Libraries In A World Of Cultural Change

Liz Greenhalgh, Ken Worpole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134223534
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A study of libraries and the role they play in both inner city areas and dispersed rural communities. It examines the library as a cultural institution, considering its spatial and symbolic presence and exploring its public service remit. The book is intended for undergraduates and postgraduates on library and information science courses and as supplementary reading for cultural and communications studies, tourism and recreation, human geography and sociology - as well as for public and academic librarians.

PART 1

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Comedia study was the first independent study of public libraries in Britain since the Second World War, and this book is largely the result of that detailed research, which was finalized in 1993. We wanted to look at public libraries in greater detail because, as outsiders, we regarded them as continuing to exhibit signs of considerable success: success in maintaining a wide cross-section of the population as regular users; success in continuing to keep abreast of new media forms – records, tapes, CDs, videos, open learning materials; success in steering a fine line between populist consumerism and elitist cultural exclusivity; success in maintaining a distinctive social and public space, and success too in maintaining particular and distinctive standards of public architecture when and where there were opportunities for new buildings. But, paradoxically, librarians saw things otherwise. They perceived continuing – and in some cases even terminal – crisis.

This book is about that crisis: illusory, perceived or real. It is about understanding that however successful public libraries may appear to be to users and outsiders, and indeed in many places they seemed to be prospering, the political and fiscal context within which they were and are provided – by local government on the basis of free, universal provision, paid for out of direct taxation – was most certainly in deep trouble, and possibly nearing an end. Were public libraries, we asked, living on borrowed time?

There were other elements to the “crisis” too: a flurry of articles in the press about the reduction in opening hours in some town centre libraries, particularly in London; the occasional fanning into flames of a moral panic about “political correctness” and whether public libraries should or should not stock Little Black Sambo stories; but also a general sense that local government was seriously under attack, and that libraries would inevitably suffer as a result. The 1980s also saw a determined attack by the government on the professions themselves, which were portrayed as conspiracies against the free market, and along with doctors, solicitors, teachers and others, public librarians were challenged to justify their “protectionist” professional practices against the potential greater efficiency and better service to the users or consumers, of services managed, marketed and delivered with greater flexibility, and with less hierarchical job structures and greater competition. In the endless turmoil of continuing local government reorganization and internal restructuring, self-contained library departments were variously incorporated, absorbed, annexed to and at worst hijacked by larger departments or directorates, occasionally with gains in political status and departmental effectiveness, but often with a loss of confidence and a down-grading of status and political visibility. The public may not have noticed this crisis, but librarians did. All of this made the value of an independent evaluation even more timely.

An independent viewpoint

It was realized from the earlier study of town centres that an independent assessment of the problems currently facing public services, and the professional traditions that sustain them, could only help, even if some of the diagnoses and subsequent prescriptions seemed critical. It is quite sobering to realize that there had been no independent evaluation of public library services in Britain for possibly fifty years, or, to put it another way, for more than two generations. Of course the library profession itself had continued to conduct its own internal reviews, publish and disseminate differing points of view about the way forward, commission user research and so on. But this was all done within the habits, professional languages and belief systems of librarians themselves – the inside looking out, so to speak, rather than the outside looking in. All institutions need both perspectives.

For it was not only a critical, independent eye that a research team put together by Comedia could provide, but it was also the insights and intellectual contributions supplied by a range of other disciplines. The Comedia team, together with its Advisory Board and those experts commissioned to provide the study Working Papers, in fact included not a single librarian, but instead contained economists, sociologists, literary critics, urban planners, media analysts, philosophers, commercial marketing experts and local government strategists, all of whom were delighted to rise to the challenge of bringing their own professional disciplines to bear upon the problems of the public library network, in the wider interest of change, development and renewal. It was at times a bumpy ride. Many of them had not given much thought to public libraries before: sometimes they were delighted with what they found; often they were shocked. For these were people who had perhaps changed professions (and certainly institutions or companies) several times in their lives, who were constantly in contact with developments abroad, heavily reliant on a daily flow of market or contextual information and for whom constant performance-monitoring was a fact of daily life. Demographic change, technological change, a sensitivity to both the national and global political situation, an awareness in the latest management thinking, in systems analysis, in organizational flexibility and responsiveness were for many of them preconditions of effective provision and decision making. Yet they found themselves looking at a public institution that preferred development by accretion, valued continuity above flexibility, preferred to consolidate a known audience above developing “new markets”, and that valued professional loyalty and integrity often above individual careers.

Independent evaluation also brings opportunities for new connections to be made. Comedia’s long experience with the economic arguments for the role of cultural resources in urban renewal was an unfamiliar argument to many in the library world; connections with planning arguments and policies, with economic development strategies, seemed only natural to the Comedia team, but these were sometimes new arguments within the library profession.

Organizational insights also can be brought in from other fields and disciplines. Again Comedia’s history of work with the voluntary sector, with the newer networking paradigms of cultural development, was able to be utilized in the service of critically understanding how public library services organized themselves to deliver the services they did, and whether the existing organizational forms were adequate to the work needing to be done in the future. We were also able to move towards particular conclusions about the current public library service, and make recommendations for some of the directions it might take, without self-interest. Too often internal management reviews or policy debates are tunnelled towards conclusions that were desired or anticipated from the beginning, as much as certain kinds of public consultation are simply mechanisms designed to win consent to decisions already made.

Towards the end of the study, members of the team found themselves at times as public advocates for the very best that the public library service had to offer, better advocates in some cases than librarians themselves, who could no longer see the wood for the trees, or effectively understand just how important what they did was to other people, and the many direct and indirect impacts on the economic, social and cultural life that were actually achieved. Indeed, at a number of presentations made to professional library audiences, librarians themselves admitted that they not only had not realized the full extent of the strategic importance of the library service to the quality of urban life, but also had failed to convince or inspire the outside world to take their work seriously.

All these arguments attest, we feel, to the value of independent, critical research and policy development. Yet if public libraries are so important, as we concluded they are, then we also believe that they are too important to be left solely to librarians. The case for the public library as a general good is now a matter of concern for all, for those who believe in universal rights and opportunities for self-improvement, as well as those who believe in the specificities of local identity, of cultural minority rights, and of individual development and self-worth. The library is not only a powerful symbol of the past, but also a potential beacon or landmark for the future.

Borrowed time?

Yet such public debate as there currently is about libraries usually takes the form of a nostalgia for a “world we have lost” – memories of libraries from childhood rather than what libraries actually are now and could be in the future. And while in many of Britain’s towns and cities, libraries play a significant role in information policy and cultural renewal – with on-line business services, economic development initiatives, open learning and adult literacy schemes, local history projects, the encouragement of early reading and support for quality children’s fiction – in other places the public library is failing to adapt to new conditions and could disappear as commercial forces overwhelm it.

This book is based on a large-scale, national research project involving detailed research throughout the United Kingdom, as well as on interviews with more than a thousand people – library providers, library users, policy analysts, social forecasters, information and technology experts, publishers and booksellers. It seeks to take a fresh and sometimes critical look at the future of the public library.

A preliminary report, Borrowed time? – which we regarded as a “Green Paper” consultative document – was published in June 1993 to considerable national and international interest.¹ Among the many findings that emerged from that research, and that are examined in detail in this book, are the following critical issues:

– Libraries are still popular institutions. About a third of the UK population uses public libraries regularly. Up to half of the population uses them occasionally. They provide an information network or “national grid”, linked at local, regional and national levels. Yet there is no real national strategic thinking. Without this the network could atrophy and possibly disappear.

– Along with all other “public” institutions, public libraries were having to develop a new rationale, management and funding system to survive in a mixed economy. Some seemed capable of adapting to these new conditions; some did not.

– Despite popular mythology, public library services in Britain have in general enjoyed growth in recent years, although opening hours have been reduced in a number of places. There are some famous exceptions to this pattern of growth, particularly in London boroughs, but nationally more than 300 new libraries were built in the 1980s.

– While book issues have been slowly declining, other uses of the library are increasing – for information, for study, as homework centres, for literary events and other community activities. Unfortunately, librarians are often failing to articulate, monitor or even promote these other uses to the wider world.

– In many, if not all of Britain’s town centres, the public library is one of the most accessible and open public institutions, and often acts as a focal point for local civic life.

– Public libraries have suffered a loss of visibility in the political realm through having no national body to represent their interests. As a result they have often been on the receiving end of policy developments such as local management of schools or care in the community – which have had major impacts on them but with little or no advance consultation.

– While other cultural institutions – theatres, opera houses, concert halls – were regarded as key elements in programmes of urban regeneration in the 1980s, public libraries (usually responsible for generating more city centre activity than all the others) were excluded.

These are mostly institutional issues – sometimes of great success, sometimes of significant failure. What this book attempts to do is to understand the richnesses of the public library tradition from an independent perspective, and to try to map out the future of the public library within the exigencies of a rapidly changing, turbulent and competitive political world. The public library has many friends – but not enough in “high places”. It offers many services – but it isn’t quite sure which are more important than others. It has a very long and valued history – but we live in an age in which long-standing institutions can suddenly disappear for ever. Many urgent decisions will need to be made if the public library is to adapt to the new demands of a new millennium. It is hoped that this book will help that process.

New arguments

This book draws on all the work that went into the original consultative report – which used only a fraction of the material produced – including responses to the case studies and to the nine Working Papers, responses to Borrowed time?, and on the results of many seminars and discussions held over the past two years. What it attempts to do – which the report could not – is elaborate the intellectual and technical arguments for public library provision in the light of the enormous social, demographic and political changes all developed countries are living through at the end of the twentieth century. It is therefore more than just a book about libraries, it is about how the public intellectual realm will be sustained and developed (not necessarily a foregone conclusion) in a period that is seeing massive developments in electronic communications, in powerful pressures towards consumer individualism, and in increasing disparities not only of wealth but also of access to information. It is about whether future societies will be based on a “need to know”, “can afford to know” or on “a right to know” basis. Public libraries could make the difference.

CHAPTER 2

Key concepts

This book, along with much of the recent work of Comedia on public space and civic cultures, is informed by a number of concepts and terms which, because they are so frequently to be found in the text, are worth elaborating or signposting here. Dictionary-type definitions of course are never enough and, as with so many words and ideas, their meaning always depends on the nuances of the contexts in which they are used. Yet we find these conceptual frameworks and terms so useful – if occasionally improperly understood – that we wish at least to try and explain how they have been used. A considerable intellectual debt here is owed to Raymond Williams’s Keywords.¹

“Public”

The definition of the term “public” is historically broad-ranging and it is used in everyday language and in this book in a number of ways. Indeed, it is a central term. It includes “the public sphere”, “public realm”, “public space”, “public building”, “public interest”, “public access” and of course “public library”. The word “public” embraces a multifaceted set of meanings, including “concerning the people as a whole”, “open to all” “maintained at the expense of the community”, “serving the community” and “for the use of the community”. Synonyms for these uses encompass “civic”, “common” or “communal”, “general”, “social”, “universal”, “widespread”, “not restricted”, “accessible” and “not private”.

Often, “public” is contrasted with the terms “individual”, “private” and even “self-interest”. Over the last decade, “public” has...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Introduction
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Key concepts
• Part 2: Institutions in crisis
• 3 The end of enlightenment
• 4 The changing role of public institutions
• 5 The modern library network
• 6 Political invisibility
• Part 3: The “libraryness” of libraries
• 7 What makes libraries special?
• 8 The era of light and glass
• Part 4: Spheres of influence
• 9 Libraries and urban vitality
• 10 The invisible web: the public library and social policy
• 11 Education and life-long learning
• 12 Information and the right to know
• 13 Other worlds: libraries, fiction and popular reading
• Part 5: Tomorrow’s world
• 14 Past, present and future
• 15 The modern state and new meanings of the public
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index