One girl wrote: Libraries rock!

Of course they do, but they will only rock if there’s money to buy new books, to provide training, so staff will have the confidence to interact with readers, to employ passionate, newly qualified librarians.

Without money, libraries become sad and tired. Without an adequate book fund, the new authors get left out, so does the quirky, the innovative, the difficult. And if libraries don’t support these writers, publishers won’t commission them.

Without money, libraries are tempted to buy what is certain to issue – and that’s the material that you can find in every supermarket, the best sellers, the easily promoted.

Libraries aren’t supermarkets; they’re places of cultural importance, where magic happens and where dreams begin. Or at least they should be.

Crime novelist Anne Cleeves writing in the Yorkshire Post, 4th February 2012.

• 3 months ago

• libraries
• librarianship
• national libraries day
• nld12

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