BBC reported earlier this week that the number of professional librarians in Wales had declined by a fifth while the number of volunteers had increased 13-fold. The decline in facilities has not been as steep as in England, but it is part of a national trend. There is little doubt that if free libraries were not prescribed by law, many local authorities would have done away with them altogether.
There is still a place for the public library, if only because of the wealth of material published before 1997 when the World Wide Web really took off. The main libraries are already information centres rather than just a collection of bookshelves. However,, professionals are needed to guide the ordinary citizen. The popular Web search engines by their commercial nature bias their results towards the new and the paid-for links.
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