16 LISTENER OCTOBER 13 2018
LITERACY THREAT
‘T
he only thing that you abso-
lutely have to know,” said
Albert Einstein, “is the loca-
tion of the library.”
In Christchurch, that will be the
easy part. At night, Tūranga, the new
$92 million central library, glows
golden above the pitted Wilson’s car
parks and the endlessly dark Cathedral
Square. By day, the striated aluminium
facade reflects the folded nature of the
nearby Port Hills, all tawny grass and
sudden shadows in an otherwise muted
cityscape.
The location of the books may not be
so obvious.
Open for business from October 12,
Tūranga will invite the expected 3000
visitors a day into a spacious, noisy,
10,000sq m civic hub. It features a
cafe, a 200-seat community arena, two
robotic caddies transferring returned
items to the processing area and a huge
$1.2 million 7m-long interactive touch-
screen wall where users will be able to
swipe through a virtual montage of
the city’s history. Upstairs, library users
will find activity rooms, a video-editing
suite, facilities for crafts, 3D printing,
an exhibition space, study spaces,
meeting rooms, a large children’s play
area laid out beneath a multicoloured
cloudscape of LED lights, outdoor ter-
races looking out to Maukatere/Mt Grey
to the north and towards Aoraki/Mt
Cook in the west.
And yes, there will be books –
180,000 of them, retrieved from two
temporary libraries and two storerooms
where they have been housed since the
Canterbury earthquakes. Where booksChristchurch
book-lovers’
new home
One compensation
of the city’s quake
ordeal is its state-of-
the-art library.
We borrow books ...
A
gain, not as much as we used
to. The number of active public
library members – those who
have used a public library in the
previous two years – has grown from
1.3 million in 2014/15 to 1.6 million in
2016/17. Weekend opening hours are
longer and the number of e-books and
children’s books issued has risen, but
the number of books issued overall fell
from 49 million to 43.5 million over the
past two years.
But public libraries are still at the
stoic forefront of our pitch for wider
literacy. Waimate District Library has
banned fines for overdue children’s andyoung-adult books in a bid to encourage
more young people to use the library.
Nelson Public Library hosts dementia-
friendly book groups using Dovetale
Press publications aimed at those with
dementia or stroke patients. Auckland
City Library has a new bookshelf espe-
cially for the homeless, where books
can be left and easily picked up again.
Although the importance of school
libraries run by a professional librarian
is widely acknowledged, figures released
to TVNZ show 178 New Zealand
schools don’t have a dedicated library,
and 330 schools have less library space
than they’re entitled to.or don’t accept – all demanding immediate
attention.
But after a day flicking through texts,scrolling through emails and scanning
through news feeds, settling down to the
unbroken text of a book, a report or a
wordy contract, our brain recoils. Our eyes
wander, our attention fractures, sentences
slip, meaning slides. Wolf experienced this
when she picked up an old but difficult book
she had previously enjoyed. “I was unable
to slow myself down,” she says. “It took me
two weeks to finish.”
READING LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW
So, are New Zealanders forgetting how to
read? A 2014-15 OECD study of adult skills
in 32 countries found the number of Kiwis
in the top two levels of literacy proficiency
was above average, but this left about 43% of
16- to 65-year-olds functioning below level
3 – that is, able to read simple text, to para-
phrase and understand basic concepts, but
struggling to identify irrelevant text or infer
meaning from large chunks of information.
In other words, they can get by, just.
According to a Book Council survey done
this year, 442,000 Kiwi adults had not read abook in the previous 12 months. “Our study
tells us that there is a group of New Zealand-
ers who are avid readers,” says council chief
executive Jo Cribb. “They’re enjoying more
New Zealand fiction, non-fiction and poetry“You can cruise on
YouTube or on Google
going ‘yuck’ and ‘wow’,
but you’re not actually
making sense of things.”