Libraries Work!, a research report released last month, demonstrates that every dollar invested in Victorian public libraries generates more than four times that value in benefits to the local community.

A public library's mission is access for all. Credit:Chris Hopkins

Yet some writers and politicians have failed to recognise this and, further, have failed to understand what public libraries do. If we allow ourselves to indulge in nostalgic middle-class ideas of quiet places and well-stuffed bookshelves, then we have failed to understand them too. In fact, we have endangered them.

Certainly, once upon a time, a public library was a collection of books. But it was never only that. The mission of a public library is, and always was, to allow whole community access to knowledge, information, literature, and cultural participation. Every single day, your public library aims to provide something necessary or enriching – for free – for you and every individual in its locality. It aims to do this even for those who never darken its door, just in case one day they do. A public library is an instrument of democracy. Its mission is access for all, no one left behind.

Everywhere, public librarians like myself struggle against a misapprehension of what we do. We attempt at every turn to counter a pervasive idea that libraries are nice middle-class havens, a temple of books, not only because its spread keeps the most vulnerable from our door, but because it mistakenly renders a public library as a non-essential service.