Library cards as the building blocks of social capital

It is no longer likely that neighbours will attend the same workplace and attendance at club meetings and organised sport is diminishing. In the context of declining participation and engagement, an established institution capable of changing with community needs is vital. Libraries already exist in our communities, with more than one per every 15,000 Australians. They must form part of any resurgence in social capital.

Public libraries can facilitate lifelong learning; providing continuing learning in a context that enhances connections within the community and encouraging civic virtue. They provide meeting rooms for groups, raise literacy levels, provide access to computers and facilitate opportunities for discussion and debate. In most communities they are a valuable and rare, neutral, communal space.

Public spaces such as libraries have never been more needed. Unlike commercialised or otherwise restrictive sites, they are places that promote social equality by levelling the status of those present. Highly frequented public spaces have traditionally been a key element of neighbourhoods. However, as Professor Ray Oldenburg notes (PDF 334KB), “Most residential areas built since World War II have been designed to protect people from community rather than connect them to it. Virtually all means of meeting and getting to know one’s neighbours have been eliminated. An electronically-operated garage door out front and a privacy fence out back afford near-total protection from those who, in former days, would have been neighbours.”

The concept of the “third place” was developed by Oldenburg to refer to the social surroundings separate from the two usual environments of home and the workplace. He states that “what suburbia cries for are the means for people to gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably - a ‘place on the corner,’ real life alternatives to television, easy escapes from the cabin fever of marriage and family life that do not necessitate getting into an automobile.”

Public libraries can be this third place and so much more.

Public libraries represent, encourage and facilitate civic virtue. Ultimately their role is a highly ambitious one. Opening Manchester’s first public library in 1852, two years after the Public Libraries Act was introduced to “raise educational standards throughout society”, Charles Dickens described libraries as a “source of pleasure and improvements in the cottages, the garrets and the ghettos of the poorest of our people”.

Great Expectations and Bleak House are out on loan now, but the 6,000 card carrying members of the Stony Stratford public library are well aware of pleasures and improvements that come from this vital institution. It is a community institution that has brought them together and is worth saving.