Reports late in the last century about the imminent demise of the book have now been shown to be greatly exaggerated. Never have so many books been published in most countries, Malta certainly included, and never have bookshops, both the traditional shops in towns and villages and their redoubtable rivals on the Net, done so much business. The amazing Harry Potter story can serve as a fine symbol of the magic books can still exercise in 2003.
The trouble is that, despite the dominance of the paperback, many books are expensive, or at least are seen to be so by those who should be reading most of all: adolescents and young adults. Our schools have been trying, with varying degrees of success, to make the school library an attractive and well-stocked place where their pupils can find books that appeal to them and are up-to-date. The main problem is posed by the school-leavers who, while no longer having access to their old school library, are faced with the rarely exciting collections in village public libraries.
It is clear that, despite the improvements - particularly the technological ones - of recent years, the public library system and its elder sister, the National Library, still have a long way to go before reaching the very high standards of similar institutions in, say, the Scandinavian countries or the United Kingdom.
The passage of local public libraries to the management of local councils has been salutary but there has not been the great leap required to make them, or the centre of the public library network, the Central Library at Floriana, the kind of information centres required by Maltese citizens in our century, or even places where a good selection of the best recent publications, Maltese and English, may be found and borrowed or dipped into.
Though some governments have been better than others in the field of library provision, not a single Maltese government has both acknowledged libraries as an integral element of the country's educational system and taken the steps needed to make them function as such.
Louis Galea, the minister responsible for public libraries and archives, has now announced that new library legislation is in the offing. Details of the proposed legislation have not been announced, but it is likely that the law may change libraries and archives, now a department within the civil service, into two separate bodies outside the civil service, one covering the National Library and public libraries, and the other covering the National Archives.
If, however, the change is to be mainly in nomenclature and in a greater administrative freedom, that will be far from enough. Libraries on the one hand and archives on the other need more funding, much more funding, and many more trained library staff, both librarians and technicians. Local councils must dip much more deeply into their pockets to make their libraries much more respectable. The new law should lay down minimum financial standards to be observed in any local library.
The National Library's role should also be redefined. It is now doing a reasonable job as the collector and preserver of its unparalleled Malta collection and the custodian of the Archives of the Order of St John, but it does little else. It should be teaming up with Malta's other large library, the university library, to provide this country with at least some of the research resources it needs.