Please see press release below for CILIP's response to the Libri Report.

Colleagues who live or work in London may also be interested to see a
letter by Bob McKee in Metro, Friday April 30, page 13.

Best regards

Julie

PUBLIC LIBRARIES REPORT - DIAGNOSIS MAY BE RIGHT, TREATMENT ISN’T

UK’s leading organisation for library and information professionals finds
much to criticise in Libri report Who’s In Charge?

The diagnosis may be right, but the treatment isn’t - that was the
immediate response from CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and
Information Professionals to Who’s in Charge? - a new report from Libri on
the public library service in the UK.

Commenting in the Guardian on April 28 on the report, by former
Waterstone’s Managing Director Tim Coates, CILIP’s Chief Executive Bob
McKee said: “Mr Coates paints a picture of a public library service in
terminal decline.  It isn’t.  It certainly faces challenges - just like
bookshops do from supermarkets selling cut-price bestsellers or the BBC
does from cable and satellite.  But [it] is still a huge operation.”

Mr Coates’s treatment is flawed, CILIP believes, because it makes the
assumption that libraries are just like bookshops that happen to lend books
instead of selling them.  “Libraries don’t just carry multiple copies of
what’s currently in print,” Dr McKee told the Guardian’s John
Ezard.  “They’re required by law to be comprehensive, so they carry large
numbers of out-of-print works as well.  Managing them is a task that
bookshops just don’t have.”

In an hour-long debate with the report’s author Tim Coates on the BBC Radio
5 Live Simon Mayo Show on Tuesday, CILIP’s Head of External Relations Tim
Buckley Owen also questioned some of the assumptions behind the report’s
findings.  “Bookshops extend their opening hours in the expectation of
increased revenues and profit,” he pointed out.  “If libraries open late,
they just see their costs increase.”

Who’s In Charge? raises several points that are worthy of serious debate,
CILIP believes.  Longer opening hours and more books on the shelves are
certainly desirable goals - and CILIP also approves of the report’s
conclusions that management of libraries should be left to the
professionals but that councillors must take proper responsibility for the
service and assume leadership.  Improved training and appropriate
professional qualifications for public library staff were other
recommendations that CILIP supported, and Tim Buckley Owen told the launch
press conference that these were areas where CILIP could make a direct
contribution.

However CILIP does have concerns at Mr Coates’s contention that
improvements can be achieved entirely within the existing public library
budget.  In a speech to MPs and authors at a House of Commons reception to
celebrate 25 years of Public Lending Right, coincidentally held on the day
of the report’s launch, CILIP’s President Margaret Haines said: “There is
pressure from Government on public libraries to make even better use of the
resources they already have.  To be candid, this isn’t the whole story;
public libraries have suffered from years of under-investment, and
increased efficiency is only part of the equation.”

Mr Coates also bases many of his figures on highly questionable
assumptions, CILIP believes.  In a raft of responses to the newspapers on
the day news of the report broke, Bob McKee rebutted claims that libraries
spent £24 on each £10 book they bought, or that it took 28 librarians to
put a book on a shelf.  “By all means let’s have a debate on where
libraries go from here,” Dr McKee said.  “But let’s have it on the basis of
a proper understanding of how public libraries work.”

Contact: Tim Buckley Owen, Head of External Relations.
  Tel: 020 7255 0652. Email: [log in to unmask]