Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

April 2003 Volume 1 (2)

150 years of public libraries in Scotland

The More We Are Together

To coincide with celebrations of 150 years of public libraries in Scotland a series of articles will look at how libraries from other sectors have fared over that period. Stuart James starts with higher education.

150 years? A mere blink of the eye to such as Saint Andrews, Aberdeen or Glasgow Universities founded in the fifteenth century, or to Edinburgh of the sixteenth. Why, even Anderson's College (later to metamorphose into Strathclyde University) came into existence at the end of the eighteenth century and preceded these new-fangled rate-supported libraries by more than 50 years.

As the new libraries were to be the working man's (and woman's) university, they offered a truly public and very distinct contrast to their academic neighbours. Old the university libraries might be, but accessible they were not, except to a small academic community of scholars (and their friends). In some cases, the admission of undergraduates to university libraries was a matter for acrimonious debate into the twentieth century. Such conditions did, however, help preserve some remarkable collections for our wider enjoyment today in a very different virtual world.

The new and the old not only co-existed but came slightly closer together in professional terms. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a developing professionalism among librarians in both sectors, with catalogues being produced and problems of conservation and use beginning to be tackled; still, in university libraries that tended to be against a backdrop of strong academic control and chronic shortage of resources (a world view familiar still in some institutions). University libraries generally kept their foundation and major collections in a central library, while as book production burgeoned during the new century teaching or research collections began to appear in academic departments; only now are more of these finally being deposited in the central collection, while new specialist collections still spring up in many departments.

The expansion of volumes grew apace, with buildings, catalogues and librarians struggling to keep pace, and well into the 1960s and 70s often enough failing to do so. University expansion of the 1950s and beyond brought alarming prospects of university libraries acquiring more and more books and gradually swallowing whole campuses (and their budgets). The Atkinson Report of 1976 tried to call a halt by inventing the concept of the self-renewing library: one of those ideas doomed to failure in its literal interpretation, but putting the concept of collection management very much on the agenda, where it has remained ever since.

Not only libraries were expanding, but the whole sector too. 1882 saw the arrival of the University College Dundee, but it was to be the second half of the twentieth century which produced first new universities in Stirling and at Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh, then in 1992 of course the scrapping of the binary divide to bring five more new universities into the fold. Not all that new necessarily: just a few years later Paisley was to celebrate the centenary of its foundation in a previous guise, while Napier, Robert Gordon's, Abertay and Glasgow Caledonian had either been around for some time or contained constituent parts which dated back a long way. In the meantime too specialist art, teacher training and agricultural colleges had developed and post-1992 these (and so their libraries) also came into the formal higher education sector either as independent bodies or (as now with all the teacher training colleges) by merger. Nursing education, too, came into higher education in the 1990s, bringing another raft of specialist libraries into the sector and complementing in new institutions the medical school libraries in many of the older universities. Thereby the health and higher education library sectors have been drawn into closer partnership.

By the latter part of the twentieth century the professional basis of university librarianship was well established. A generation of able and powerful librarians established collection, service and management standards which their successors would gratefully inherit; those foundations paved the way for automation which initially affected (or saved from drowning in chaos) university libraries. Scolcap of blessed memory was primarily an HE initiative: ultimately it was to fail for a number of reasons - technical, commercial and organisational - but it gave many of us a first taste of addressing the issues of automation, and of collaborating with one another.

Those were interesting times in every sense, but most of the scars seem to have healed. Certainly they have largely healed in terms of collaboration today, which is at once deeper, more extensive and more effective; the change in the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL) in recent years is symptomatic of the real benefits of genuine collaboration between institutions of differing sizes, missions and histories.

Earlier mention of Atkinson (not forgetting Follett) points out that until devolution, universities and their libraries were funded and administered from UK sources; now we are all devolved to the Scottish Parliament and Executive, under a Scottish Higher Education Funding Council. But a tension exists, for many of the contexts for university libraries - especially the large research libraries - are United Kingdom or European and internationally focused; and for all of us the backbone electronic services on which we rely originated in JISC.

How far Scotland should, or can, develop its own policies and infrastructure is a matter of debate still. But the policy in Scotland is clear, and brings us almost full circle over 150 years. Lifelong learning underpins us all and if we have become very good at collaborating with each other we are also getting a lot better at collaborating with those now community-charge-supported libraries we are celebrating this year.

There is an exciting future for HE libraries in almost any terms - collection development, service development, virtual libraries and all the issues which arise with them - but it is one we share more than ever before with libraries in all sectors. The last 150 years may have been interesting; the next promise to be even more so.

Stuart James is Librarian of the University of Paisley

Information Scotland Vol. 1 (2) April 2003

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Last updated: 12 February 2004