Not so much silence, please

For Seamus Deane's narrator in the spellbinding Reading In The Dark, its windows blazed throughout the darkness of Derry and his childhood. For Harold Pinter, according to a new biography, it was "life-giving" in his adolescent years. It, of course, is the public library. Libraries and childhood seem to go together, and a library card has often been the first badge of citizenship for young people. Even today, when the library service seems beleaguered and defensive , a new study has shown that, while adult fiction issues have declined, children's issues rose by a remarkable 21% in the period between 1989 and 1994.

New research from Sheffield University also confirms this continued attachment to libraries among children and young people. An investigation into young people's use of town centres showed that, apart from general shopping trips, the library was the most popular of all places visited. The report of a Department of National Heritage working party, Investing In Children, makes a clarion call to take the library needs of young library users children even more seriously. Children's librarianship has always been one strength of the service, in spite of tabloid myths about librarians removing books from shelves for reasons of political correctness. In the real world, Birmingham libraries recently pioneered a Centre of the Child, offering facilities for parents and children that are friendly, accessible, educational, recreational - and all free. It's a great success.

Such levels of popular loyalty should stand the library service in good stead as Labour and Conservative leaders compete with promises of access for all in the wired society. A current bid to the Millennium Commission aims to attract money to put all public library services on the Net.

Yet librarians remain depressed. They still feel that nobody loves them. And, in a way, they are right. While a minor falling-out at a fringe theatre can make national news, discussion of library policy and funding seems enveloped in a wall of silence, apart from unease that libraries open for shorter hours and spend less on books. Both these impressions are true, although the difference in quality from area to area has as much to do with management and politics as money.

Yet no other public or commercial institutions has anything like the same cultural reach. Some 58% of the population claim to hold a library ticket, and 40% claim to use a public library regularly. W H Smith or Waterstones would kill for that market share. Libraries are often the first place that new immigrants feel secure enough to visit as they tentatively move into the public realm. They are uniquely popular with both men and women, young and old, black and white, rich and poor.

So why does the service remain politically and culturally invisible? Perhaps there isn't a single explanation for this anonymity. My own hunch is that it has to do with the chameleon-like nature of libraries, which merge into their communities so successfully that they disappear.

This assimilation may seem unremarkable, but it's a real achievement. We cannot say the same about theatres, art galleries, museums or even leisure centres, all of which present the sort of barriers to access that public libaries signally overcome. Libraries are a service delivered locally; there is no hierarchy of provision, as in other cultural forms, with a London-based "Royal" or "National" jewel in the crown. (Remember that the British Library is not part of the public library network). The best libraries are often to be found in the regions - in cities such as Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham - and so elude the metropolitan eye. Another factor that ensures a low profile is the professional culture of those who choose to work in libraries: self-effacing, friendly but reserved, with not a a luvvie or militant in sight. People trust librarians to be unobtrusive and accepting, a secular clergy.

Librarians will often tell you that people prefer to photocopy sensitive documents such as immigration or adoption papers at the library rather than the commercial copyshop, even if they have to travel further and pay more. This professional ethos, which does librarians proud in their relationship to the public, does them no good at all in a culture in which cash flow depends on lobbying, self-promotion and the knack of spotting the next funding programme. While you would trust a librarian to help you trace your family history, you wouldn't send one to a Treasury committee to close a deal.

Britain's libraries are just about holding their own in a world of extraordinary change and fragmentation. Yet, as the London study shows, many buildings are in the wrong place (on sites that suited late-Victorian population densities) and are unsuited architecturally for modern needs. The profession is failing to attract new talent, largely because it is unable to offer a high-flyer career structure (librarians, like their books, circulate). Many of the most ambitious library-school graduates now go into commercial information management. Despite this, the best of the new generation of city libraries - Hartlepool, Hounslow, Lewisham, for example - have not only doubled or trebled library usage, but have almost single-handedly reversed the decline of town centres. In an age of lifelong learning, the public library could come into its own again, but librarians cannot do it all by themselves. Other hands will need to help move the public library service into the 21st century, and onto the sunny uplands of political esteem.

Ken Worpole co-authored the recent Comedia report, "London: Library City"