THE ARTS: Ireland's libraries are keeping step with the times to offer a surprising range of services, from the Internet to DVDs, writes Arminta Wallace
How long is it since you've paid a visit to your local library? Weeks? Months? Years? If you still harbour fond memories of a dark, cluttered, chaotic place smelling of dust and old books, you should check it out. You may be in for a shock.
Public libraries are changing as Ireland is changing. Not, perhaps, as much as librarians would like them to; the funding isn't always available for that.
Last week, however, the Library Council and the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government unveiled a cultural heritage website, www.askaboutireland.ie. The first step in a planned countrywide digitisation programme for public libraries, it offers access to an astonishing wealth of local history material from your living room.
In libraries themselves, meanwhile, there is now a noticeable emphasis on a range of electronic media: audiobooks, CDs, DVDs. Clearly, the library service is keeping abreast, if not actually ahead, of the new-technology posse. But does all this snazzy new stuff mean that good old-fashioned books are being reduced to second best?
Many of our most successful writers say their interest in books was triggered through childhood visits to libraries. Is all that about to change? Time to pay a few visits.
Blanchardstown Public Library is Ireland's biggest; a soaring glass-fronted structure, it forms part of the Civic Centre, which also houses Fingal County Council. Next door is the glittering Draíocht Theatre; across the road is the consumer paradise known as Blanchardstown Centre. The range of activities at Blanchardstown library is dizzying. A notice board offers everything from English lessons for foreign nationals to genealogy lectures and start-your-own-business talks - and as the library is open between 10 a.m. and 8.30 p.m. from Monday to Thursday and between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays there's plenty of time to browse.
In one corner is a colourful junior library that encourages reading, story-telling and crafts. "The floor is tiled, so the kids can make as much mess as they like - and they do," says senior librarian Dermot Bregazzi. A row of pint-sized sinks helps with the clean-up afterwards, while a soundproofed ceiling insulates the fun and games from the boffins engaged in serious research on the floor above.
The library's design is open-plan with a bright, blond-wood vibe, but there is also a self-contained lecture room and a "cyberskills" room with 20 PCs set up for training sessions. You can borrow a Mark Rothko print for your bedroom or browse in the CD lending section, where Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis nestle next to Westlife and Los Van Van. Last year, says Bregazzi, some 400,000 people used the library, with 90,000 booking one-hour Internet sessions and everybody else borrowing some 365,000 items between them.
"We have a big catchment area, because people who work in the centre travel from all over the place," he says. "Foreign nationals tend to use the Internet PCs to keep in touch with their families via e-mail - and we also have fax facilities, of course." Upstairs, the reference library is impressively endowed with maps, encylopaedias and periodicals. "But it's still mostly about books," he says, pointing to a pie chart which shows that some 80 per cent of the library's activity is book-related. Blanchardstown is proud of its book selection, especially its well-stocked art and Irish-language sections. Inevitably, however, books, too, are moving into cyberspace - when you borrow one, you can, if you wish, renew it online.
Online access is also a priority at the Dublin City Library and Archive on Pearse Street. Once a small branch library, this listed turn-of-the-century building has been extensively refurbished to include purpose-built archive storage facilities. "We have a research library coupled with the city archive for the first time," says Dublin City librarian Deirdre Ellis-King. "The Dublin and Irish studies collections encompass newspapers, manuscripts, early printed books - all sort of ephemeral material related not just to the greater Dublin area but also to the rest of Ireland. The city archive is the institutional record of the city, which goes back 1,000 years.
"We have a reading room with 100 spaces - and we have a cafe, because even people doing research need to take a break every now and again. It's an amazing addition to the cultural infrastructure of the city."
For all their apparent trendiness, however, she says these - and other glamorous new additions to the library service - are simply doing what public libraries were designed to do. "The origins of the public libraries lay in facilitating lifelong learning, and that still would be the main focus of library effort: trying to encourage people to develop in a personal sense." In the current social climate, there is inevitably a focus on computer and Internet skills. "But at the other end of the scale we have something like 29 reading groups working with library staff, so you have the two things working together. We think that reading and discussing books is very important - reading fiction, for example, expands people's horizons, encourages them to rise above ordinary day-to-day existence. What we're trying to do is provide the tools for learning - and the more we can encourage people to find things out for themselves, the better."
This means all sorts of people, from second-level students working on research projects for the new history syllabus to foreign nationals who want to improve their conversational English. At Pearse Street, work has also begun on an oral archive, a determined attempt to preserve the stories of ordinary Dubliners before the city changes beyond recognition.
A strong sense of place is also characteristic of much of the work being done in libraries outside Dublin. Annette Kelly of the Library Council, the advisory body for the Government and public library authorities in Ireland, believes that, in order to be effective, projects that involve the Internet must be as people-centred as possible. "People will use the Internet if there's something that they want to use the Internet for," she says. "We have a project called Agora which will allow communities to develop their own websites.
"For example, look at Ardkeen. It was a small suburb on the outskirts of Waterford. It's now 8,000 people, most of whom have no connection with Ardkeen or Waterford. They have a brand-new library there, and what we're going to do is get community leaders - the local art group, the GAA, anyone who'll work with us, really - to put up their own content. The hope is to develop homework clubs, reading groups, all sorts of things, and to build up a sense of place, not just from the area as it is now but also from its history."
On a national scale Askaboutireland.ie has a role to play by making local history available to a wide audience. The result of a six-month pilot project that it is hoped will lead to extensive online developments, including quizzes and games for children, the site's main feature at present is a presentation called The Big House Experience, but it also acts as an Internet portal, offering links to libraries, museums and archives across Ireland. "Every time a local authority puts up a site, we're looking at it, going, 'That's amazing'," says Joan Ward-Vos of the Library Council's project team. "The material is incredibly interesting and varied. It ranges from what you might think of as elite historical families, like the Gore-Booths, to all the little people of history." Two pictures sum up the gap: a portrait of Eva and Constance Gore-Booth, dressed in identical ethereal white, posing confidently for an advertisement for Drumcliffe Creamery, and a shot of the gardening staff from Heywood House at Ballinakill, Co Laois, in 1905: rows of men in cloth caps and V-neck sweaters, gazing at the camera in anonymous silence.
If the report produced by the Ask About Ireland project is correct, library staff can be trained to carry out digitisation programmes with a minimum of money and fuss - so virtual collections are, it seems, here to stay. In real life, however, there is no limit to what can be achieved with a little imagination and plenty of dedication; and while the Internet will almost inevitably come into it somewhere, the focus doesn't have to be totally or even primarily high-tech.
Last year, branch libraries in Longford joined forces with teachers in the area to bring fifth-class children together for a group workshop in creative writing. "It actually worked quite well, although you would have imagined it would be chaotic," says Fergus Kennedy, arts officer for Co Laois. "But anyway, it gave us the idea of using branch libraries as a focal point for the development of children's imagination."
The initial result of that project was a children's novel, All Because Of A Toothbrush, published by Longford County Council in January. This year a follow-up project called Dream Academies aims to take the work a stage further, with the children's work being displayed online on a weekly basis.
"We hit upon the idea of training volunteer facilitators - teachers, young mothers and so on - to work with the children, say, every Saturday morning in the library, getting them to make stories and poems. The whole idea, really is to make a whole generation of Longford children aware of their own creative potential - and maybe give them an insight into how literature is made. Here and there we might find a little gem, and if we could provide encouragement and support to that child, well and good. But if we could create a generation of readers," Kennedy concludes, "it would be a worthwhile exercise in itself."
Longford County Library and Arts Service also runs a website at www.virtualwriter.net, which aims to bring young writers from all over the world together to show their work, discuss recent trends in literature and generally act creatively. "At the moment we're receiving submissions from as far away as Auckland, New Zealand, and Anchorage in Alaska as well as from Ballymahon and Granard and Lanesboro," says Kennedy. "Last week, in fact, we got one from somebody in Tanzania who is from Longford and was surfing the Net in Africa somewhere. But the thing that blows my mind about the site is that it is operated by an editor in a tiny little branch office in one room in a village on the side of a hill in north Longford."
Ireland's tradition of nurturing writing talent through exposure to books via the public library service would appear to be alive and well - and even in a worldwide wonderweb of metadata and e-content the humble branch library is, it seems, a force to be reckoned with.
