We’re all desperate to promote libraries’ unique selling points these days — CILIP and the Society of Chief Librarians are both in the midst of campaigns addressing the issue. Could it be, asks Rob Westwood, we’ve forgotten the obvious one: silence?

Dudley, 1997. Our school librarian (in actual fact a teacher who enjoyed shouting at kids so much that she ran the library voluntarily) would respond with an almighty “Shh!” to the tiniest unauthorised decibel. From what I could see, her main technique of library management was to maintain a level of silence on a par with the vacuum of space.

Should her magic cochlea detect you asking a neighbour for a pencil sharpener, you’d immediately receive Miss Booksworth’s* amazing “Shh!”. Her catchphrase was “This is a library, not a chat shop” and was comedy gold as far as class clowns were concerned.

I remembered Miss Booksworth’s generous shushing when I read the April 20th Telegraph item about Gloucestershire Libraries Service whose decision to introduce piped pop music to four branch libraries has been predictably controversial.

Is quietness still a hot potato in libraries? It probably used to be, but these days we’re preoccupied with the more glamorous hot potatoes of social networking websites and the marketing of library services. It’s entirely possible though, that quietness has the potential to be topical again, this time as a marketing issue. If trade press and the “public perception of the librarian” papers frequently generated by library schools are to be believed, library managers are worried about the appearance or brand of their services. It’s a survival strategy: being perceived as stuffy or bookish could endanger circulation statistics, in turn threatening funding. Success, it is thought, is in the Statistics. It could be argued that quietness is undesirable. To be quiet is to be aloof, focused, dedicated, even spiritual. Silence is for scholars, for Trappist Monks and Quakers; not the (possibly imaginary) hip young dudes that library managers want to attract.

It is this quantitative and potentially misdirecting line of thinking that makes me want to speak up for quiet libraries. Unlike the hysterical Telegraph, I do not hold that Gloucestershire’s decision to play pop music is a harbinger of the end of civilisation. I do, however, suspect that Gloucestershire’s idea, whether good or bad, represents the thin end of a potentially noisy wedge. This is not a problem in itself but it’s a trend worth keeping an eye on.

Whether or not a library should be silent depends upon the mission or purpose of that library. In the case of our old school library, Miss Booksworth was admirable in her drive for silence, albeit she was a little over-sensitive about it. The Raison d’être of the school library was to offer a quiet space in the rambunctious storm of high school life, one in which pupils could do their homework or learn something useful through extra-curricular reading. Piped pop music (or Britpop back then) would certainly not have been suitable.

For the bigger and medium-sized library, music and chatter must remain permanently off the menu. Silent study rooms are not a solution either: they make the user feel like a quarantine case and divorced from the library environment, they may as well have stayed at home. Proper libraries should be quiet. It comes back to playing to our strengths instead of emulating retail: music and chatter are fun but they are already catered for elsewhere – nay everywhere – in the world. Far rarer these days are spaces for quiet contemplation.

If however, you’re a small branch library in 2009 with the main purpose of circulating biographies and novels among the local public, I’m not sure that silence is relevant any more. Just because a practice is traditional does not mean that it’s necessary or right to blindly uphold it. If nobody uses a library for study or reflection, it is basically a book shop. In such an environment, music is perhaps not unwelcome. Let the punters talk! Pipe in the music! But consider this:

Perhaps more than ever before, it has become important for libraries to offer quiet, elegant study spaces: local retreats from noise and bluster and from the voices of the commercial world loudly competing for your attention. “The erosion of silence,” writes poet Yahia Lababidi in the latest edition of the Idler, “is unmistakably connected with our increased stress levels as well as increasingly shortened attention spans.” Libraries, by preserving quietness, have the opportunity to reverse this. We should offer a cure for these modern maldies rather than pander to them.

Keep the libraries stocked with new and classic books, offer a friendly and useful service from well-trained human library assistants and keep the noise and consumer products – takeaway coffee and computer games – to a minimum. Quietness is not formal or aloof: it is blissful, lends itself well to the practices of study and reflection, and is becoming a rare commodity. Rare commodities are highly valuable and librarianship is sitting on a big one.

“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone,” said Pascal. There’s a marketing plan in that somewhere. Let people know that leisure industries – television, holidays, shopping – do not allow for true retreat from busy, tiring, beeping, malfunctioning modern life. The greatest retreat is to enjoy silence for a while. Entrepreneurs have cottoned onto this already, which is why there’s so much money in luxury retreats and why business people spend so much time floating around in sensory deprivation tanks. This is something libraries might want to trade on.

Pipe down. Sell silence.

*You may not be surprised to hear that this is not her real name.