol Industry has been enormous. 

The next, and final, step for me was to be given responsibility for an entire service of carols. I became interested in where the carols came from. They were medieval Christmas dances, for the most part, since Christmas had replaced the ancient midwinter festivals that kept up the spirits of the dwellers in northern climes during the dark, dismal days of December.  (Say that ten times real fast.) 

Romanticism has many aspects; two of these are exoticism and eroticism. Though in common parlance, the word romance is most often understood in its erotic sense (romance novels, etc), the exotic aspects of romanticism is almost as important (e.g. Orientalism, Science Fiction, Egyptology.) Thus, carols fascinate us especially if they are from ancient times (remoteness in time) and from far away (the East, South America), or unusual in some way (Latin rhythms, calypso) or accompanied by unusual instruments. (For instance, consider “Mary’s boy child,” made popular by Harry Belafonte, and Nina and Frederik.) So when people look for variety in Christmas music, they look at these alternatives, since the spirit of romanticism is complementary to the nostalgia of Christmas. 

This post has been influenced by my friend Ileana, who wrote to me deploring the fact that most stores and radio stations keep playing the same songs, until they sound too hacked to be tolerable. The ‘variety’ offerings in the CD market are very dull, and unavoidably so, since the variety offered is relative to the compiler, and, most of all, constrained by the necessity to be marketable.  This means that the contents of the CD must appeal to the widest possible audience, which in turn means that they must be dull, by definition. Dullness in taste is apparently a survival trait in the human species. (The individual who survives to propagate his/her genes is the one who has not been bored to death before he or she can do the propagation.) Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a Christmas collection that one could play through the season, through the quiet hours before midnight of Christmas Eve, to the first few carols of Christmas Day itself, and more lighthearted songs for later in the season? I would like to see a collection along these lines: 

(1) Traditional hymns tastefully performed: O little town of Bethlehem, O come all ye faithful, Brightest and best of the suns of the morning, etc. And let’s not forget Quem Pastores Laudavere. (A slightly more renaissance-sounding version is here.)
(2) Traditional French carols, e.g. Il est né le divin Enfant. Charpentier has immortalized several of these in his Midnight Mass for Christmas.
(3) Traditional German carols: Es ist ein Ros entsprungen (sung here by the choir of the same St Thomas’s Church School at which Bach worked when he was alive); Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (the clip is of an elaborate setting by Bach, his opus No. 1, movement 1.); Vom Himmel hoch; as well as chorales made famous by Bach: In dulci jubilo, Break forth o beautious heavenly light; modern German and German-Swiss and German-Austrian carols, including Silent Night (Stille Nacht), and German versions of lovely Latin carols: O du fröhliche, o du selige; etc.
(4) Medieval English carols: Lully lulla, thou little tiny child; He came all so still; Lullay myn lyking; ...
(5) Medieval Basque, Catalonian, Spanish and Portuguese carols.
(6) Carols from the Middle East, and Eastern Europe: the Cuckoo Carol, the Zither Carol.
(7) Modern carols from other lands, tastefully selected. An example is Arirang, a carol created by Malcolm Sargent from a Korean Lullaby, and Ariva-rararo, a carol in a collection by D.T. Niles, from a Tamil lullaby. Cantique de Noel, by Adolphe Adam (sung by Joan Baez), (sung by Roberto Alagna).
(8) Modern English carols, e.g. The Little Road to Bethlehem (Michael Head), one of my favorites. Another lovely arrangement is by R. R. Terry, of Myn Lyking, with a string accompaniment by John Rutter.
(9) Last, but not least, Celtic carols, and carols of Ireland. Searching for an Irish carol, I stumbled upon the Cherry Tree Carol, which I had always thought of as English, but what do I know? 

If I do not see you before Christmas: a merry Christmas, a happy holiday season to all my readers, and any others who happen to stumble upon these pages! 

Arch, blissfully listening to Schlafe, mein Liebster