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November 9, 2008
Grim for grown ups
Miranda Mckearney at the Reading Agency has rightly been at pains to point out that childrens librarians are doing a good job and that the use of libraries for borrowing books is far from over.
She strips out the childrens lending figures which show, encouragingly that in each year since the millenium
Loans per child
2000/1 8.3
2001/2 8.2
2002/3 8.1
2003/4 8.0
2004/5 8.2
2005/6 8.3
2006/7 8.4
but when you look at what remains for adults the picture is pretty grim:
loans per adult
2000/1 5.2
2001/2 4.9
2002/3 4.6
2003/4 4.3
2004/5 4.0
2005/6 3.9
2006/7 3.7
You wouldn't want your income to go down like that! Presumably that's why the Chief Librarians, MLA, DCMS, CILIP etc keep telling us that book lending is not a measure of the performance of libraries. Well Miranda obviously thinks it is a good measure.
Everybody likes measures when they make their performance look good and dismisses them when they do the opposite
We say that these figures on their own show the poor performance of the public library service, and that it is time the Society of Chief Librarians faced their responsibilities and addressed the problems properly instead of denying them.
When compared to other council services satisfaction levels for public libraries may be relatively high, but where potential customers of libraries have a choice of going elsewhere to obtain what a library offers, they have been voting with their feet for a long time. The service is very poor indeed.
Posted by Perkins at November 9, 2008 11:38 AM
Comments
The real issue is what would a political party, a major national institution or even a national retailer do if his business was "going south" and his support was disappearing. Would he not first undertake comprehensive market research to understand why and what his customers and potential customers need and want from him and particularly the reasons why people were leaving?
Is his offering poor, is he not available when people need to visit him, does he appear out of touch, are his staff unhelpful etc? Why is it that the MLA, the DCMS and the profession have shied away from commissioning comprehensive public research for public libraries?
Posted by: George at November 10, 2008 8:27 AM
George makes a good point. Also, if anyone was to draw up a proposal for a retail business that said it would spend 94 percent of its budget on overheads, and 6 percent of its budget on stock, they would be laughed out of the room. And yet this is what many libraries are doing: small wonder that adult loans are declining - there's hardly anything available to borrow.
Posted by: Amanda Field at November 10, 2008 9:35 AM
I was interested in recent posters from London Borough of Newham talking about how they were going to act on user feedback.
"You said - you want more books"
"We respond - we will buy more books for children"
Urm - I love the kids but as much as the next person but that is a rather selective bit of listening.
Posted by: A at November 12, 2008 2:18 PM
In Newham the number of books available for borrowing has fallen by 42% in 10 years; book lending to children has fallen to 7.1 loans each year (the national average is 8.4); book lending to adults has fallen by 35% to 2.9 loans per annum (the national average is 3.7). The cost of the library service is over £0.5m per library per annum for each of the 11 libraries (ie well over the cost of 20 substantial book shops). 52.6% of the cost of the library service is spent on staff, 6.1% is spent on books.
The figures are so awful it is better not to look at them. So they don't. Is this Lyn Brown's territory?
Posted by: perkins at November 12, 2008 4:24 PM