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December 7, 2008
Public libraries are....
"Public libraries are an important national resource with a vital role to play in establishing, nurturing and nourishing people’s love of reading. Libraries also play an important part in life-long and informal learning providing access to books as well as other reading material whether on paper or, via the People’s Network, in digital form. Libraries, together with their staff, are a trusted civic amenity—highly valued, safe public spaces and storehouses of advice, information and knowledge—without which the citizens of Britain would be very much the poorer.
The public library system in Britain costs about £1 billion per year, the vast bulk of which is provided by local authorities who must deliver an efficient and comprehensive service in their areas. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport, acting through the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council—and in partnership with many others—has responsibility for the oversight of the service and the promotion of its quality. After some casting about, the Department has now settled on a system whereby libraries are measured against ten national standards. However, we believe that this list represents rather limited ambitions which, even so, are not being fulfilled. The top ten standards do not refer to extended opening hours, book loans, access or material for people with disabilities, value for money from the service or free access to the internet (all of which we regard as important). In addition, crucially, the standards that are in place are not backed up with effective mechanisms for ensuring continuous improvement or even simple compliance.
Therefore, the snapshot of library services revealed by our evidence is unsurprising. There were pockets of excellence but, overall, there were equal proportions of satisfactory and less than adequate services across the country. The data submitted to us showed that overall spending was up but, within this total, spending on books was down; as were loans of books and overall visitor numbers. We regard a situation in which core performance indicators, and gross throughput, are falling—but overall costs are rising—as a signal of a service in distress. This must be reversed.
Our key recommendations are designed to focus attention on libraries’ fundamental role in promoting reading and we seek to distinguish clearly between core functions and desirable add-ons (prioritising resources in favour of the former). There need to be far stronger links between national library standards (which themselves need improving) and effective mechanisms to encourage and enable library services to meet, if not surpass, them. We also wish to see an action plan for the refurbishment of the nation’s library buildings; one that includes clear indications of where the necessary resources, estimated at somewhere between £240 million and £650 million, will come from."
March 2005-- The Culture Select Committee of the House of Commons.
Posted by Perkins at December 7, 2008 9:21 AM
Comments
Book sales in a recession are down just half a per cent (unlike cars, down 36%). There is a great appetite for books, and libraries should recognise, rather than discard, their core strength.
It is also bizarre that newspapers should think it wise to cut down on books space. These pages might not bring huge advertising but they bring readers, who then look at the other pages...
Posted by: Christopher Hawtree at December 7, 2008 11:02 AM
Reading this post and seeing mention of "ten national standards" prompted me to go to the DCMS website to see how Public Libraries are currently assessed.
I couldn't find anything about standards - but that was probably because I'm not asking the right questions of the search engine - but I did find the page that says "How does the DCMS assess the performance of public libraries?"
The answer to that question is given by the DCMS: "From April 2008 all local authorities are required to report their performance against 198 indicators to central government. Indicator 9 concerns libraries" - Whew that's a bit stiff I thought, 198 performance indicators - then I realised that there is only one indicator for Libraries - no 9. So I downloaded a document that would tell me what the National Indicator for Libraries involved - a pdf download entitled "National Indicators for Local Authorities and Local Authority Partnerships: A Handbook of Definitions".
This wasn't terribly illuminating as it just informed me that NI 9 related to "Use of Libraries". I then discovered that the "DCMS is collecting data for National Indicators (NI) 9, 10 and 11 via Sport England’s Active People survey." - so thought - this might be the place to look to see how libraries are performing, and the standards against which they will be assessed. Although I did think it a little odd that "Sport England" might be collecting the data on libraries - still I perhaps they have expertise in framing questions and compiling data. The Sport England website informed me that the "Active People Survey 2" which assesses compliance with the National Indicator (I hope you are still with me on the jargon) "commenced on 15 October 2007 and was completed on 14 October 2008." I was also told I could look at the questions asked by the survey. So I downloaded the briefing note and the questions. The question being asked is (roll of drums...) "During the last 12 months, have you used a public library service at least once?" So what things boil down to is that the DCMS is assessing public libraries by a single standard the number of people who use a library at least once in the year.
Posted by: Martyn at December 7, 2008 9:28 PM
Martyn - your extensive research is correct; but why such information is so deeply buried is a mystery. And we know that public libraries, when used by commercial firms for hairdressing demonstrations, count the number of attendees as visitors to the library. It also, for what it is worth, contravenes one of the many recommendations of the select committee (agreed by the Government) which was that whatever measures operated they should be clear to the public.
The larger question, of course, is why Roy Clare and Andrew Motion feel allowed and are paid by the DCMS to adopt the anti-book stance they do when the views of Parliament are so clear. Roy and Andrew's recent statements in The Bookseller seem completely to contradict this extract above, which is the full introduction to the Select Committee Report of only four years ago.
Posted by: tim coates at December 8, 2008 10:38 AM
The single performance standard that Martyn has discovered - the number of people who use a library (authority) at least once in the year - is quite a good one. But why on earth conduct an expensive SURVEY to find this figure?
Every service can get the ACTUAL number of active card-users from its own computer system!
Posted by: No Brain at December 10, 2008 2:53 PM