Bold Minds

Library leadership in a time of disruption

Margaret Weaver, Leo Appleton, Margaret Weaver, Leo Appleton

• Publisher: Facet Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781783304530, 9781783304547
• eBook ISBN: 9781783305155
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Scienze dell'informazione e biblioteconomia

Are librarians and libraries relevant in the 21st century? This is a fundamental question and one that presents differing opinions across the many diverse information sectors. If there is a continuing need for libraries and for librarians, then how do library leaders obtain strategic support when there appears to be a lack of clarity or understanding about the very purpose of libraries at a time when economically, libraries are under pressure to develop new business models and be more commercially focused?

Bold Minds: Library leadership in a time of disruption brings together international leaders who frame many aspects of the current library provision and who carry responsibility for the library models of the future to consider how librarians and libraries can be a driving force in a time of disruptive economic, technological and cultural change.

Each chapter critically presents a short leadership provocation regarding libraries and their purpose, encompassing strategic impact, culture change, engagement, diversity, service delivery, collections, staff skills and professional training and assessing what it means for leaders, their sectors and organisations, and how they have developed their personal leadership signature.

This book will be invaluable to library and information professionals in a range of public and private sector libraries as well as policy makers in services where libraries are a component. It will also be useful for students, educational establishments, and IT professionals with an information management element to their work.

SECTION 1

Views from the corridors of power: the political and global perspective

The focus of this section is about how the library leader positions the library services within the wider organisation or indeed within the political and economic environment in which it finds itself. The constituent chapters discuss organisational culture and power relationships as well as how the profile and reputation of the library can act as influencing capital in a world where only the strong and bold survive. Positioning the library so that it is relevant, purposeful, indispensable and prolific are all important in the discussions that make up this section.

The authors discuss how strategic alignment and positioning within the parent organisation allows the library to be a key strategic driver and consequently library leaders can be looked to for more holistic organisational leadership. The selection of chapters in this section draws upon a set of experiences from public and academic libraries in the United Kingdom and Canada, but the messages and provocations are relevant across all library sectors and in any global location. The disruptions and provocations being posed and addressed in this section are around the powerful role and purpose of libraries that library leaders need to establish and deliver. Provocations such as ‘the library is on the road to extinction’, ‘the library is a follower, not a leader’ and ‘libraries are nice to have, rather than essential’ are all countered in this section, as the three authors present compelling and bold narratives about their experiences of positioning and aligning their own library services. In each case, thorough awareness of the institutional organisational culture and the external environments in which the library exists are essential.

CHAPTER 1

Painting books on the walls: why libraries have lost their way and how they can rediscover their real purpose in a fragmented world

Richard Heseltine

Introduction

Libraries in the early 21st century seem to be experiencing wildly contrasting fortunes.

Wherever we look in the world, we can find examples of investment in new buildings and facilities. Great cities, it seems, or those aspiring to be great, still build grand libraries, or ambitiously re-develop old ones. Spectacular new public libraries have recently been opened in places as contrasting as Helsinki in Finland (Oodi, 2019) and Tianjin in China. New York Public Library (New York Public Library, 2019) is engaged in a massive, and massively expensive, renovation of its two principal buildings, masterminded by the Dutch architectural practice Mecanoo, also responsible for the architecturally-dazzling Library of Birmingham in England (Birmingham City Council, 2019).

Universities throughout much of the developed world have also poured huge sums into their libraries, nowhere more enthusiastically than in the United Kingdom, where the pressures placed on universities by the rapid commodification of higher education, and the attendant emphasis on the student experience as a factor in competition, have produced some stunningly good new libraries and many large-scale re-developments.

On the other hand, UK public libraries in general face what many see as an existential crisis (Press Association, 2016). As a consequence of the imposition by central government of an austerity programme that has seen massive cuts in public spending, public libraries have been engulfed by a funding crisis that has led to widespread reductions in library services, significant job losses, and several hundred library closures. Just over a year after the £188 million Library of Birmingham opened to the public in 2013, more than half the staff were facing redundancy and services were being axed (British Broadcasting Corporation BBC, 2014).

Even where public libraries have fared somewhat better than their counterparts in the UK, they often face major financial pressures, and always the challenge of digital disruption, and its widespread concomitant, the almost orthodox belief that public libraries are rendered obsolete by some combination of Google and the Kindle. Academic libraries by contrast appear to have weathered, so far at least, the digital revolution. They have largely retained their leading role in the provision of access to digital resources, faced fewer challenges to the longevity of the printed word, and enjoyed a renaissance when it comes to physical space.

It is worth exploring these contrasts, whether within the public library sector, or between public and academic libraries, more closely. Is everything quite as it appears to be in those libraries that seem to be flourishing? Is there perhaps a deeper reality that is common to all libraries and have they, in different ways, all lost their sense of purpose? And if that is the case, how do they rediscover it?

Painting books on the walls

Let us take the case of public libraries first and look at some of the new libraries that have been created. From the 19th century to the present day, great cities have built imposing libraries as symbols of civic pride and emblems of public commitment to knowledge, learning and civilised values. Despite all the uncertainties that surround the role of libraries in a digital age, cities continue to invest large amounts of public money in ambitious new projects.

Helsinki’s new central library, known as Library Oodi and opened in December 2018 at a cost of €98 million, is one of the latest examples, reflecting a strong and enduring Finnish commitment to public libraries (Oodi, 2019). Oodi, we are told, is ‘what you want it to be’. ‘Borrow books, read magazines, enjoy lunch, work, hang out, see a movie, study, hold a meeting, organise events, enjoy a glass of wine, learn about the EU’s activities, create music, meet friends, sew curtains, play with children or play board games. Oodi is all of this and more.’ The idea of the library as a highly inclusive cultural and social space is very strong. Oodi is described as Helsinki’s ‘living room’, as a ‘living meeting place in the city centre’. This echoes the well-known description of public libraries by Francine Houben, the creative director of Mecanoo, as ‘cathedrals of the 21st century’ and her explanation of the ethos of the Library of Birmingham, which contained this phrase: ‘I wanted to make a people’s palace because it’s a public building and I think at this moment libraries are the most important public buildings, like cathedrals were many years ago. We wanted it to be very inviting and welcoming, not just about books. It’s not just for the rich or the intellectuals, it’s for everybody.’ (Frearson, 2013)

A similar inspiration applies to the striking new public library opened in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2015 (Dokk1, 2019; Urban Mediaspace Aarhus, 2015). Dokk1 is a combination of main public library, municipal services and performance spaces. It was designed to be ’a flexible and dynamic sanctuary for everyone in search of knowledge, inspiration, and personal development – an open and accessible learning environment supporting democracy and community’. Notably it is part of a much larger dockland re-development project, with an imposing position on the waterfront, and explicitly intended to become a ’sustainable icon for Aarhus’.

The Library at The Dock in Melbourne, Australia, is another example of a new public library acting as the centrepiece of a dockland re-development (Goad, 2015; Danish Agency for Culture, 2017; City of Melbourne, 2019). It aspires to provide ‘a welcoming and inclusive place which celebrates culture, inspires community interaction and enables learning and creativity’. It is seen as ‘a vital connector for vertical communities who may be otherwise isolated’ and is described as ‘emerging as a key destination for all the people of Melbourne as well as its own community of residents, workers and students.’

As a final example, there is the extraordinary new library in Tianjin, China, which has attracted much media coverage (Tan, 2017; Wong, 2017). Its futuristic, all-white architecture is certainly remarkable, featuring an eye-shaped, humanity-dwarfing atrium. Its Dutch architects see it as a ‘new urban living room’, echoing the language used to describe Library Oodi in Helsinki. However, most of the shelves in the atrium are plastered with images of book spines, so that those who are, as the architects hope, inspired to read, need to seek out the more traditional sections of the library to find actual books. The ‘book mountain’ in the atrium, which all those under the age of fourteen, wearing heels or not fit to hike are advised to avoid, apparently represents, again according to the architects, ‘a new typology’ for cultural projects of this kind.

The image of books painted on walls provides an extreme but valuable insight into what might be going wrong. When looking at Tianjin, it is hard to escape the feeling that exuberant architecture has triumphed over the fundamental purpose of the building. But can we be sure what that purpose is and is it any clearer in the other examples we have considered? Five points stand out in most of the descriptions of new public libraries: a broadening of the functions contained within these buildings, whether in the direction of civic services, as in Aarhus, or, more usually, of a cultural space embracing a wide range of recreational activities, giving rise to the language of urban living rooms; a clear focus on social inclusivity, reflected strongly in the language and aspirations of Martine Houben and her use of the phrase ‘people’s palaces’; a strong connection with wider schemes of urban renewal; a desire to create iconic landmarks; and an almost complete silence on the role of librarians.

The victory of form over function symbolised by the painting of books on walls in Tianjin can be reasonably deplored. However, few would do anything but celebrate the fine new buildings that have arisen in places such as Helsinki, Melbourne and Aarhus, and all that they offer. Nor can we criticise the aspirations of these cities: there is nothing wrong with creating people’s palaces or regenerating disused docklands. But what we miss is a clear picture of the fundamental purpose of a 21st-century public library. What exactly does it mean to say that the library is an urban living room or a people’s palace?

This lack of specificity might not matter much as long as excellent new spaces labelled ‘libraries’ were being created. But it does matter in the far more numerous cases where public libraries face chronic funding pressures, or where, as in the UK, widespread closures are their fate. And it matters in all places where the view is widespread, particularly among those who control the public purse, that libraries are irrelevant in a digital environment.

Public libraries clearly do inhabit a world that is utterly different from the one in which they were founded. Everywhere there is the same need to engage honestly with the challenges they face and to be clear about their fundamental purpose. It is therefore disappointing that these tasks have received so little real attention. Far too much of the debate about the future of public libraries has been dominated by nostalgia, sentimentality and deference to the agendas of others. This argument has been explored at length elsewhere (James Reckitt Library Trust, 2017; Heseltine, 2018), but it is important to rehearse it here.

Public library supporters constantly invoke memories of their childhoods and of the part that libraries and librarians are remembered as playing in them. This sentimentality has been well criticised, this time in a North American context, by John Palfrey: as he observes, survey after survey shows that everyone loves libraries, just as they love the memory of a good childhood experience, but nostalgia is no prescription for the future. ‘An approach that relies too heavily on nostalgia to pull libraries as institutions through this period of transformational change is a dangerous one’ (Palfrey, 2015, 154).

Nostalgia is often combined with an equally simplistic argument for the primacy of the printed book. Every time the defenders of public libraries proclaim that books will never die, they unhelpfully reinforce the fact that libraries remain overwhelmingly associated in the public mind with the lending of printed books. And whilst it is all too easy for library defenders to blame the long-term decline in the lending of books, in the UK at least, on service cuts, there is a reluctance to engage in a rather more difficult discussion about the systemic place of libraries in providing access to a commodity, the printed book. In most developed economies and for the majority of people, the printed book has lost its relative scarcity value, thus removing much of the rationale for a non-market model of distribution based on sharing an expensive resource. Not unreasonably, public library defenders respond to this by focusing on the needs of the disadvantaged in society, of the economically deprived and the digitally excluded, but at the grave risk of positioning public libraries as little more than ‘soup kitchens for the printed word’ (BiblioCommons, 2015, 9).

There is of course a more sophisticated and progressive defence of public libraries, one which concentrates on the wide range of innovative services offered by the best public libraries and on their positive socio-economic and cultural impact. We might call this the ‘books plus so much more’ argument. There is no question that the best public libraries are developing increasingly innovative services and activities in areas such as: children’s learning; artistic and cultural activities; literary programmes; support for IT access and digital literacy; business support; help with health and wellbeing; activities to encourage engagement with science and technology through design and production; and programmes to develop a sense of community identity through, for example, oral history projects. In the UK, these activities have been documented in a string of reports published in recent years (Department of Culture, Media and Sport, 2014; Arts Council England, 2012, 2013a, 2013b; Scottish Library and Information Council, 2015), the most notable recent example of which was produced by the UK Government’s Libraries Taskforce in 2016: Libraries deliver: ambition for public libraries in England 2016–2021 (Department of Culture, Media and Sport, 2016). The Taskforce report makes a particularly strong case for the contribution of public libraries to social cohesion and to social, economic and cultural development.

All too often, however, this particular narrative, when deployed in defence of public libraries, leads to libraries being reduced to bit-part players in other governmental social and economic agendas at national and local levels. Impact is crucial but the question remains: what is it distinctively that librarians do? What functions do libraries fulfil that other organisations could not?

It is the failure to address these questions that leads to the positioning of public libraries as amorphous community hubs – or ‘urban living rooms’ in the language of the architects of Helsinki and Tianjin. Now these are not unreasonable descriptions if we are concerned with the important role that libraries should play in their communities. But such phrases can also be immensely misleading if they result in the characterisation of libraries themselves as generic community or cultural centres, for what then is left to libraries, and to librarians, that is distinctive? Hence the tendency, implicitly or explicitly, to fall back on books as being at the core of the purpose of libraries: the ‘books plus more’ proposition. But this reinforcement of the essential feature of the popular stereotype is dangerous. To the extent that people either do regard printed books as a dying technology or simply consider libraries to be marginal to obtaining them, then it follows that the case for public libraries is damaged by this reinforcement, regardless of the range of value-added activities that libraries undertake. Wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Section 1 Views from the Corridors of Power: The Political and Global Perspective
• Section 2 The Re-Birth of Libraries – New Business Models and Re-Generation of Services
• Section 3 Who Really Matters? User Communities and Alignment
• Section 4 The Future Library Professional – Horizons and Challenges
• Index