Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal August 2004 Volume 2 (4)

Endpiece

Adding value

Brian Osborne says we must do more to promote the added value of libraries.

Am I going to be the only library columnist not to get some mileage out of the Libri report Who's in Charge? Not a chance!

There is much of significance in the report, which was written by Tim Coates, a former Managing Director of Waterstones, although some of its intellectual leaps are beyond me – for example the bland assumption that Hampshire County Libraries with a staff of 511.9 fte can be managed by three people other than those providing front line, customer-facing, services. Query: how many back office staff do Waterstones have? His recipe of trebling expenditure on books and doubling opening hours, and doing this, and more, within existing budgets, however does seem like work for the Magic Circle rather than for CILIPS members.

The report's assumption that the bookshop model for staffing, for cataloguing, or for acquisition, can be simply carried over into the library field is not one that many library practitioners would endorse, or one that would seem to make for efficient library services. Unfortunately people outside the profession will pick up Coates' report and assume that it represents something more than what it actually is: an extrapolation from one, not necessarily typical, service by a writer with a particular and entrenched view about public libraries.

However one thing that I think that emerges from the whole episode is that as a profession we have signally failed to impress on the public, or on our paymasters, exactly how a library differs from a bookshop, what libraries do and why libraries are needed. For evidence of this failure you need only look at the words of an intelligent and knowledgeable Scottish publisher, Hugh Andrew, Managing Director of Birlinn Ltd (Hugh publishes me so he is, of course, by definition intelligent and knowledgeable) who was quoted in the Sunday Herald of 30 May as calling on libraries to "reform their elephantine and self-perpetuating bureaucracy."

Hugh Andrew may be relied upon for a pithy phrase, but his words cannot and should not be totally ignored. Whether or not we see librarians as elephantine, it seems other people do, and we and our professional bodies have a major job to do to convince the world that libraries are adding value, changing lives and delivering irreplaceable services and that the Coates solution is not the only or the best way forward.

Hugh Andrew's comment was made in the context of concerns about the state of Scottish publishing (touched upon by Colin Will in Information Scotland June 2004) and in particular the decline in public library spending on Scottish material – a matter close to Hugh Andrew's heart (and to mine, if I may declare a commercial interest!). Of course one common thread in Tim Coates' and Hugh Andrew's concerns surely is rooted in a decline in overall materials budgets – given decent bookfunds the percentage of total spend on books would be higher than the, admittedly disappointing, 9% Coates reports, and the spend on Scottish books in Scottish libraries would also be higher. The fact that the average Scottish authority only managed to reach 70.1% of the target for adult stock additions tells its tale of a funding crisis of significant proportions. However, even within what are often disgracefully low budgets, there must surely be a case for prioritising material reflecting Scottish life and culture.

Gordon Platt of Canadian Heritage demonstrated what can be done when he spoke at a Royal Society of Edinburgh seminar on Scottish Publishing in June. Thanks to the support given to writers and publishers by the Canadian Government the percentage of books sold in Canada that are written by Canadian authors has risen from less than 10% in the 1960s to almost 40% at present. Please don't ask what percentage of books sold in Scotland are written by Scots or published in Scotland – the answer, if it could be produced, would only depress you.

The decision to support Canadian writing and publishing was not made in a narrowly protectionist spirit or to create an inward-looking culture. The support was given because it was realised that Canada, if it is to be anything more than a US branch office, must give her citizens the tools to talk with themselves, to tell their own stories, write their own histories and argue over their future. Without such intervention Canada saw herself threatened by cultural assimilation by a larger southern neighbour. Now why does that sound ever so slightly familiar?

Brian D Osborne
brian@bdosborne.fsnet.co.uk

Information Scotland Vol. 2 (4) August 2004

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