Community service

As the Manics famously sang, libraries gave us power - but today they give us a whole lot more than that.

On the one hand, this wonderful Guardian article by Aida Edemariam is celebratory - of the vital role that libraries play in many people's lives, of their function as welcoming havens that bring disparate individuals together and help to combat social isolation, and of the time and energy invested in them by staff who genuinely care about where they work and the community they're catering for.

But, on the other, the bewildering array of roles that libraries and their employees are expected to perform is a damning indictment of "years of cost-cutting [which] mean that the state has effectively reneged on all but the most unavoidable of its responsibilities to the troubled, the poor, the educationally challenged, the lonely, the physically unwell, the lost or the homeless". Nick Poole, CEO of library association Cilip, is quoted as saying "We risk becoming a social care safety net" - but the article suggests that that's already very much the case, with libraries now stretched to breaking point as one-stop shops unwittingly tasked with plugging the myriad gaps in the social welfare and asylum systems.

And the fact that libraries can be "a place to sit still all day and stare at the wall, if that is what you need to do, without anyone expecting you to buy anything" is equally damning, in that it underlines how impoverished we are in terms of freely accessible public spaces untainted by commercial/capitalist imperatives.