Richard Ovenden.
versity of Oxford who have had access to libraries earlier in life – whether through school or public libraries – are invariably better equipped to get the most out of uni- versity libraries. There is a line that can be drawn through our lives, linking and growing our library experience. He says: “We find increasingly that students at the university who’ve had experience of libraries growing up are extremely well equipped to utilise the power of a great research library and the college libraries in Oxford [more than] young people who haven’t had the benefit of access to libraries before, for various reasons.
“And so, the more that we can link up that process in order to empower our citizens with the ability to navigate the world of knowledge and to use libraries as part of that toolkit that they need[…] the better our society will be as a whole.” The Libraries Alliance is hoping to push that joined-up approach, emphasising the skills learnt early on can create a firm foundation for the future. Richard points out that the Bodleian Libraries is already encouraging that by opening the doors to young people.
“[The Bodleian is] able to open up our resources, open up our spaces – we now have an education team that brings schools in the local area into the library. We take exhibitions on the road. We now open-up some of our training to our col- leagues in the local public library system. “We’re on a journey, and I think that
February-March 2026
seeing ourselves increasingly not as an isolated institution, not just as an HE library, but part of that broader ecosystem is something which I hope that the Libraries Alliance will cultivate and foster and make more evident, not just for the Bodleian, but for every library in the country.” The catalyst for the alliance was twofold, the first an article written by Richard in Prospect magazine (
www.prospectmagazine.
co.uk/culture/books/67177/on-borrowed-time) and the 175th Anniversary of the Public Libraries Act. Richard says that research- ing the article gave him a new aware- ness around libraries outside of his own sphere, saying: “During the course of writing my piece for Prospect, I spoke to a lot of different people, particularly in the public library sector, which I didn’t know particularly well. Obviously as a user I know it, but I’ve never worked in the pub- lic library sector. And so I spoke to Isobel Hunter at Libraries Connected, obviously to Louis at CILIP, to various public librari- ans, including Neil McInnes in Manchester, and got intelligence from them. “But it occurred to me just how interest- ing and enjoyable and horizon broadening it was to have those conversations. Louis, Isobel and I had a little discussion and we thought, let’s try and bring the rest of the community, the different sector bodies, together to start having a conversation.”
Describing the inception of the alliance as “organic”, Richard says that those ini- tial meetings helped cement the idea that there was a greater power in advocacy and influence when working together.
Future skills
One clear area of focus for all of the partners is the need for a “future-ready” workforce, and again this is something that institutions should not be looking at in isolation.
“I think that the sector as a whole has been very aware of the challenge of digital for decades now, we’re already on that journey. Because the digital world changes so fast, the pace of innovation is increasing – we’ve seen that since the relatively recent introduction of genera- tive AI and the chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude and so on. It’s really only been a couple of years, but they’re pervasive now, they’re everywhere and you can’t evade them, or evade thinking about them. “Our ability as a library community to engage with the digital is already there. How much that ability and those skills are spread across all libraries is something that we need to know more about. So doing more survey work, identifying where there are relative strengths and areas of the library world which are less well prepared, less well skilled.
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