Regardless of the information visitors are looking for, they can easily access it through the help of skilled and well-trained librarians. Therefore, librarians have a significant role in public and academic libraries. Generally, their duties include collection-cataloging, development, reference services, building partnerships with educational institutions and providing instructional lecturers to visitors. However, as many communities know, librarians do this and so much more!
A librarian can bring you back the right one. Public libraries play an important role in supporting education and literacy. They provide countless resources, such as educational materials, trainings, courses, scientific publications, etc. Public libraries provide their services not only face-to-face, but some of them have also integrated e-learning.
Furthermore, several published studies confirmed that public libraries had a tremendous importance in every community by providing various services for educational purposes. Nowadays, patrons enter public libraries to find what they will read next, to ask questions about job applications and resume writing or to fill out government forms, including tax and health insurance paperwork.
All these questions are answered by highly skilled librarians without any charge. People come to libraries not only looking for information, but also, for finding themselves and their communities. Mothers join baby story-times clubs, elderly people attend events and find ways to connect with people. In addition, libraries serve as community centers for diverse populations by supporting non-English speakers to help them integrate into the community. Hence, public libraries often collect books in different languages and hire librarians or staff who are multilingual.
Taxes and levies are a sensitive subject, and helping a community understand the benefit of public funding for facilities is something we deal with a lot. Despite the arguments, it remains clear that public investments in libraries have a net economic benefit. Because of the economy of scale—and the savings associated with sharing and reusing resources—libraries save community residents money. They help local job markets by training the talent pipeline and they provide access to meeting spaces, technology and other resources for civic groups, clubs and neighborhood organizations.
Add on all the other services libraries offer and this is a taxpayer bargain. They reflect the local aesthetic and give every citizen a town treasure of which they can be proud. The librarian will also be speaking on behalf on the library, as libraries are sadly not sentient. Libraries are important because they help societies work toward leveling the playing field. They provide free and, yes, in some cases, low cost materials and services. Given how all people, at least in the United States, are certainly not born into equal circumstances, this attempt at equality is massively important.
Libraries are cold so that librarians have a reason to have a sick cardigan collection. Libraries are quiet? Traditionally, libraries have been places of reading and study—two activities that are inherently quiet. But many libraries—public libraries, anyway—are now seen more like community hubs than funeral homes. Well, depends on the individual community, I suppose. But, generally, see above. Those that are closed on Sundays may have determined it is not worth the money and staff hours it takes to be open on a day that few people in their community choose to visit the library.
You should ask your library, though. Is it a holiday? Library staff like occasional days off, too. You should elect local officials who are committed to libraries and funding them. It is not just picking up a book.
It is the social experience of reading, talking about the books, browsing, comparing what you have read with family and friends.
Librarians are gate keepers in that process. They open doors to new worlds, new possibilities. They ask library visitors to evaluate the information on offer. Most importantly, they give access to narratives. Children and adults do not just need information to thrive as thinking beings, but stories.
Libraries are the temple of story. They are not in decline because of some natural, historic progression, but because of the monstrous cultural vandalism of savage cost-cutting. We will pay a terrible price for the behaviour of our masters. For we remain, per capita, the most literate country in the world — we produce and read more newspapers and books per head than any other nation.
When I worked in Easterhouse library lots of local children came in to do their homework — browsing, reading and receiving help from the experts on hand, rather than sitting at home printing out reams of often irrelevant and undigested material from the internet.
It will damn our country into the kind of poverty you see in third world countries. They can have a transformative power — especially for those marginalized, disenfranchised, alone, or simply open a world of stories and imagination to readers young and old. People with a curiosity about life and the world around them. People who want to learn or escape into literary fantasy, people who like to meet.
People who fall in love. To hack away at anything which is principally about people always seems especially harsh and counter-productive to me. In , voters passed 84 percent of library funding referendums nationwide and 54 percent of library construction measures, according to the Library Journal. They are not only digital hubs which provide people with access to free or low cost PCs but also have a role in supporting people to get online and explore all the benefits that being online brings.
At Harvard, our reading rooms are full. The 85 branch libraries of the New York Public Library system are crammed with people. Librarians are responding to the needs of their patrons in many new ways, notably by guiding them through the wilderness of cyberspace to relevant and reliable digital material. Libraries never were warehouses of books.
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