With neither problems nor development

On September 30 we marked the All-Ukrainian Day of Librarians. Still popular today for some reason is the perception that libraries, especially small ones in district centers, are being closed one by one and there is a catastrophic shortage of funds to update the collections. Fortunately, everything is not so bad. According to Tetiana Prokosheva, chief of the libraries department at the Ministry of Culture, libraries present one of the few sectors free from grave problems. They are being funded, their collections are updated, more and more regional libraries in Ukraine open their own web sites with every passing day. This in itself can testify to their high level. Libraries are being regularly renovated; books do not get moldy or fall prey to rodents. Moreover, a program, drawn up recently to update library collections, is now under study at the Cabinet of Ministers.

However, the issue of libraries is too complex to be regarded exclusively as an object of government policies. Libraries include three — cultural, informational, and learning — components, and this makes their field of activity boundless: from lending books to establishing a system of classifying knowledge. So a closer examination will surely display problems which are not so insignificant as they may seem at first glance. Libraries have now halted the performance of their direct function, the public outreach of information. The activity of libraries is closely linked to book-publishing, which has, unfortunately, seen better days here. The point is libraries usually get literature from other countries by means of exchange, so if there is nothing to exchange, books published will never find their way onto Ukrainian library shelves. According to Anatoly Korniyenko, General Director of the National Parliamentary Library, libraries do not currently hold a prominent place in Ukraine’s information space. Even the Internet and the opportunity to use it (naturally, not for free) cannot solve the problem, because the available outdated equipment causes endless problems, and the library staff does not always know how to handle it. “To work to full capacity at the National Parliamentary Library, one must be computer-literate and know at least two foreign languages. But people of such skills seldom go to libraries because of low salaries, so we have to educate our staff on the spot, and afterwards they quit us for a better-paid job,” Mr. Korniyenko says.

Nonetheless, central libraries do not suffer so much from staff turnover. This is mainly the problem of small libraries. One of Kyiv’s uptown libraries told The Day that it has only two full-time employees who work every day practically for pennies. In theory, a librarian should have gone through a preparatory course or graduated from a special university or college. The latter is virtually out of the question, as this kind of college almost always suffers from low enrollment. Moreover, any kind of higher education among district librarians is also a rarity now. Ideally, a librarian is a navigator in the ocean of information, but in fact the librarian is usually reduced to doing paperwork. In addition, the existing “repositories of knowledge” in Kyiv are now plagued by another problem, a territorial. The new district map in the capital has led to a far from uniform redistribution of libraries. This means that from now on libraries will have to share their possessions with new neighbors, while some of them will have to close altogether. The closure of libraries will undoubtedly stir a wave of discontent among the public, for, according to Kateryna Adonina, deputy director of the Minsk District Central Library, the demand for books has multiplied over in the past few years. Naturally, this mainly concerns educational literature. It is precisely in libraries that students read and write the synopses of textbooks missing from school libraries and financially out of their reach. In addition to young students, libraries are also full of pensioners who come here to read periodicals free of charge because they are not in a position to buy or subscribe.

Thus, we can successfully debunk the myth about degradation of the once most well-read country and about its progressing loss of culture. Yet, too few small-town libraries can satisfy their readers with an interesting new piece of fiction, research publications, or Internet access. For the times of public reading rooms have long passed.