Connection

The secret life of libraries

. . . "If someone suggested the idea of public libraries now, they'd be considered insane," says Peter Collins, library services manager in Worksop. "If you said you were going to take a little bit of money from every taxpayer, buy a whole load of books and music and games, stick them on a shelf and tell everyone, 'These are yours to borrow and all you've got to do is bring them back,' they'd be laughed out of government." . . .

The great untold truth of libraries is that people need them not because they're about study and solitude, but because they're about connection. . . .

The libraries' most powerful asset is the conversation they provide – between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence.