 |
 |
Anyone got a hard figure for total web visits and total physical visits? Does the rise in one more than offset the decline in the other? Ian Clark Library Systems Officer, Augustine House, Canterbury Christ Church University Tel: 01227 767700 ext 3141 Follow us on Twitter: @ccculibrary -----Original Message----- From: lis-pub-libs: UK Public Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Laura Swaffield Sent: 10 December 2013 13:08 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: LIBRARIES: what new CIPFA report really shows 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.