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| Alexandra Park library, North London |
To fight funding cuts and closures, libraries have been
energetically trying to prove their worth over the past couple of decades. One
way to do this is by using five categories of experience supposed to
conceptualise informal learning – the kind that happens outside school or
university. (These were developed by the Museums, Libraries and Archives
Association and labelled Generic Learning Outcomes).
As a big fan of libraries, I will now try to use these
categories to summarise what I remember learning over the past two years from
books in five of my local libraries in North London – Southgate and Palmers
Green (both London Borough of Enfield) and Muswell Hill, Alexandra Park and
Wood Green (all Haringey).
Enjoyment,
Inspiration, Creativity A lot. Fascinated to read about the development of
writing from cuneiform on clay tablets to email in Steven Fischer’s A History of Writing (particularly liked
the picture of bird bone tubes incised at regular intervals by Neanderthals
paired with a picture of the ‘pictograms and pulse signals’ on the 1972 Pioneer
10 spacecraft which the designers hope will be readable by any alien life which
happen to meet it). Also: Fischer’s A
History of Reading; Rosemary
Goring’s Scotland: The Autobiography (collection
of disparate pieces written over a thousand years: funny, touching, intriguing);
biography of Amy Winehouse by her father which seemed after a skim read to be a
lot about attempts to help her stay off drugs; Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted
Hughes (an old favourite).
Knowledge and
Understanding Can’t be separated from the above IMO. Felt I was getting some insight into complex physics from Steven
Hawking’s A Brief History of Time
since it was carefully structured, well-written and not too faux-chatty as many
popular science books tend to be, which too often comes across as patronising.
This was fished out of the Alexandra Park reserve collection for me a couple of
times – thanks!
Activity, Behaviour,
Progression Am gradually moving towards a Paleo diet (no refined carbs or
sugars, no dairy) prodded partly by Daniel Lieberman’s The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease which
explains how our hunter-gatherer bodies are ill matched to a world filled with
chairs, sugar, lifts and shoes. It’s also a good read apart from any health
changes it provokes (Lieberman is Professor of Biological Sciences at Harvard)
– did you know Neanderthals’ brains were about as big as ours? Lieberman thinks
they were as ‘smart’ as homo sappy but
not as creative or communicative. Also got a lot from another health-related
book which I would not have seen but for a display mounted at Southgate
Library.
Skills Umm… struggling
a bit here. Learnt a bit about putting a ‘call to action’ on your website from
a marketing book whose title I don’t remember (must try that one day) and the
best way to use your LinkedIn profile (reminds me, must update mine) – from Social Media for Dummies or similar.
Attitudes and values
Neanderthals rocked. The medical profession should focus more on preventing
illness rather than treating it.
None of this will show up on any official statistics (how
can I quantify an expanded understanding of the wonderful world in which we
live?). Perhaps most of what we get from books can’t be expressed simply, let
alone measured. I can say though that the NHS has already saved something due
to the health-related book I read (and subsequently bought a copy of) and might
save more if Daniel Lieberman is right and the Paleo diet keeps people
healthier for longer.
What I particularly love about libraries is the way you
discover things by accident – this doesn’t happen so much on the
cookie-controlled web. It happens in bookshops too of course, but those are
diminishing even more than libraries. And you are more likely to risk reading
something new if you don’t have to pay out. We need paper, we need accidental
discoveries. Here’s to the value of a good local.
PS Library attendance has fallen by almost a third over the
past 10 years – 48.2% of adults visited libraries in 2005/6, compared with
33.4% in 2015/16, according to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. One
hundred libraries closed in 2014.
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| Trinity College library, Dublin |