Video: Libraries are being closed in Russia
2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55
From 15 to 18 October 2014, the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall hosted the 1st Moscow International Forum “Culture. A look into the future”, organized by the Department of Culture of the city of Moscow.
The program of the event stated that the forum “will feature Russian and international experts of creative industries”: “Representatives of various city institutions will meet - libraries and theaters, museums and parks, cultural centers and music labels, film companies, festivals and art fairs, universities and etc."
According to the organizers of the forum, culture should turn from a subsidized "burden" into an effective means of attracting resources for the development of urban areas. Pearl from the forum's website: "The improvement of the quality of urban life and social climate through the development of territories, industries and tourism depends on her (culture) presence."
At the end of 2012, the deputy director of the Moscow City Library Center (MGBTs) Boris Kupriyanov said: "In Moscow, where there is a monstrous shortage of public places, there are a huge number of libraries that are antisocial places, although their purpose is reversed." What an antisocial place is is generally incomprehensible. Apparently, wishing to emphasize that they are little visited, poorly prestigious, poor. And therefore they are antisocial.
The official also says: "Times have changed, the tasks of modernism have been removed, the task of enlightenment in front of Russia, unfortunately, is no longer worth it."
Further, the distinguished deputy director states: “… There can be two solutions: either to try to make attractive, interesting and modern public spaces out of libraries, or to close them - and leave 20 or 40 out of 480 city libraries. … There are options for libraries to remain as they are, not now.
So will libraries continue to pursue cultural and educational challenges, using both old and new opportunities, or will they solve completely different problems, providing some attractive services to clients who have a far from enlightened understanding of attractiveness?
Typically, neither librarians nor concerned readers are presented with the Library Reform Program. On the other hand, the facts of strange changes taking place in the libraries of a number of regions more and more often come to the attention of the public. These changes cannot be called anything other than the destruction of the library business. Here are some illustrative examples.
In August 2013, in Perm, the Leo Tolstoy Library No. 1 was reformed. Under the pretext of conferring a new status (re-profiling of Library No. 1 into a youth library), 30 thousand books of various profiles and readership were written off.
In the village of Lesnoy Gorodok, Moscow Region, local authorities have changed the leadership of the village library named after I. A. Novikova. And the new leadership demanded to write off all books published before 2004. The "rules on sanitary standards" served as the basis for such an action. Pulling books from the fund supposedly "according to sanitary standards", the management of the libraries is actually pulling out from the public access a whole cultural layer, which will no longer be possible to restore! After all, many works of Russian and foreign classics were not published after 2004. What is this if not a war with culture and history?
Libraries are deprived of the right to form an order for new editions, they are sent unified sets, completely without taking into account the specifics of their work.
“According to the wishes of the reformers, exhibitions on fashion, style, cosmetics, and cars should be held in the library. For girls - a selection of women's, so-called "sentimental" novels, for young people - books in the genre of "action-packed detective" (to put it simply, "mochilova"). We would have nothing against such exhibitions if they offered the reader some unique information.
In reality, such a book "exhibition" is essentially no different from a coffee table in a hairdressing salon."
So, in Vladivostok, the regional scientific medical library is liquidated, for seventy years of its existence, it has collected more than 250 thousand units of scientific publications within its walls.
Pacific Medical University, the fate of the rest is unknown. Together with the library, its branches in other cities of Primorye are closed.
Over the past 3 years, 13 libraries have been closed in Volgograd and 9 are under threat of closure.
During the period from 2014 to 2016, 61 libraries were closed in the South Urals. According to some incomprehensible norms that came from, the Chelyabinsk region should carry out optimization, simply - close 300 libraries. In total, in 2005 there were 875 libraries in the Chelyabinsk region.
In April 2014, the Minister of Culture of the Moscow Region, O. A. Rozhnov, sent an order to the heads of the Moscow Region municipalities recommending uniting children's and adult libraries. This led to the merger and actual destruction of children's libraries in Dmitrov, Dzerzhinsk and other cities. A children's library is a specially organized world that brings up a child, a teenager, instilling in him the necessary knowledge of his native culture and history. Reform of children's libraries according to the scenario of "merger - eviction from large premises - reduction of funds" will lead to the fact that thousands of children will be left without libraries.
The reorganization, and even more so the closure of the library, in the overwhelming majority of cases turns into a massive write-off of books. Sometimes this goes on quietly and secretly, sometimes heaps of discarded books thrown into the back of a truck or (if the books were brought by readers and were not taken into account by the library) simply sent to the trash, fall into the lenses of television cameras, and all of us contemplate barbaric pictures that make us wonder: “Who are we, people of the XXI century?"
In September 2017, about 248 thousand unclaimed publications were handed over to residents of Moscow. For the first time, the townspeople were able to replenish their bookshelves free of charge in 2016 as part of the "Library Night" campaign, when libraries wrote off about 17.5 thousand publications
The number of libraries in Russia is annually decreasing by about a thousand; today their number does not exceed 39 thousand.
In October 2017, the only territorial public library in the city of Omsk, which has a rich history, was closed and closed. The book fund and property is being sold. The Omsk People's Library is the library of the ElectroTochPribor plant, evacuated from Kiev during the Great Patriotic War. The library escaped the thunderstorm of war, worked for many years, preserving the book fund, but could not survive the property conflict - now the bailiffs are evicting it from the premises that the city authorities needed.
I would like to ask, who are you people of the 21st century? What has become of you? Are libraries no longer needed and books no longer valuable?
Video about the closure of the Omsk People's Library
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