PUBLIC LIBRARIES
CLOSURES SLOW, CONFUSION GROWS
Good news about public libraries? There's some. Web visits are up by a
whopping 25% in just a year. If the future is digital, that's
promising.
And the rate of closure is slowing. These days, that counts as good
news. But what does that statement conceal??
Plenty.
'OPEN' - BUT IS IT A REAL LIBRARY?
The latest statistics* from CIPFA (Chartered Institute of Public
Finance & Accountancy) show 'only' 74 libraries closed in the year up
to April 2013, compared to 201 closures the previous year.
Yet Ian Anstice of Public Libraries News**, who compiles up-to-date
figures day by day, records a higher figure for the same period.
Why?
'Presumably,' he says, 'because councils are counting volunteer
branches as open.'
(Ian records libraries 'lost', to cover both closures and libraries
dumped on to communities to run.)
VOLUNTEER NUMBERS ROCKET
The clue lies in CIPFA's further finding that staff numbers are down
6.8% year on year. But the number of volunteers rocketed by 44.5%. So
we now have 20,302 staff - and 33,808 volunteers.***
'The figures show that councils are learning a new trick,' says Laura
Swaffield, Chair of The Library Campaign.
'You don't shut libraries outright, because your voters will hate you.
Instead, you dump them on to volunteers to run and call them
"community libraries".
'Your library service will knock itself out to give them some support,
as best it can. And you can claim to have x libraries "open", whether
or not these are real libraries. Nobody's asking you about that.
'If the volunteer libraries collapse in a year or two, hopefully
nobody will notice. And anyway, the local elections will be over.'
OUT OF CONTROL
'The overall message, then,' says Laura Swaffield, 'is that the whole
library landscape is sliding out of control.
'The CIPFA figures can no longer give a full picture of what is
available. And the government (DCMS) and the Arts Council are doing
nothing to monitor the real situation.
'Meanwhile, nobody knows what a library is any more.
'This one is a proper council library, with skilled staff always on
hand and fully linked to some fantastic national resources. That one
is run by amateurs - some excellent, some not - and with council
support that varies wildly from place to place.
NOBODY KNOWS WHAT'S GOING ON
'This exacerbates a long-standing problem with the CIPFA figures. The
headline statistics show the national trend, which overall doesn't
look great.
'You need to drill down to the local details. These would show where
library services are booming - as many are. Even more important, they
would help show the factors that lead to success. But this analysis is
not provided.
'Now, even local analysis won't show what works and what doesn't. A
simple count of a council's "libraries" won't reveal how many of them
are the real thing.
'We know that usage figures have plummeted in some volunteer
libraries, in Swindon for instance (which is now keen to turn over
another nine libraries to volunteers).
'But such information has been hard to track down. Lewisham is flatly
refusing to make its latest figures available to library users. It
gets harder all the time.'
So - how does the library service fare? Increasingly, nobody knows.
And, it seems, nobody cares.'
Laura Swaffield
Chair
The Library Campaign
www.librarycampaign.com
07914 491 145
* http://www.cipfa.org/about-cipfa/press-office/latest-press-releases/cipfa-library-survey-shows-closures-slowing-visitor-numbers-falling-but-volunteers-soaring
** www.publiclibrariesnews.com
*** The figures cannot be directly compared. Staff are counted in
terms of full-time equivalents, volunteers as individual people,
regardless of how many hours they work. Another example of how hard it
is becoming to make sense of the new library landscape.
But the trend is very clear: 2008-9 showed 25,648 staff and only
15,894 volunteers; 2012-13 shows 20,302 staff and 33,808 volunteers.
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