Make libraries a place for books, as well as for communities

What hope is there for libraries when someone in charge of a major public library can write: "Libraries are not about borrowing books" (Letters, 19 March)? As a public librarian, I can tell you that the vast majority of our users come to libraries for exactly that reason – to borrow books. Through the borrowing of books, libraries promote reading and literacy skills, introduce authors to new audiences and supply resources for information and learning. We are able to do the things listed in Blair McPherson's letter because we loan books to the public.

If we ignore the importance of books, we undermine our own arguments in defence of our public library service. We should be proud of the fact that we loan books by the hundreds of thousand across the UK every year.

David Kenvyn


• My local library was the first Carnegie library ever built in England. It is now effectively unusable by anyone wanting to put it to its original purpose. Whole rows of bookshelves have been ripped out to make space for computer terminals where bored youths surf away their days. Another large area has been cleared to make space for classes from infant schools. Large parties of excited children come in to talk loudly about, glance at and fight over the same books as they have in their classrooms. Yet other areas are furnished with comfy chairs and coffee tables where people eat their sandwiches and talk on their mobile phones.

This is what people like Blair McPherson have invented. This might be a community centre but it is not a library.

Steve Illingworth

Haworth, West Yorkshire

• If you'll pardon the cliche, libraries will be a dog's breakfast until directors of services such as Blair McPherson buy more books and stop following Blairite babble about community cohesion. Cornwall has found a better solution than volunteer libraries. Unit costs have been driven down by automation and locating other services like one stop shops in libraries.

Philip Kerridge

Bodmin, Cornwall

• Yes, they are about borrowing books, and yes, they are about housing books. A library without books is not a library, whatever else it may be. If you could keep this basic fact in mind, you might find "inventing" a local library a whole lot easier.

Helen Rees


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