The role of the traditional “librarian behind the counter” is under threat in a drive by councils to cut staff hours using self-service checkouts. Officials in some local authorities are proposing that libraries can be operated at times without any professional librarians, relying on self-service technology, smartcards for entry and CCTV.

This has been criticised as a “mad idea”, limiting access to librarians’ advice and expertise for the young, vulnerable and many elderly people.

Buckinghamshire council outlined plans at a cabinet meeting in June to save about £550,000 a year and reduce staffed hours by up to 30% with the technology. Library users with smartcards will be monitored by CCTV to ensure people do not “tailgate” into the buildings.

Martin Tett, the council leader, told the meeting he felt “a bit uncomfortable” about the “library flex” proposals, which are due to be implemented at eight county libraries from next year, subject to consultation.

“I liked the old library service,” said Tett. “I liked the librarian always behind the counter. They performed not just a library service with their knowledge of books and literature, but also a social service. I would also say, though, we have got a very tough financial settlement.” He said the council also had to accept “change is going to happen” and the need to recognise new technology.

Officials hope that, during unstaffed hours, community organisations, friends of libraries and council services will use the libraries. They say there is a potential to increase total opening hours by 50% with the new technology.

Kari Dorme, a former area librarian for Beaconsfield and High Wycombe, said professional librarians loved getting to know readers and also acted as a social service. “It is a mad idea. You can’t replicate the knowledge and skills of librarians. I’m not against self-service machines, but the whole ethos and character of library work is being counted for nothing. A lot of elderly people would much rather speak to a human being.

“Councils want to use these machines when there are no librarians, and I’m worried about the security and safety of these buildings.”

Buckinghamshire council says it will implement measures to ensure public safety, including use of the libraries by community groups.

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Self-service technology has been introduced by many libraries to provide convenience for users, but is being increasingly deployed by councils under financial pressure to cut costs. Haringey council in London said in its budget consultation for 2024-25 that it was examining self-service technology, saying that it had “the potential to reduce staffing by 40%”. This weekend, Haringey said it had listened to residents and was “not proceeding” with the technology.

Croydon council in south London introduced self-service last year at only two of its libraries, Selsdon and Norbury, but faced significant challenges. It found “current trends indicate a strong preference from library users for face-to-face services from library staff”, and that the service did not provide access for people without a library card or under-16s, who cannot use the service without an adult.

Croydon found initial take-up of self-service access hours was “disappointing”, and concluded it was necessary to pay for a security guard on site in the event of an emergency evacuation.

Self-service technology is being examined by councils as libraries across the country come under the threat of closure or face cuts in their services. Birmingham city council has announced plans to review funding of its 35 libraries, which could lead to closures, Nottingham city council plans to close four libraries, and Havering council in London is also proposing the closure of four libraries.

Laura Swaffield, chair of the charity The Library Campaign, which supports library users’ and friends’ groups, said libraries were under attack in many parts of the country. “Libraries have a wider role as community resources. We oppose self-service technology where it is being used as a means of leaving libraries unstaffed.

“If you just want to pick up some light reading, or you know how to use the computer, that’s fine. Many people need far more than this. The library is the most accessible front door to a whole range of information and support.”

High-profile writers have warned of the impact of cutting library services. In an interview with the Observer in April, David Nicholls, author of the novel One Day, said: “I get very angry about that. Libraries closing, the way the arts are not accessible. That makes me really furious.”

Clive Harriss of Buckinghamshire council said: “The traditional and much loved library service has really changed and evolved over time. We need a modern library service that reflects these changes and continues to provide face-to-face contact for the people who still value this in their local library. Library flex allows us to do this.”

Croydon council said usage of self-service had slowly increased and that it was now part of a review. Havering council said it already offered self-service technology and was not proposing further investments. Nottingham city council said no decision had yet been made on the proposal to close four libraries. A spokesperson said the library service already operated self-service systems and would examine its use “to help people use libraries beyond core staffed hours”. Birmingham council said its consultation on its library service review was ongoing.

End of the librarian? council cuts and new tech push profession to the brink

Jul 07 2024

Staff in England’s public libraries under threat of being replaced by automated checkouts amid budget pressures.

The role of the traditional “librarian behind the counter” is under threat in a drive by councils to cut staff hours using self-service checkouts. Officials in some local authorities are proposing that libraries can be operated at times without any professional librarians, relying on self-service technology, smartcards for entry and CCTV.

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One might feel short-changed to read a book about death by Sebastian Junger that did not include some battlefield drama. After 1997’s The Perfect Storm, his bestselling account of a trawler disaster that became a blockbuster starring George Clooney, the American writer received even more acclaim for his war reporting. His narrative gifts earned him comparisons with Hemingway.

Sure enough, bullets do fly in Junger’s seventh book, a gripping exploration of the liminal space between life and death. In Afghanistan, he hid behind a meagre holly bush while “bits of leaves drifted down from bullets that were chopping through the foliage over our heads, and gouts of dust erupted around my feet”.

There’s also an account of the death, in Libya in 2011, of British photo­journalist Tim Hetherington, the colleague and friend with whom Junger had just made Restrepo, an Oscar-nominated documentary for which they spent a year at a US army outpost deep in Taliban territory.

But such passages are brief and infrequent. After decades in which he described the impact on body and mind of some of the world’s most hostile environments, it’s Junger himself for whom the bell very nearly tolls in June 2020, in the rather more comfortable setting of his Cape Cod cabin.

It started with abdominal pain but spiralled into semi-consciousness and approaching sirens as “the sky began to turn electric white”. Junger briefly rallied but his wife, Barbara, with whom he has two young daughters, demanded that he be rushed to hospital. “There was something about the way you looked at me without seeing me,” she told Junger later.

It’s in the hospital that the real drama starts. Unbeknown to the writer, he had for much of his life walked around with a “hand grenade” inside him; a rogue ligament had compressed a major artery, increasing pressure on his downstream pancreatic vessels. One of these smaller arteries had burst, causing massive internal bleeding.

A third of Junger’s slim book is therefore a terrifically detailed medical thriller, as suspenseful and pacy as an episode of peak-era ER. I could feel my own pulse quickening as the author’s threatened to stop. There are heroic doctors, bags of blood, and remarkable accounts of the medical innovations that ultimately spare him.

But it’s what happens to Junger’s mind that shakes him most. At the very point he comes closest to dying (and we’re talking seconds away) his father appears above him and slightly to his left, gently reassuring him and seeming to invite his son to join him, eight years after his own death. “He was not so much a vision as a mass of energy configured in a deeply familiar way as my father,” Junger writes.

Miguel Junger was an immigrant scientist whose rigidly rational belief system Sebastian would inherit, deepening the confusion that followed the near-death phenomenon. The rest of the book is an existential quest for understanding, as demonstrated by a vertiginous list of sources that includes studies about everything from limbic lobe dysfunction to “the near-death experience as a shamanic initiation”.

Junger has joined a blessed cohort of people who have seen death and returned to describe it. He finds remarkable patterns in other such accounts, across time, cultures and religions, and dives deep into the links between the work of the great physicists and our understanding of human consciousness (there’s also a remarkable familial link; Erwin Schrödinger, of cat fame, once had an affair with Junger’s great-aunt).

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Some of the subatomic stuff is inevitably harder to digest than the hospital drama, but it remains compelling in Junger’s hands. I found his search for the nature and meaning of death – an atheist’s open-minded grappling with the unknowable – to be at once reassuring and troubling; it would be hard not to read it without wondering what flashes and visions might have greeted loved ones who didn’t make it back from the brink. This book is one reason to be relieved that Junger did.

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“If all images are vanitas, how should we look, in the Anthropocene present, at works from the past? Bruyere reveals a profound disruption in our ability to represent ‘the world without us’ with familiar tools of mastery or closure.”

—Karen Pinkus, Cornell University

“Concise in form, its arguments well crafted, this book reads with inspired conviction. By way of reading the future past, Bruyere delivers a saga and a symptom of the state of things in the fragile world in which we live.”

—Tom Conley, Harvard University

“Timely and provocative, this book deftly and courageously broaches the topic of human extinction while developing truly original philosophical arguments. There is no work that is able to approach the end-of-the-world theme with the pitch-perfect tone Bruyere brings to his discussion.”

—Lynne Huffer, Emory University