Better treatment: Public libraries should get a higher priority when it comes to government funding.
JOHOR BARU: Libraries and museums should be used as community spaces that can help bring down the crime rate by giving youths space for healthy activities.
Selangor Public Library Corporation director Datin Paduka Mastura Muhamad said because public libraries, museums and archives are not a funding priority, this limits their role in society.
Mastura highlighted how RM1bil was spent on food and cleaning cells for 94,000 convicts and individuals in rehabilitation centres nationwide in 2009.
“This translates to roughly spending RM30 per person each day for the whole year.
“The amount is far higher compared to the funding given to public libraries nationwide in the same year, which was about RM128mil.
“That year, 16.6 million library visitors were recorded, which means that only 2 sen was spent on each person each day,” she told The Star.
Mastura highlighted this during the 25th biennial Library Convention of Malaysia here on July 13.
She added that it is about time that the government changes its priorities and places more emphasis on how libraries, museums and archives can bring down the crime rate by providing community spaces for children and youths.
Mastura admitted that as a government agency, public libraries faced a lot of red tape in expanding their activities and hoped that the private sector could do more to assist them.
Meanwhile, local author Zainal Rashid Ahmad, another speaker at the four-day convention, touched on a new worrying trend facing libraries and the reading community.
In his frequent live streams where he discusses books, Zainal noticed that more and more people have the habit of buying books but not reading them.
“If we do not tackle this, in the next five years, we might face a scenario where people stop buying books because they just do not have the capacity to read them because of time constraints and other reasons,” he said.
He added that many new book buyers mostly purchased them as a “prescription” as they had not cultivated the reading habit when they were young.
“They do not read for leisure, for fun ... they tend to be professionals or young executives who seek solutions in books to help them in their jobs. So the challenge is to keep them interested in reading books for pleasure,” he said.
Zainal Rashid, who had 26 years of experience in the media industry, also proposed roping in the tourism industry as one of the stakeholders to attract more people to libraries.
About 700 participants from public libraries nationwide participated in the convention to discuss the challenges faced by their institutions and find solutions on how to narrow the gap between libraries and the community.
