The great human memory…

CHRIS BENNETT has been looking at libraries

I VISITED the Southbroom library for the first time and was delighted with what I found.

Housed in a charming building, probably around fifty years old, maybe more, the library has two main sections.

A small side room holds the non-fiction books, a very useful idea. The main part of the collection is neatly catalogued in alphabetical order and has a good variety of books.

The library is now privately run by volunteers, and during my hour or so in this delightful and tranquil place there was a steady stream of people returning books and looking for others; very much a living library.

The people of Southbroom are lucky; libraries all over the world are closing.

Writing in the Telegraph in London last week the columnist Ed West had this to say:

“Even attempts by some libraries to lure in kids, the poor and other officially favoured demographics by filling their shelves with DVDs have made little difference. The roots of educational and cultural poverty at the bottom of society go far deeper than that”.

Food for thought. The saving of the Southbroom library from closure was a bold effort and the institution is much appreciated by the village’s residents.

However, it has to said that the role of the small reference library is fast loosing ground to the internet, especially in the form of the globally popular Google search engine and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The rise of the smartphone is making access easier all the time.

Some interesting statistics show that even those extraordinary resources have not led to further reading. A recent survey of a well-known UK university’s history students revealed that 66 percent did not know who was on the English throne at the time of the Armada, and 69 percent did not know the location of the Boer war.

This trend towards a lack of interest in history seems to be another world-wide phenomenon.

And what will happen to all the books? Their biggest drawback is probably the amount of space and the controlled conditions in which they are kept.

Will the time come when all the world’s books are on computer, virtual places like the remarkable Gutenberg Project? I suspect no one knows, but I don’t think so.

I fear the world’s history is in danger of disappearing.

There will, I hope, always be places like the Bodleian in Oxford, and the Wren in Lincoln.

The Bodleian Library is the main research library of the University of Oxford, one of the oldest in Europe, and in Britain second in size only to the British Library. The Bodleian operates principally as a reference library and, in general, documents may not be removed from the reading rooms.

Another great name from the past is that of one Michael Honywood, who bequeathed his 5,000 books, including one of only 250 manuscript versions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral; these are still in the building built to house them in Lincoln. It is one of only two of Sir Christopher Wren’s surviving libraries. Michael Honywood was made Dean of Lincoln at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

Closer to home we have the libraries of the major universities of South Africa and the Brenthurst Library in Johannesburg, all housing priceless collections of well preserved chronicles of our county’s past.

If you have a local library, support it.

Reseach: Wikipedia and the Telegraph UK.

CB

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