“I went to my own public library the other day with my 11-year-old daughter and was horrified to see a television monitor running videos in the children’s section – not a kid in the stacks and all the rest lined up to play games at the computers. It was a library that had gotten everything exactly wrong.”

Librarian William Wisner doesn’t like what’s happening to libraries and urges a return to a role as “captains of the information superhighway”. Libraries are popular, he says, only because everything is free. But is that enough to survive in tough budget times.