The Libraries Directory 50th Edition Libraries Directory Home • Online Guide • A to Z

Preface to the 50th Edition

Until the mid-nineteen nineties nobody questioned the role or purpose of public libraries in Britain. They are funded by the state through local councils and this has been true for a long time. We provide both central and local community libraries, even in quite small towns, and we have always believed that we should. The 1964 Libraries Act defined how the system was to work and aside from Conservative encouragement to supplement the tax money by seeking revenue from the rental of non-book items such as films, not much changed. Libraries were not even seen as particularly worthy or special; like many public services, from road designing to primary school teaching, they were part of the honourable framework of the support we give to each other as a nation. Like nursing or social care, to be a librarian was to do good work which was probably under-rewarded if not under-valued.

The library profession is a noble one. The ability to organise, store and retrieve information and written work is an essential role of every profession, academy and institution. As we deluge ourselves with more and more retainable data, the art of knowing how to make it useful is a need that becomes greater with each year of advancing technology. Librarians are a group whose importance in our society is becoming greater. Alongside this growing importance, however, they face a proportionally growing challenge to keep ahead of the abilities of computers, while also providing a service to a customer base which has become not only universal but enormously demanding in terms of access. Every school child expects to be able to find the answer to any random question; so when they develop and begin to inquire into more specialised fields, their demands of the librarians are far more challenging than at any time in the past.

The idea of a public library as a University of the Street Corner, a high but honourable ambition, in turn requires the public librarian to rethink what is required and how it can be delivered. These are challenges of great scale which must be met, not only by the professional bodies but also by the schools and universities which provide the courses in which the skills are learned.

During the recession of 1990, a peak of use in public libraries in the UK was reached, after which the numbers of people using libraries began to fall, not dramatically but steadily and relentlessly. At its height, there had been over 600 million visits and book loans from the 4,500 libraries around the country. By the turn of the century there were less than 450 million and the decline continued.

There were many theories and assumptions about why this was happening, but no-one seriously and methodically attempted to uncover the causes. That failure to inquire into and to understand the problem is the root of an enormous fuss about public libraries now. Actions that were taken then, on the basis of those assumptions, are now being questioned. Some believe that the damage to the service was made worse, not better, by what was and in many places is still being done. There can only have been about six or, at most, ten possible causes, and where we needed to know how much each of those contributed to people's increasing lack of interest in what libraries offered, we did not find out. We still don't know. We don't even know whose job it was and is to determine the causes of the decline in use of public libraries. The public would say, correctly, that it is not their role to diagnose problems. Beyond that, we face a quandary: we simply do not know which arm of local or national government, which library professional body, which national charity, which quango or commission, agency or body (and there are many of all of these) should be responsible for knowing why people do or don't use public libraries. All we can be sure of is that not one of these bodies does know, or has seriously attempted to find out.

If our army lose battles, we need to know why; if our trains fail to run, we need to understand the cause; if our hospitals create more illness than they cure, it is only when we know the reasons that we will understand how to put things right. If a chocolate manufacturer finds his sales are falling, if a tailor sees that people go elsewhere to buy suits, if a publican observes falling revenues, then none of these people can survive in service unless they make an accurate and correct diagnosis of the problems and take appropriate steps to change what they do. Professional librarians and their political masters have not been trained in the dark arts of such analysis. As a consequence, most of the many innovations made by them to put things right, were the wrong ones. Changes were made which achieved no long-term remedy and, in many cases, almost no short-term gain at all. The strategy, for the last ten years, has been the wrong one.

To an outsider some of the unsubstantiated theories leading to incomprehensible actions have been curious, if not downright mad. There is one that goes along these lines: libraries need to attract teenagers; teenagers don't like to be told to read; books are what put them off libraries; libraries should not display books. This, in fact, is quite a common policy and has been widely used in many places.

Another approach has been of wide influence: libraries are a source of information; information nowadays is on the internet; books are also available on the internet; therefore the process of collecting printed books for libraries can be run down and be replaced by wide free internet access in library premises.

Here is a third: our local library is only open on two mornings each week; not many people use it; therefore we should not waste our budget on that library; if use continues to decline, we shall close it. And here is a theory of a particular kind: The Government is concerned that no-one in the public should be excluded in the 'Digital Divide'; libraries are public spaces and they should play a significant part in this agenda; libraries are, primarily, an essential part of the digital age.

There is a well-developed idea that runs: libraries are part of learning; therefore a library should be a learning centre: its space will become a learning facility and the librarians will become learning co-ordinators.

'Outreach' and 'Reader Development' became the expressions that were used for the assistance given to people to find what they wanted to read and to develop their reading skills. In many places professional librarians were given the job titles of Outreach or Reader Development Manager and their work was now not to be based in libraries, but in 'reaching out' into the 'community'. In many places libraries were closed in order to fund these posts and others similar.

It is not hard to see that in each of these cases a need identified for a particular group of people has been extrapolated into the policy for the library service to the entire population. A government 'agenda' has been created in some department of Whitehall in order to address a specific social problem and libraries along with many other public services have been obliged to find and demonstrate a commitment to it, however irrelevant or destructive such actions might be for them. The consequence of these actions is that a minority might benefit in a marginal way, but the majority will no longer find what they are looking for.

Libraries are libraries and they are better if they cover every need that individual people may have of them, not just those in line with the rapacious government ideas of the moment.

There have been even more implausible examples. Libraries were made to play their part in Government campaigns to combat obesity by emphasising the contents of their collections of diet books. And libraries, somehow, became part of the campaign to publicise the Government's efforts over the 2012 Olympics by proclaiming their role as part of the 'Cultural Olympiad'. These are not mere Robert Heller fantasies but in each case an active participation in the government scheme could lead to commendation of the managers involved and even the opportunity to be granted funds to spend on library facilities to further these non-library activities.

Yet all this has gone on and still no-one in any of the many departments has undertaken the polling research needed to understand why these activities were reducing the use of libraries even more. Book lending has continued to fall quite significantly every year. There were some isolated studies conducted by MORI at the request of individual councils to identify the reasons for this. Every single one of these drew the same conclusions: they said that what people want in public libraries are longer opening hours, better designed, better equipped and cleaner buildings and more things to read. It would be very surprising to find any member of the public, in such polls, even contemplating that a library should engage a substantial portion of its obviously limited funding on 'outreach' or 'reader development'. Computers in libraries, say such research reports, are okay, but not if they come at the expense of the book stock. Yet no Government agenda, in all that time, has placed any importance on these remedies at all. Since 1998, there have been 26 Government initiatives for public libraries and not one of them addressed the quality of the book stock, or the state of the buildings. There was a small, but ineffective, attempt to increase opening hours.

If we seek a nation of readers (as the most recent report of the National Year of Reading reminds us we do) then we need our public libraries to have books in them. It is as simple as that, and that is where resources need to be spent.

Libraries have become victims of what people call 'political correctness' on a massive and destructive scale. Any kind of management – whether commercial or civil – which is so misguided in its understanding of its clients and so free to invest huge funds in wrong-headed ventures, should not be tolerated. We have been witness to ten years of horrifically bad management of our public library service and there should be no excuses for it. With the exception of small projects here and there around the country there is little sign of improvement.

Moreover, if these matters had been addressed, as they could easily have been, at the beginning of the decade, it would have been quite practical to reverse up the path that had been chosen and turn onto the correct one. Now, such a change is really difficult: people have been employed, budgets have been spent, collections have been destroyed and reputations have been made and lost. People in the system don't know which way they are supposed to go, or which political fashion is the one of the moment.

Shirley Burnham campaigns to save Old Town Library in Swindon, where she lives, which is shortly to be closed. Although Old Town is a substantial and identifiable district of Swindon, the library is only open a few hours a week and the council have decided that it is insufficiently used to merit the meagre council fund that is needed to keep it open. Shirley carries a petition wherever she goes. Walking in snow and sludge around the streets, carrying a flag, complete strangers approach asking if they can sign. A boy on a bicycle whom she might have been tempted to avoid wants to talk about what his mum reads. A young couple with a cold baby, hurrying to the supermarket, insist on talking about how important the library is to them. Old and young, clean and dirty, all are anxious and proud to add their name and signature to her petition. It is heart-warming to watch. People are in no doubt at all what their library is for and what will be lost if it closes.

In another town a councillor explains that he can make a library better by locating it in the same building as a charity clothes shop, with the same staff to run both. Second-hand trousers will not make a poor library into a good one, but the idea of helpful librarians able to advise and inform is beyond his understanding. Running and improving libraries is his civic duty, for which he is well paid. Yet for him, making better libraries is not about improving collections or offering wise experience, it is about yet another government agenda called 'co-location of buildings'.

Libraries are without books and budgets with which to buy them, and even more fundamentally, they are without people who will champion the importance and value of writing and reading.

A whole parade of expensive initiatives from Best Value Reviews, to Audit Inspections and Peer Reviews and then to a multitude of Standards and Measures and Indicators, have all come and then been rubbished. A symposium of projects to address efficiency and management practices, accompanied by spending on consultants to match the defence budget of a small nation, have produced absolutely no change whatsoever in the level of misdirected expenditure wasted on the service. There are still as many methods of processing and labelling public library books as there are councils, and there is no sign at all of any efficiency gains or improved management after all these multifarious training courses and conferences.

On the scale at which they operate, our libraries are no more socially inclusive than they ever were. They have not developed the reading habits of a generation or the generation before them, and while many have turned themselves into free internet cafes, they have contributed little else to the age of the internet and the information revolution it brought. They did not materially participate in the largest increase in children's use of books that has ever been seen, the years of the Harry Potter publications; they no more help people to find employment than they ever did; and they are rarely part of a learning or learned society. They are most definitely no longer 'Universities of the Street Corner' and few of them have an ambition to be so.

Of course, they have brought true benefit to a small few, and for some people and some groups in certain places they have been a font of excellence, but so they should: the library service is a national institution with enormous funding. However, it is not sufficient to have worked hard and been of benefit only to some. We should expect much more than that. The failure of public library administration has been abject and the legacy is a dangerously weak institution, a situation which should bring no pride to those whose well-paid job it has been to superintend and manage it.

The one exception that should be made to all this criticism is the National Summer Reading Campaign for schoolchildren, which has been created and run by The Reading Agency and is supported by schools and by public libraries. It is a signal triumph in an otherwise bleak landscape.

Questions are asked about how best to manage the structures of such a large institution. At present the 200 councils which are designated as library authorities each have their own expensive management structure. In Northern Ireland over the past two years a programme has been initiated whereby the previous five library boards have been amalgamated into one management body, and early reports of this development are positive. We could see the same happening in Wales where the small councils could be formed into perhaps two bodies, and so on across the UK. There has been some discussion of London libraries being managed by one library board. However, whatever management arrangements are made, in the end it is the responsibility of local councils to account to local people for the service that is provided.

The extent of overhead costs in these many councils has had the effect of driving down the book funds. This is becoming a serious issue which the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, or even the London Mayor are well within their power to address in their own areas. But so far no real moves have been made to use these bodies to tackle the problem.

It is councils who have the power to make change and they cannot be told by any minister or ministry what it is they are supposed to do. Within the past few years we have appointed local councillors to take responsibility for the improvement and operation of public libraries. Unfortunately, since that change was made no-one has taken the time to explain to them that for a long time there have been concerns at national level about how the service is operating.

Making councillors responsible was, in theory, a very good move, because many of the problems of the service lie in its disconnection with the public. The presence of a councillor in the loop, who hopes eventually to be re-elected, creates an electoral mechanism for improvement which otherwise did not exist: if you have lousy libraries you will not be re-elected, if you have good ones you have a very strong and visible calling card at the hustings.

Within this structure there is the possibility of a councillor making a stand and bringing improvement. There are a number of councils where this has happened and there is no doubt that it is the initiatives from within the council that have borne fruit, rather than anything that has come from government or any national body. This is an important lesson. In Hampshire the influence of the leader of the council has set the tone for the improvement work that is being done there; in Tower Hamlets it was councillors who insisted that a new direction was needed; and in Hillingdon the portfolio holder, Henry Higgins, most definitely led the management in a very effective and positive direction. In each of these cases the change has been marked, but they have been improvements made in isolation from work elsewhere, with the consequence that there has been little opportunity to learn lessons, one from another, across the public library sector.

Whatever happens within government, change will be slow to come. Unless there is pressure from outside, neither councils nor central government act as quickly as they should. It is only the constant and noble pressure brought by a doughty band of local campaigners, like Shirley Burnham, fighting to save her own library and anyone else's who asks for her help, that actually force a reluctant rethinking of strategy. These are the people to whom libraries of the future will need to give thanks, if only they can hold on long enough and succeed in what they are doing. These are the people to whom we should always have been listening.

Tim Coates
Former managing director of Waterstone's and campaigner for improvement to public libraries