Do public libraries still deserve public funding?

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Since almost every text is now a search away, some councils treat libraries as a nostalgic expense. In my opinion they deserve funding more than they did when information was scarce, because what a library provides has quietly changed. The first reason concerns access rather than books. A library is one of the last public buildings a person can enter without buying anything, and for a student without a quiet room, an unemployed adult filling in an online application, or a newcomer practising the local language, it is infrastructure rather than luxury. Information is free online only for those who already own the device, the data and the desk. The second reason is guidance. Abundance created a new difficulty, which is judging what to trust, and librarians are trained precisely in evaluating sources. Schools increasingly rely on them to teach that skill because nobody else does. Critics reply that usage has fallen and that buildings are expensive. Where that is true it usually reflects underinvestment: branches with short hours and old stock lose readers, while renovated ones with study spaces and children's programmes report queues at the door. In conclusion, libraries remain worth funding because their real product was never the books alone; it was equal access to knowledge, and inequality of access has grown rather than disappeared.