Scotland gives up on libraries at its peril

There has been an undeclared battleground in the intersection between economic, fiscal, technological and social changes taking place in our society – the library. Once seen as a central resource to a literate society, the debate over libraries has taken a number of turns since.

We may be approaching another, with the news that 55 libraries have closed in Scotland in the last ten years and that only 461 remain. Seven libraries have closed this year alone. But in some ways that isn't even the most eye-catching fact. That may well be comparative spend – in Scotland local authorities spend a wildly varying amount per capita on books, from 50p to £2.41.

The real shock isn't the internal 'postcode lottery' though, its the international comparison. Our £2.41 (at best) compares with £3 in Ireland, £4.24 in Lithuania, £5.18 in the Czech Republic and an enormous £25 in the Netherlands.

Different nations have taken a different approach to libraries. Many saw the changes taking place in technology in the 1990s and started to transition their libraries away from being just book borrowing services and converted them into social hubs with a much wider variety of services, sometimes offering them as a hub for core public services (Finland is a model for both).

Others have moved beyond book borrowing towards models such as 'tool libraries', where library members can borrow a much wider range of items. But all have kept books at the heart of what they do.

Libraries in Scotland have made some small steps in these directions and those lucky enough to have local libraries will have experienced the much wider range of activities that take place in them now. Libraries are increasingly co-located with other facilities, which makes sense.

Nevertheless, there is a strong sense that libraries are at the bottom of the list of local authority priorities. When looked at through a spreadsheet, libraries appear to look much less essential than other priority services. They certainly seem to be at the top of the list for cuts.

There are very good reasons to be concerned about this, though some of the concerns are new. The closure of libraries is coinciding with a devaluing of long-form reading. There are now regularly reported concerns that graduates coming out of universities since the pandemic are increasingly relying on technology rather than core texts when they are gathering information.

Recruiters are increasingly reporting that candidates for jobs are unable to carry out research tasks without the assistance of AI, that reading and summarising or just assessing larger volumes of information is a skillset some struggle to replicate in supervised situations.

The impact of a reliance on increasingly volumes of shorter form media content on attention spans is highly contested. While most people report feeling their attention span has decreased and there is concerning evidence on unconscious behaviours (on average people check their phones more than three times as many times a day as they think they do), the picture is not a simple one.

Nevertheless, there is clear evidence on the psychological merits of exposure to long form writing and we know that reading longer form fiction is good for us emotionally. As we decrease library provision we make a social statement as to the weight and significance we place on books and we make access to reading harder for those on lower incomes.

If we want to balance the power of the social media giants which are feeding us faster and more emotionally-draining streams of short form content often designed to distract but not to hold attention, we need to make public investment in the alternative.

This does not mean that libraries should stand still. Some of the developments in libraries from 20 years ago has not really stuck – their use as digital hubs was superseded by the mobile phone, offering almost everyone a digital hub in their pocket.

But their role as circular economy hubs is increasing in importance. The library model is a crucial response to overconsumption, environmental degradation and resource depletion. They can become the seed of a wider borrowing and leasing economy.

Libraries themselves often offer a place of peace and rest where the pace of modern life is kept at bay. This is a role many people are seeking out more and more. And perhaps above all, libraries are an investment in a kind of cognitive behaviour which is increasingly under assault in the western world – slow, deliberative and absorbed without inbuilt consumption or distraction.

Libraries in the future will probably not be like libraries in the past, because libraries have always moved on and adapted. But we now need libraries to be at the centre of a debate about the nature of the society we are building and in particular its impact on our thinking and cognition.