John Holden's Speech to a Recent CILIP Conference

John Holden's Speech
How can libraries best demonstrate value as costs come under pressure?

[John Holden is a visiting Professor at City University and was previously Demos' Head of Culture until Sept 2008. John has kindly given permission for his speech, to a recent CILIP Conference, to be circulated]

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, and thank you very much for inviting me to come and talk about this subject : How can libraries best demonstrate value as costs come under pressure?

Like all good questions it begs many others – what is value? Who does it need to be demonstrated to? Isn't it revenues, more than costs that are under pressure? Why do we need to be asking the question in the first place? And so on. I will deal with all those and more in a moment, but I want to start by reading you a fairy story, so - Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, there lived a king who wanted to rule over the most prosperous and admired kingdom on earth. As a result, artists and scientists beat a path to the King’s court with their ideas and inventions. One day, a group of scholars appeared, and on account of their venerable old age and respectable appearance, an audience was granted.

Sire, said the first scholar, we have something for you, but we want a billion gold Franks for it.

That’s a billion gold Franks a year, corrected the second scholar.

'That’s a lot of money' said the king, 'but tell me what you are selling, and then I will tell you what I am prepared to pay for it.'

Sire, said the third scholar, it is black, and dirty stuff, it comes out of the ground in lumps and when you light it, it burns for a long time.

The problem is, interrupted a fourth scholar, that when it burns it makes a lot of smoke.

But that can be overcome, countered the third, I have proved it in my laboratory, and the advantages are overwhelming – it keeps people warm.

'..... at the expense of breathing', adds the fourth in a stage whisper.

'Who said that?' the third objects angrily, looking around. 'Who said that. Who dares to contradict me? I will see him in court'

'You are in court' says the king, and the assembled nobles laugh sycophantically.

Then, the fifth scholar rises majestically to his feet. His white beard and immaculate robes silence the crowd and he steps forward to speak.

'Your majesty' he says quietly, 'my colleagues are all wrong. This substance is not black at all. It is an enigma that is clear but also white, and when it is in the sun it sparkles with all the colours of the rainbow. It is as beautiful as snow, yet harder than granite, but alas it cannot be burnt.'

He sits down.

'So says the king. This thing that you want to sell me for a billion gold Franks'

'A billion gold Franks a year' interjects the second scholar.

'As I was saying.' the king continues 'This thing is black and white and every colour of the spectrum. It burns and doesn't burn, it smokes and doesn't smoke, it warms and it suffocates. Is that correct?'

The scholars look at each other and begin to squabble amongst themselves once more.

'Enough' roars the king, 'take them away and chop off their heads.'

Well, you get the picture – here's a bunch of people with a problem. They have something - carbon - that appears in many forms, and is of great value, but they can't agree on how to tell their story.

The library community has a similar problem. During the last decade, a general reader on the Clapham omnibus would have come across disputes in the letters pages of newspapers, statistics pointing in all directions, and claims and counterclaims in articles.

She or he would have come away confused and probably saddened – asking 'why am I reading all this fractious debate about something as universally loved as public libraries? Where is the single voice of reason, someone who I have heard of and can trust, someone who can tell me what's really going on?'

And, of course, the problem has now been magnified because it is not just how newspaper readers view libraries that matters. On the contrary, we have a very real issue of persuasion and legitimacy brought on by the credit crunch and the forthcoming cuts in public expenditure. DCMS has already cut new building, and they have also cut £2million a year by dropping universal internet access via the libraries programme.

Now we have to persuade a group of what I call Scamps – Sceptical Councillors and Members of Parliament - who are running around with machetes. Every Minister in the new government will have to face a grilling by a Star Chamber with the Orwellian title of The Office of Budgetary Responsibility and they will have to justify every penny of what they spend. At the level of Local Authorities the squeeze is likely to be even more severe, and as everyone in this room knows, it has already begun. The pressure is on, and the question is not just what value libraries offer, but what value for money do they give?

So libraries need a coherent way of describing themselves, a convincing narrative about what they achieve as well as what they do, and a unified voice. They need a new story – and one that is not a fairy tale. Let’s see where we are now, and where we have to get to.

At the moment, libraries talk about themselves in a number of different ways. Sometimes, the storyline is about infrastructure : libraries are buildings; there have been branch library closures, some impressive new libraries have opened. They contain books – should they have more and if so of what type? And they also contain computers, used either by Australian backpackers to catch up on their emails or by the unemployed hunting for a job, depending on who you believe.

At other times, the library narrative is about activities. Libraries provide information and expertise; they organise clubs for parents and children and they help people to read. Personally, I believe that some of libraries' most important and consequently most convincing work has been going on in the area of reading, especially through the work of the Reading Agency.

Then again, libraries are also described in terms of their outputs - and statistics tell us about footfall, book loans, numbers of library cards issued and so on.

Finally, there are outcomes : what does all this library activity achieve in terms of helping individuals, groups and communities? Did the library help that unemployed person find a job? Did the reading club help an old person to lead a long and healthy life?

The heterogeneity of public libraries is in reality a great strength. Libraries can be many things to many people. But there are two problems. One is that heterogeneity is often portrayed in terms of competing interests rather than complementary interests. The history of the argument between books and computers is a classic case. An outside observer could be forgiven for wondering which century public libraries want to exist in – is it the eighteenth or is it the twenty-second?

The problem with computers has been, not they are a threat to the book – the book will be with us always, and computers have helped to sell and publish more of them – no, the problem is that computers have been a threat to existing library models and established institutional ways of working.

And the second problem with heterogeneity is that it leads to mixed messages.

Now, it is useful to have lots of information being put into the public arena, and to create more conversation about libraries. The Warwick academic, Eleanor Belfiore, has described how research papers and statistics rarely if ever produce change on their own, but they contribute to a general climate within which political decisions and funding decisions are taken. If you think about it, many of the major cultural decisions taken over the past decade were not evidence–based at all, but flowed instead from a more generalised idea that 'something needed to be done'. For example, when the last government decided to spend £16 million on cultural sector leadership it did so not because it had carried out extensive, or indeed any, research, but because the issue of leadership was 'in the air' so to speak. I would argue that the same was true of the decisions to establish Creative Partnerships and NESTA.

But the thing is, creating a generally benign and positive climate depends not just on a sustained volume and regular flow of opinion, research and advocacy, it also depends on two other things : consistency, and a trusted source. These are two areas where the libraries community needs to sharpen its approach if it wants to communicate its value.

Take consistency. This is from the letters page of The Guardian on 19th March 2010 : 'Libraries are not about books'. And this is from 22nd March 2010 : '..... the vast majority of our users come to libraries to borrow books'.

Or try these statements, all published in The Daily Telegraph within twelve months of each other :

. 'Library visits have remained static over the last three years' (March 2008)
. 'Visits to public libraries in Britain rose by six per cent' (February 2009)
. 'The number of people borrowing books is down by 3.3 per cent to 12.5 million.' (March 2009)

Now, I know, and you know, that visits, and borrowing, and numbers of books on shelves are apples and pears and oranges, but you can see how the public, and politicians, get confused.

And the other issue - of recognisable, trusted sources : what were the sources of these statements? Someone that we'd all heard of like Melvyn Bragg, or Judi Dench, or Cheryl Cole? No they came from organisations and spokespeople that the public would not recognise at all.

In terms of a marketing campaign, or even a plain old public education exercise, this approach doesn't work. This is no way to convince people that libraries are good value. So what is?

Well, to answer that question, I think you first need to think about what exactly you mean by 'value' and what you mean by 'people'.

The politicians, those Scamps who I talked about earlier, need to be convinced about value in a number of different ways. If I were a local Councillor or an MP I would be looking for four things.

First, as an elected member, probably seeking re-election at some point, I would want to be convinced that my voters were happy with the service they were getting. I would expect to see satisfaction surveys; I would visit libraries for myself to make my own judgement about the quality of the service, but I would definitely be interested to know who was using the library, why they were going there, what they wanted from the library, and whether they were getting it. This value of the library as a unique institution, doing things for individuals that no other institution or organisation could do, I call Intrinsic value. Intrinsic means 'of the essence of', or 'an essential part of'. What is this value that only libraries can provide to each one of my voters?

Second, since I would be charged with meeting a set of targets and achieving a set of outcomes for my community, I would want quantitative data showing that those outcomes were being achieved. I would expect to be told what the economic impact of the library is, and what measurable social outcomes flow from the council's library investment. This I call Instrumental value, or more accurately, instrumental benefit.

Third, as a politician, I am interested in my community. I want to be convinced not only that the library is lending books and helping people to study and to read and so on. I am also keen that as a local institution the library should play a civic role in strengthening a sense of local pride, in building trust among people. That means that I will see value not just in what the library does, but also in the way that it does it. Such things as the way that members of the public are treated by the library staff, the opening hours, the cleanliness of the premises – all of these things amount to much more than customer care in the context of a public institution because they act to create (or to destroy) a sense of community and society. This type of value I call Institutional value.

Finally I would want to know about value not just in terms of what the library is achieving and how, but whether my library service is giving me a different type of value, a comparative value, that is – value for money. How does my library service compare with others in similar circumstances? What's the cost-per-book-loan, the cost-per-computer, and the cost-per-square foot of running the libraries? Are those costs going up or down? You might think these are crude quantitative measures, and they are, but Councillors have to be convinced that they are spending money efficiently as well as wisely.

Figuring out how to do more with less is a good discipline in easy times – in hard times it becomes essential to survival. Buildings are expensive to build and to run, and they must be worked hard. The art of cost saving of course comes in finding ways to cut costs without cutting services – indeed while improving services, because if the range and quality of services falls, organisations get into a spiral of decline that can be impossible to stop – just look at the Post Office if you want an example not a million miles away from Public Libraries.

In the commercial world, we, the public, have become accustomed to a whole array of goods and services – from clothing to cars to computers – getting cheaper in real terms while getting better in quality (even if we are sometimes fooled about the quality). We are also accustomed to having greater choice – not just choice between different options, but choice in the sense of shaping our consumption. The change is exemplified by this, the Model T Ford, famously available in one colour, to this, the new FIAT 500, which can be customised in 500,000 variations, so that a buyer can have exactly what he or she wants, and may never see another car exactly like the one they have chosen.

The Harvard Business Professor, Shoshona Zuboff, puts it like this when she says : 'the new individuals seek true voice, direct participation, unmediated influence and identity-based community because they are comfortable using their own experience as the basis for making judgements'. If that is true in business and increasingly across public services, why would it be different in the case of libraries?

For members of the public then, what counts as value from the library service is very personal. I don't think members of the public are particularly interested in scrutinising the costs of providing the service they enjoy. I don't think they care much about all the instrumental value of libraries that politicians have been so obsessed with over the last few decades. No-one walks into a library thinking 'Oh, I'm so pleased this place is contributing to the growth of the creative industries and helping to achieve community cohesion.'

But I think that members of the public do care about three things : they want their own needs met easily, efficiently and respectfully. They want to take pride in a local institution and feel that it is serving their community. And increasingly, they perceive value partly as a function of how much interaction they can have with an organisation and how far they can shape their own desired outcomes.

I think that's what the public care about. But I don't know this for sure. There has been, for a very long time, a dreadful lack of research into what the public really want from their libraries. We need much more information on this. We should be asking questions right across the nation about what it is that people value about their libraries. We should be doing more contingent valuation studies, like Bolton did back in 2005, to find out how much people value their libraries in economic terms.

You have to go out and ask these questions because value is essentially a subjective issue. Benefit can be measured objectively, and is the observable change between a start point and an end point. You can determine whether someone has benefited from an experience, because there is an outcome. For example, it is possible to measure over large numbers of the population the extent to which improved reading skills affect social mobility, or whether school visits to libraries affect reading habits. These things can be counted. But when it comes to value, only the individual can decide that. It is up to me, or you, to value an experience and to place a value on it. You can tell me that reading a book will benefit me, but you can't tell me that I will value the experience – I have to decide that for myself.

From what little information we have we can infer that Public Libraries are in fact valued by the public. According to data from the CIPFA and DCMS, they are among the most popular and most respected public services in the country.

But there is more to it than that. There is something special about Libraries, and other cultural facilities, that politicians really should take more account of, because these are places where the public interact with public services of their own volition. You have to send your children to school, you have to obey a summons or go to hospital, but you use a library by choice, exercising your own free will. This is a powerful argument in favour of libraries, but of course it only works when people are voting with their feet and turning up in ever greater numbers.

To sum up then, what counts as value depends on who you are. I think libraries need to be able to show politicians that they are generating the three types of value described in this triangle, that is the intrinsic value of libraries to individuals and the unique role that they play; the instrumental value that they have in achieving economic and social goals; and the institutional value that they create in their role as civic and community organisations. They need to show that they are doing all these things while at the same time doing so in a way that demonstrates value for money and constant improvement in terms of operating efficiency and quality of service.

But creating value for the public is a continuous process that demands a number of capacities from libraries such as flexibility and the ability to listen and respond, but also a number of virtues and behaviours : among them empathising and respecting the public, and helping people to grow and to learn.

Libraries are doing a lot already in terms of producing public value, but there is room for improvement, as there always will be. And it is the production of value itself, rather than an advocacy campaign that ultimately convinces. The argument about value should start from the desires and actions of libraries themselves to increase value, and to provide better value for money. The stories and data about value should flow from libraries' own improvement initiatives. Value creation should not be a by-product or a response to outside pressure or requests. In other words, the best sort of advocacy comes from doing, not just telling, where people can see, touch and feel the value, not simply read about it.

This is an absolutely crucial point. The process of demonstrating value really begins and ends with substance not stories. You cannot demonstrate value unless you are creating real value in real places for real people. I have a friend called Simon Anholt who has created something called the Anholt Nation Brands Index. What he does is, every year, he asks a large number of people in about 20 countries what they think about other countries in terms of their governance, culture, attractiveness as places to visit or to do business and so on. And every year, he gets angry phone calls from countries who don't like where they appear on the list. After explaining that the rankings are not based on his own opinions, but on the views of many many respondents, he confronts the callers with an uncomfortable question : maybe the reason that they are at the bottom of the list is because they deserve to be there. Perception and reality are, after all, not always contradictory. No amount of picturesque villages and world famous poets will overcome a reputation for bureaucratic inefficiency or a history of domestic conflict. To begin to address their problem, these countries need to change their way of being, not the type-face on their brochures.

And to address those issues of substance in the context of libraries, we need to fill in the gaps in our knowledge about what the public wants and needs from their libraries. Only then can we address all those questions of institutional ability to create that value. And I expect that what the public wants will be to some degree consistent, but that it will also vary in detail from place to place, from person to person, and will change over time, so the information needs to be local as well as national, and produced on a regular basis. Just in the last week we have had a new library charter from the Campaign for the Book. I agree with all twelve of its propositions. The activists are clear and committed. But I also want to know what members of the public, users and non-users, up and down the country, think. If we are to have a localism agenda there will be a different granularity in Bolton and in Bognor and in Bodmin. How can we address the substance of value unless we know what people think and what they want?

I would like to finish on a personal note. This may be a cliché, but I am of a generation that was born in what today would be considered poverty, as it happens, in Bolton. I lived in a house with 3 books – a dictionary, a picture book about animals, and an atlas. But just down the road there was a branch library full of books – and hence full of knowledge, imagination, magic and wonder. Without that library, and the love of reading that it created, I would not be standing here today. I love public libraries and I still have a library card and use it regularly. But I have watched with growing disquiet, and increasing anxiety, over the last decade as the library community has failed to tackle a series of issues that have long been talked about, and that everyone agrees need addressing. Issues such as finding a powerful voice, developing public and political advocacy, bringing together libraries, authors, the professional bodies and the book trade as one unified and effective force; creating a coherent agenda among the various government departments and agencies.

I started this speech with a fairy story about a man with an axe. In reality, right here, right now, we've been told that we will experience 'savage cuts' and 'extreme pain'. In all this, it is likely that the poor will suffer most. Indeed they are already doing so – while Footsie 100 Boardroom pay is up 7% from last year, the Financial Times has reported that it is the lower paid who are bearing the brunt of the economic downturn.

In contrast to all other cultural services, Public libraries are used disproportionately by the less well off in our society. It is absolutely vital that our public libraries maintain and improve on the value they provide to the public, and especially to this particular section of the community.

Libraries may be about buildings and books and computers, but ultimately, and above all, they are about providing value to people.

We all know that we have a job on our hands to convince the Scamps – the sceptical councillors and MP’s - about the value of public libraries. It's part of our role to give them all the data, statistics, stories, charters and manifestos that they need. But we also have another job, which is to teach these people what they so often tell the rest of us - that actions have consequences. Value is usually created over the long term, by hard graft; but the work of destroying value can take only a moment.

Thank you for listening