“Librarians are turning to the police to recover borrowed books”
This was the headline in a national newspaper. The article went on to talk about how users in the public library treat borrowing as taking and that more than half the collection does not come back to the public library. We really need to pause to think about unreturned books. Does that constitute theft to necessitate police action? In what nature of relationships do we turn to the police? This really is the over riding question that we feel the library – the public library needs to consider.
Relationships are at the stronghold of public services, it is why institutions like the public library were imagined in the 18th Century. In India, it was in the Princely State of Baroda where Maharaj Sayajirao III Gaekwad introduced the idea of a ‘people’s university’ with free public libraries and a focus on the physical building and a collection of books. It was later in the 20th Century that another visionary for library work in India S.R Ranganathan devised a classification system for book search because he found people spent too much time looking for books in the library. From these two stalwarts, the public library has inherited it’s main spinal column. Building – Collection – Classification.
Illustration by Alia Sinha
In order to protect this foundation, rules and regulations naturally flowed into public institutions often leaving the public out of the formula. So, as a library user I enter the public library which I imagine is a space and facility for me but I find imposed upon me a set of rules and forbiddances that immediately make me feel like an ‘outsider’. Our relationship with the institution begins with impositions rather than with trust and a welcoming spirit. And from here it seems but logical that a non-returned book could be constituted as a theft!
But public institutions are replete with people, many of whom are well-intentioned and purposeful and so we need to look at the problem and attitude about books from their point of view as well. We return to S.R Ranganathan, an individual that every public librarian knows well. The five rules of library science written by S.R Ranganathan are simple statements that emerged out of years of careful observation. He noticed that in many libraries books were chained to the shelves and enormous time was spent on preservation and protection, so he coined the first, Rule 1: ‘Books are for use.’ His 2nd and 3rd rules: ‘Every person his or her book’ and ‘Every book its reader’ were simply born from his belief that that every user would have a specific interest and therefore want a specific book, and every book would have a user. His fourth rule was taken very seriously by him. Rule 4: ‘Save the time of the reader’, resulted in him devising a separate classification system as mentioned earlier. His last rule, Rule 5: ‘The library is a growing organism’ holds out the most hope because he recognised that nothing should remain static- least of all rules!!!
However as we can see from being users in the public library, rules are the most fixed thing that there is! Who makes these rules? What role does the librarian have in this rule-governed domain? Can rules change? And why do we begin our relationship in the library with them? The answer or the hint of one lies in looking at how we imagined the public library system in this country. The Public Library system is referenced in the Constitution of India, and comes under the State List, with the structure being drawn from the Madras Public Library Act of 1948. The Act speaks of many things, but collection, which is the core of the library, is not mentioned explicitly. Neither is its management or sharing procedures. These very critical aspects of sharing a collection are left to the institutions themselves. In different states, committees are often set up to decide aspects like selection, purchase, access and so on. But none of these have been reviewed over time and so rules and recommendations are taken from other time periods even in the 21st Century, and those continue to dominate purchase and selection. The rules are fixed. It is bureaucratically cumbersome to change, so we work even more rigidly with them. A maxim from Melvil Dewey in 1876, ‘The best reading for the largest number at the least cost’ is still the guiding principle for the selection of books. Thus, discounts are very important when selecting books. For many libraries in the country the discount is mandated. And so publishers build that into costs with no thinking around the why and what. Selections are often made on print date rather than content. Quite often, book selectors are not readers and rarely in tune with the public, and so funds flow into collections that do not match Rule 2 and Rule 3 of S.R Ranganathan’s Five Laws.
Libraries are public spaces but the imagination that guides the way that the books are shared remains privatised. Once books make up a collection they are seen as the property of the librarian and therefore they need to be guarded. When lent out there is great concern about their retrieval. In many state-rules, the librarian is held responsible for non-returned books. This understanding has cascaded into school and community libraries where teachers and librarians continue to be held responsible for loss, damaged and un-returned books resulting in them becoming wardens of their collections. If I was penalised for every book that did not make it back on my shelf at the time of an audit, or that got left out in the rain or was handled badly, by the third book I would be locking my shelves, chaining the books down and not encouraging any book to leave the premises. And so we now have a hostile system upon us of the ‘fire-breathing librarian’ and the ‘untrustworthy, callous borrower’ and the only way forward is another rule-toting institution, the police!
But what of our ability to foster relationships? Should the public and the institution not make efforts to align themselves more closely? Bringing in the police is unlikely to help, it is far more likely to make users more wary, librarians more guarded and Rule No. 5 to disappear, because the library will not be a living organism anymore. Relationships must begin with mutual understanding. We hope that in some police outpost, there is a stash of library books that are passing hands and are being read with delight and seriousness! And in the public library we hope that librarians are talking with the users sharing the need for timely book returns so that the joy can be passed on to others and that some of these new prospective members are police personnel themselves!
Acknowledgement
This essay was possible because of the insights into the public library system that were afforded in preparation for the Library Educators Course and conversations with public librarian Sairam Anantha, Thiruvanamalai District Library (TN).