The Future of Libraries?
After several months of not actually working in a library (actually about 14 months) and after settling comfortably into my new role, I have found myself thinking about the future of libraries. These thoughts have several strands, and so I begin to tease them out…
In my new role I get to meet people working at the sharp end of both public and academic libraries. And in a few of my recent System Manager Beginner training courses, I have had the pleasure of getting to know some of the budding system managers. There are huge differences in outlook between those from different institutions.
Public institutions often have people who feel that they put their hand up at the wrong moment. I was one of those once – except I wanted to put my hand up! Public institutions often have IT departments whose priorities are governed by the Revenues and Benefits systems, with libraries coming lower down the pecking order. Public institutions often have parts of their IT systems outsourced to third party providers such as Serco, Allied or BT. I even know of one customer whose library system has fallen into a gap between contracts, and while it is sitting in the third party controlled datacenter, it is not supported, so any network changes or basic information tasks are chargable.
Quite rightly there are administration structures in place to ensure visibility of major system changes, but quite often these seem unneccesary or unweildly. Yet in an academic instituition, where the same strictures are required, there seems to be more of a willingness to do whatever is necessary to get the products working in a timely fashion. Maybe this is because the academics see the library as an essential part of the life of the campus? The library priority is therefore higher? Maybe the IT department was (and is) part of the library itself, because the library was one of the first depatments to move it’s knowledge of data managment to electronic databases?
So what could public libraries learn? Or perhaps more to the point what could Local Government learn?
I have a wholly unsubstantiated theory that the readership in libraries is declining because we are doing two things.
Thing One, is destroying the reader base. The government is actively encouraging more people to go to work, therefore surely people have less time to read so many books? (I know it’s a wild theory, and impossible for me to quantify, yet I am sure there are readers out there who just can’t read as many books as they used to) When I was ‘doing statistics’ for my previous employer, I ran some age profiling to see where the peaks were in the numbers of loans. unsurprisingly, they were at school age and retirement age.
Thing Two, is the shrinking of the book budget and the deterioration of the stock. Who wants to go to the library and borrow umpteen celebrity gardening books? I can tell you the tale of the borrower who came to the library to borrow a copy of a book about a lesser known but famous composer (Sir Michael Tippett). The book was not there, and when he came to the enquiry desk I was able to inform him that the book had been withdrawn from stock because it had not been out for over a year. Luckly I had been around when the book was withdrawn had had been allowed by my superiors to let the Art College have the book to add to their library. So I sent the borrower up the hill, and he was happy.
That’s probably enough from me for now.