Introduction

Libraries are important public spaces through which the social life of the city can be read, like ‘diagnostic windows in society’ (Mehta, 2010: 16) or ‘a barometer of place’ (Robinson, 2014: 13), which can tell bigger stories about the state of cities and nations. This chapter investigates the transformation of public libraries in the United Kingdom (UK) and the Netherlands (NL) during the COVID-19 crisis. In both countries, public libraries were already in some state of crisis when the pandemic hit. Financial pressures, decreasing membership, and digitalization required libraries to reinvent themselves. In the Netherlands, libraries increasingly serve as spaces of encounter facilitating social networks and care (van Melik, 2020). However, being temporarily closed and reopened under strict regulations causes a major setback in the library's functioning as a ‘social infrastructure’ (Klinenberg, 2018). In the UK, the devastating public impact of COVID-19 takes place on top of an already-existing state of emergency: that of a national public infrastructure crippled by ten years of austerity and hollowing out of library services (Corble, 2019).

This chapter starts with an overview of the national pictures of British and Dutch public libraries before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, after which we discuss two important changes in: 1) the library's functioning and 2) the nature of librarianship. It is based on interviews with seven anonymized staff members (three in NL, four in UK) and UK public library worker and campaigner Alan Wylie, who sits on the national ‘Cultural Renewal Taskforce’ for steering library services through the COVID-19 crisis. These interviews took place within the framework of our volunteering-as-research practices that already started in the years prior to the pandemic, respectively in a single library in a suburban context of Utrecht (NL) and a library service including multiple sites in a London borough (UK). Through this data we address the question of what the public library is for, when services are stripped back to the bare functional minimum of information provision, and their vital social spaces and infrastructures are suspended as the impact of both neoliberalism and the pandemic takes its toll on public life.

Crisis-upon-crisis

It is well-evidenced that libraries are essential lifelines for low-income, isolated, or marginalized people (Jaeger et al, 2014), and during a global pandemic such lifelines are more critical than ever.