Need some help at your local library? Look under A for Amateur

Ed Vaizey is crowing about his untrained volunteer army dispensing books to the public. But read the small print before you congratulate him.
by: Catherine Bennett

Describing it only as "very impressive", the culture minister, Ed Vaizey, has been too modest about a recorded explosion in the number of volunteer librarians, up 44% last year, from 23,400 to 33,000. Admittedly, a simultaneous 7% fall in the number of full-time librarians might look like a slender pretext for national jubilation. Yet this massive saving in our libraries is not merely a victory over Big Society sceptics, but evidence that Vaizey is achieving the unprecedented and seemingly miraculous: the delivery, for virtually nothing, of a treasured public service.

The implications of his ministerial alchemy almost defy computation. It is not just the chilling realisation that local authorities have, for years, squandered unimaginable sums on librarians who are manifestly surplus to the operation of a statutory "comprehensive and efficient" library service. How many other tasks, the public will ask, could equally have been performed – and could be so in future – by the kind of civic, amiable, often elderly people, with neither the relevant vocation nor training, who are now coming to Vaizey's assistance? Assuming, as Arts Council England (ACE) does in a recent paper on "community libraries", there can be no principled objection to unpaid management where only inessential, vaguely cultural operations are at risk from local authority cuts, there must be lessons here for museums and galleries, theatres and green spaces, and any other easy targets to which volunteers already make a valued but peripheral contribution.

At the very least, for the sake of joined-up government, the coalition will want to take another look at a page on its National Careers Service website. There, it is misleadingly suggested, a qualification involving stock selection, education, data protection, management, budgeting, lifelong learning, social media, copyright, etc, might have some value in the book-oriented workplace, in which "good spoken and communication skills" are mandatory. So you want to be a librarian? Simply make your way to Lincoln, Leicestershire or Sheffield where, Unison advice notwithstanding, yet more books may shortly be dispersed, pending disintegration, to the care of volunteers, no qualifications necessary.

At this stage it remains mysterious by what curious arts the notoriously reclusive library hater, Vaizey, discovered that hundreds of Britain's public libraries could be harmlessly transferred to amateurs, and whether there are any basic standards or other criteria to which these random operations should conform. But the minister has done some personal research. "All the volunteers I come across say they are running their libraries far more cheaply than the local authority was doing it," was his response to the above volunteer figures, in which some diagnosed a certain disregard for reading, to say nothing of professional sensitivities. If only for a quiet life, Vaizey might want, before opening his mouth in future, mentally to substitute the word "Romanian" for "volunteer".

As it is, so far from regretting the rapidly falling number of already low-paid full-time staff, Vaizey anticipates a day when the free community model is actively preferred, not only as a euphemism for eventual closure. He told a newspaper: "We would at least do the work for them in terms of sourcing the equipment – we can provide them potentially with access to our book stock."

Potentially there could still be difficulties with entirely untrained librarians with no understanding of the books over which they might (stock permitting) preside, but this objection, too, Vaizey has anticipated. "We can provide them with training, and a lot of these community groups would happily pay for them if they were raising money."

Potentially, then, in potentially less affluent communities, the absence of such training might be, potentially, to the detriment of users needing book advice, personal support and, quite often, careful management, in a library system that now seems to lack any direction whatsoever. The attraction of warm, friendly reading rooms to lonely, difficult or disturbed people – those public elements that can make libraries so unappealing to their prosperous detractors – might rapidly become a deterrent to some volunteers, not that there appears much guarantee, aside from a CRB check, of their own credentials.

Although there is no record of members of his ever-expanding army of amateurs being more likely than the professional version to respond to, say, lisping requests for Fairy Magic with copies of American Psycho, or to commend to GCSE history students the gospel that is Mein Kampf, there is every reason, as many eminent writers have argued, to worry about missed opportunities to engage readers in ways that are standard in any decent bookshop. Even the strange "Mood-boosting" fiction list promoted by Vaizey's department is an acknowledgement that libraries might, with the potential of their contents to change lives, be about more than cheapness.

"Does he think the job of a librarian is so simple, so empty of content that anyone can step up and do it for a thank you and a cup of tea," Philip Pullman asked, after Oxfordshire county council's leader called for library volunteers. Forget Oxfordshire county council: having fully considered Pullman's point, both ACE and Vaizey would like to know who said anything about tea.

In one of her first statements as children's laureate, in which role she declared that she would "bang the drum" for public libraries, Malorie Blackman recalled how she "lived" in the library as a child, reading The Silver Chair 15 times over. Today, without accountability, no one in this fractured service would be in a position to correct a volunteer who had never heard of CS Lewis, or who suppressed Pullman for religious reasons, or who believed, in common with many from the iPad-owning classes, that physical books are dead. One lead volunteer told a critic of his rural service: "Libraries should provide what people want, and that is IT not books".

But even in IT, no disrespect to community librarians who never aspired to collaborate with Vaizey's increasingly Potemkin service, there are shortcomings, of which they are aware. In Dorset, a volunteer manager detailed problems destined to be exacerbated as the already basic equipment that volunteers inherited becomes obsolete. "Volunteering," she wrote in a letter to Public Libraries News, "by its very nature, is largely undertaken by the retired… Many, like me, are by no means comfortable on computers once we are beyond the boundaries of emails, looking up something on the web and sending the odd photo or two."

In the short term, this might be less of a problem than the embarrassment, anticipated in smaller community libraries, of ordering from a local volunteer with a hazy grasp of data protection a title such as Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Overcoming Binge Eating, or Break Free from OCD. All the above, with many other frank self-help titles, feature on Books on Prescription, a collaboration between GPs and libraries – and 33,000 volunteers. Is the service confidential? Totally, of course. But if in doubt, just ask the untrained and inexperienced librarian at the desk.

from: Guardian