Tim Coates' Speech to Conference : Page 3
On the other hand what the public library does do – and proudly – is to endeavour to make a contribution to the social agenda of local government. It addresses questions of health care; it provides accommodation for job centres; it attempts to make its libraries youth and community centres, not by its provision of reading material, but by going out of its way to offer other entertainments that it perceives might be more attractive. It participates actively in immigrant wellbeing programmes. How well it does all these things is for the various audiences and the audience development officers to assess, but that it does them at all allows the service to claim that it plays a role in the priorities of local government and from the impact that these things make it justifies its role and its funding. Whether actual use of the service goes up or down, or whether books are borrowed and read, is said to be irrelevant if one only could measure the impact the service has on the economy and the well being of the local community and the councils local area agenda.
I don’t deny that a local council is entitled to set priorities for what it must do; of course it must; but I do disagree with the idea that all the public services it offers have to contribute actively to those priorities if they are not particularly relevant. Just because you want to care for single parents doesn’t mean you shouldn’t mend the roads. I disagree with those who give resource and priority to social agendas for libraries if what is needed to make those public libraries better requires other priorities and actions. A council may reasonably seek to improve health care in its area, but I think that the role of the library in such a cause is to be a good library to the people, not to be a place that offers health advice, as many libraries currently claim to do. A council may reasonably seek to care for the young unemployed, but that does not mean turning the library into a youth job centre that may easily make the library less attractive and even actually frightening to other library users. Use of the library building for any purpose is not the same as making it into a really good library. Diverting management attention onto outreach schemes of this kind, means that there is insufficient time and money to devote to the core of the service.
Co-location of public libraries with other services, which is at present much applauded by government agencies and professional bodies, will not on its own make a library a better library – any more than putting a library into job centre will make it a better job centre. Putting a library in a council one-stop shop saves nothing because librarians are no better at answering difficult questions about care of an elderly relative than council workers are able to recommend the reading age of the Gruffalo. What makes a library better are improved stock, better designed buildings, longer hours, or more helpful and knowledgeable staff. Large modern futuristic central libraries are not necessarily more useful than small community libraries. If efficiency is measured in terms of the cost of travelling by individual people (as supermarket chains have now realised it should be) then large and urban may well be less efficient than a library which is small and neighbourly.
These views I am expressing are quite controversial in government circles, in fact they are almost treasonable, but to an ordinary member of the public they are obvious. They are so clearly the reasons that people protest when small libraries are threatened with closure one wonders why officials find it hard to understand them. But the reason is that government departments are so big and intertwined that they get themselves fixed on agendas which become remote from what the public actually want — that is a problem of the big government we have. It becomes impossible for middle managers to argue common sense.
A good library makes an enormous contribution to the community in which it stands by
virtue of what it does for each individual and what they need, rather than by acting as a
social service. What we need are better libraries --
measured against the
requirements that the public has – rather than by assessing their contribution
to council priorities. Those are two very different things.
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