This article is from the January 2003 Issue of Update.
Sharing learning was a constant theme at the PLA conference this year. The title ‘Making Connections, Making a Difference: Public Libraries in Society …’ could be equally applied to connecting with other professionals as reaching out to more library users. Launching the new vision for young people’s services, Start with the Child, Viv Griffiths remarked that, despite a plethora of excellent project-based work such as Youthboox, ‘We are constantly reinventing the wheel, because we haven’t listened to one another’s experiences, and, fundamentally, services resist change.’ Time-limited funding, valuable lessons being forgotten and difficulties in sharing outcomes all need attention.
Start with the Child
The Start with the Child report (featured in last month’s Update) insists that surveys and data collection are not enough. Psychologists and researchers from outside the library world consulted more widely than ever before — not just librarians but also children. Young people prize the opportunity to participate and provide feedback, evolving as they are at an ever younger age (whatever your opinion of this) into mini-consumers highly aware of branding and image.
Beacon Councils
One of the main objectives of the Beacon Council scheme is for local authorities to share their best practice with others through open days and peer-to-peer visits. Minister for the Arts Baroness Blackstone paid tribute to the eight services rewarded as ‘Libraries as a Community Resource’. She contrasted their excellence with this year’s Audit Commission report findings that just over half of library services are judged as only fair and able to improve.
Strategic framework delayed
PLA conference delegates knew that the eagerly awaited new strategic framework for libraries would not after all be delivered by the minister in time for this conference. She set out some of the emerging conclusions, but not before telling public librarians ‘not to be optimistic about extra resources’. Three areas key to libraries’ modern mission, she said, are: the promotion of informal, often basic learning; access to digital skills and services; and measures to tackle social exclusion and build community identity and citizenship.
Reader development
Instilling the habit of reading is still the basis of everything else libraries do, the minister stressed. The Reading Agency (TRA) is now forging ahead with advocacy, training, partnership building and spreading good practice. TRA Director Miranda McKearney made her usual call (worth stating repeatedly) for mainstream funding of reader development projects and embedding into all library services. ‘The nation needs what we do with readers, and needs to fund it seriously.’ Miranda drew particular attention to a new TRA programme, Their Reading Futures, which aims to deliver higher-quality reading services for children, taking lessons and skills learnt in ‘brilliant but patchy project work and using them to transform mainstream services, targeting all staff, not just children’s specialists’.
Another excellent reading promotion tool launched at the conference was whichbook.net - browsing software for library bookstock. By allowing books to be selected based on choices in subject matter, setting, ending etc, it gives readers a licence to be vague. Just as in bookshops 72 per cent of customers’ decisions to buy are made after they have entered a shop, the majority of library users are browsers looking for a ‘kind’ of book not a specific title. ‘The delight of whichbook.net is that it gives you what you want but that may look different from what you were expecting,’ said Tom Forrest of Opening the Book, one of the Openlibraries Ltd partners which created it.
People’s Network
Crunch time for implementation of the People’s Network will have come and gone as you read this. Chris Batt told conference delegates it was time to concentrate on press campaigns. A budget of only £17,000 for marketing caused some incredulity among delegates. Big events in January to align with the launch of Online Nation could help things. But it seems that to publicise their wonderful facilities, offering local access to national resources, library services are to get very little cash support at national level.
There was also little news on sustainability. Baroness Blackstone said: ‘It is incumbent on us all to make sure that this network is not just sustained but developed further, building on its strengths, once the lottery funding, which was granted for its establishment, ends next year.’
Social exclusion
Tackling social exclusion, the third of the minister’s priority areas, four speakers bravely stepped in at short notice to fill a vacant session. Bill MacNaught spoke about targeting areas of need in Gateshead with AIRS, the service for visually-impaired people and deaf people, and another scheme for looked-after children. Linda Houston explained how in Belfast 50% of residents live in wards with the two highest levels of deprivation, and 65% of their libraries are in that area. ‘So we are skewing resources the right way…’
Pamela Tulloch told of the ‘REAL’ centres in Glasgow, an initiative between Libraries and Leisure and Scottish Enterprise Glasgow to set up high-quality open learning centres. BT has provided £100,000 to set up ‘REAL on the Road’, mobile learning centres which will go into some of the most deprived areas of the city. Patrick Conway spoke on libraries brokering community legal services in Durham - an excellent example of pooled resources.
Sadly, another speaker on behalf of an excluded group saw equality of access as still a long way off. There are two million blind and partially-sighted people in the UK, 90 per cent of whom are over the age of 60. With a rapidly ageing population, the number of people with age-related visual impairment will increase. Fewer than five per cent of books are published in alternative formats such as Braille, audio or large print. Helen Brazier of the National Library for the Blind highlighted the fact that the majority of blind or partially-sighted people read more after they lose their sight than before. Public libraries have to rethink the whole library experience for these users, who are simply not finding their needs being catered for.
There is an urgent need for more partnership working between public libraries and the more than 30 voluntary sector organisations that provide library services for visually-impaired people. Excellent initiatives such as Reveal from Share the Vision and ‘A Touch Of…’ have helped but the present situation remains fragmented and unsatisfactory.
Fundamental literacy problems
Another potentially excluded group are those with fundamental literacy problems, who make up a staggering 24 per cent of the population. Julia Strong described the Vital Link, a scheme working to bring partners together from among libraries and basic skills’ advisers, to show what libraries can contribute and to share best practice. You may have read about this valuable work in last month’s Update. Julia quoted a librarian from Essex who said don’t forget how much courage it takes for adults to go back into education.
Something which may work against sharing learning is that local authority workers are in a more and more competitive environment — bidding for funds, awards and recognition. Competition may build confidence, said Lin Homer, outgoing Chief Executive of Suffolk County Council, but we mustn’t forget to explain ourselves or to use our politicians properly. ‘Remember, we are local government.’
Buildings ‘neglected’
Lin is moving to Birmingham City Council, which is looking forward to its new central library. New libraries are being built in Barcelona and Dublin, too, ‘…so why don’t we work on them together?’, asked Lin.
Ken Worpole, of public policy consultancy Comedia, thinks library buildings are neglected in this country. In any society, he said, there are only eight to 10 different types of buildings — and he believes the library is the most important. ‘Libraries embody the most important values that create the modern world — access to information, rational discussion, culture.’ However, in Britain we increasingly look to the rest of Europe for library architecture. It is very important yet our librarians tend to marginalise it. ‘Librarians should get together with architects to do something exciting with city centres.’
Ken Worpole always has fascinating things to say about the importance of the library ‘space’. Predictions half a decade ago — that the internet would de-institutionalise society, we would all work at home, and have all our needs fulfilled online — are clearly not coming true. Instead, said Ken, ‘electronic forms of communication are enriching other forms of the way we see and use public space’.
Some public library buildings are of huge symbolic importance. New York Public Library is one and, for Ken, Birmingham Central is another. ‘It mediates between the commercial and the cultural sector’ and the steps ‘do everything’, they lead you up to the library, they form a meeting space. He thinks the new library project is a ‘risky strategy’.
Audit Commission
Best Value inspectors found a third of libraries lacked comfort and were in buildings of poor condition. Jacquie Campbell and Greg Birdseye of the Audit Commission urged delegates to use the review as a challenge, as a tool, and above all to share best practice and ‘talk to your colleagues’. On the good side, inspectors were impressed with progress made in ICT services. Concerns centred on the quality and range of stock, opening hours and poor location of libraries; a bias in fiction towards older people; and low public awareness of what libraries have to offer.
The commissioners urged services to be more challenging in deciding what the service is for. Jacquie added: ‘There are few examples of authorities proactively seeking out good practice in other authorities… Library authorities are extremely adept at collecting data, but there is little evidence to show how this information is used to drive improvements in the service.’
An inspection update brought some good news: the picture is improving all the time. After further inspection reports which brought the total up to 70, 46 per cent of services are rated as good or excellent and 60 per cent have promising or excellent prospects for improvement (from the previous tally of 36 inspections of which only 41 per cent were rated good or excellent).
Comprehensive Performance Assessment
The conference debate this year was on the motion that ‘Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) will be a catalyst for positive change’. The motion was not carried. Both sides made their points clearly. ‘Prove yourself and we’ll get off your back and let you get on with it… poor performers cannot be left to let down their council tax payers,’ said Brian Stevenson of the Audit Commission. ‘CPA is a distraction, regressive and unfair. It is not quality controlled, it weakens management,’ countered Rob Froud (Somerset County Librarian). Commentators from the floor thought that it is making a scapegoat of local government, it is bad for morale, and it focuses too much on process rather than any achievable positive outcomes.
One conference delegate has sensed among his fellow library chiefs hostility to all criticism of public libraries and to any form of assessment, measurement and regulation, with the laying of all blame at the feet of lack of resources. However, a number of valid points were made by delegates from the floor. Gary McKeone of the Arts Council was concerned about measuring evidence. He highlighted aspects of libraries’ work which cannot be measured by statistics - the ‘soft evidence which shows how libraries’ work with readers can actually change lives’. Miranda McKearney said reading can make a difference ‘… which is very hard to measure in ways that count with the Audit Commission. We badly need new indicators to capture this. On the one hand book issues are down but on the other impact studies are showing a huge and changing community engagement with reading.’ Lin Homer believes that the library standards are ‘deeply flawed’ in their concentration on physical closeness of buildings and number of visits, aggregated opening hours, and percentage of users.
Money was constantly being put into schools, but libraries’ role in learning was not supported as much, said Councillor Lyn Brown (LB Waltham Forest): ‘We extend the working-class child’s school day. We need the money — revenue and capital. It is so important to the impoverished communities we seek to serve.’
Leadership
All professions could do with more visionary, transformational leaders who will in turn motivate their staff. CILIP President Sheila Corrall suggested that the whole organisational culture in which public libraries operate may have to be modified to cultivate future leaders. ‘We need to raise aspirations so that more people set their sights higher and aspire to the exciting roles that are available to library and information professionals today.’ ‘Young and new thinkers should be nurtured, more candidates under 40 should apply for senior positions.
In the US and Australia they have established leadership institutes. The value of learning on the job should not be underestimated, however. Attending events like conferences contributes to sharing learning, but there are opportunities still closer to home for sharing within the organisation.
Debby Raven is a freelance journalist. The Public Library Authorities Conference is organised by the Public Libraries Group of CILIP and was held at Carden Park Resort Hotel, Chester, 15 - 18 October 2002.