The Guardian view on the future of libraries: an old question of human dignity in a new form

Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty

“Libraries gave us power,” sang the Manic Street Preachers in the opening line of their 1996 hit, A Design for Life. It was a customised version of an inscription that their lyricist and bassist Nicky Wire had spotted above the entrance to a Victorian library building in Pill, a neighbourhood in Newport in south Wales.

Pill library has since been repurposed, but the lyric has travelled around the world. In 2009, it was inscribed on a commemorative plaque at the opening of the new Cardiff central library, at which the Manics were invited to perform. “The weight of those almost Orwellian words became intertwined with an idea about what the miners had given back to society when they built municipal halls and centres across the country – beautiful looking institutes that they proudly left for future generations,” said Wire.

Hundreds of local libraries have closed since then, but the invocation of them as a badge of civic pride, and of reinvestment of hard-earned capital in the wellbeing of communities, is as valid as it ever was – even though many now use them as much to access the internet, meet friends, or simply to keep warm, as to borrow copies of Animal Farm or 1984.

The threats to libraries have for a long time been a shape-shifting army of demons advancing on all fronts. On one flank came the proliferation of discounting deals between publishers and booksellers, making buying books cheaper; on another, successive governments have borne down on the local authorities that are largely responsible for funding them. Some even argue that the digital word is so ubiquitous, and so well-served by search engines, that who needs bricks and mortar, paper copies or librarians at all any more?

October’s cyber-attack on the British Library, randomly unfortunate though it may have been, offers a timely warning about assuming that the future of libraries is online. The attack has so far closed it down to all but in-person visitors for two months. The good news is that from Monday, access to the library’s main catalogue, and key collections that are not available anywhere else, will be restored. The bad news is that it will take time for the rest of the collection to get up and running, in a systems rebuild the total cost of which is yet unknown but is likely to eat up a sizeable proportion of its reserves.

So many scholars will still have to visit in person, and consult real librarians, to track down research material. “It has been a sobering couple of months … and what happened to us in October has implications for the whole collections sector,” wrote the British Library’s chief executive, Roly Keating, last week. The immediate implication is that no library in the world is safe until cybersecurity catches up with new generations of criminals.

The global democratisation of information that digitisation of the great libraries has enabled in the last decade is both impressive and progressive. But criminals are not the only threats: online access is vulnerable to everything from wars and hostile regimes to power outages. So, too, are buildings filled with books, and people to track them down. To keep their millennia-old place as bastions of civilisation, both grand scholarly institutions and humble community libraries must be financially supported to continue offering both. Take it from A Design for Life: “What price now / For a shallow piece of dignity”?