Left to right: Julian Diamond, Richard Heseltine, Gill Furniss, Nick Poole, Caroline Brazier, Douglas White.
education, retail, culture which are bringing life to communities and cities.”
Economic potential
The economic value of libraries was pre- sented from a number of perspectives. One of the key benefits of libraries, according to the Arup report, is their ability to increase the prosperity of communities. Julian said that when libraries are placed at the centre of economic and cultural life, “They’re really effective at generating revenue for neighbouring retail and leisure activities.” Another economic angle was presented by David Fletcher, founder of Wimbletech: “I think libraries should be able to fund themselves, they should be cultural, social and economic engines in their own right, and that is something that can certainly be delivered through effective partnership and certainly if you look at the online side of things, with local IP (intellectual proper- ty)… there’s tons of IP there that could be turned into income.”
Exploring the wider economic role of public libraries, Nick Poole commented on the recent publication of the government’s
Debate: (L to R) Douglas White, Caroline Brazier, Richard Heseltine.
Industrial Strategy saying: “We saw the announcement of the Industrial Strategy and there isn’t a single sector mentioned in it that doesn’t fundamentally depend on a literate workforce, communities every- where being able to engage, have ideas, build enterprises and so this is our time, whether we know it or not.”
Divided we stand
Could a platform model really cope with a variety of roles and funding models? For example, managing the economic poten- tial of libraries alongside their potential to do public good. Jonathan Douglas of the National Literacy Trust said “The truth is that the relationship between poverty and literacy in the UK is now the strongest in any country in Europe apart from Romania… I suppose the question is whether we are prepared to campaign for libraries… as something that is an active agency of equal- ity in society and should we even be saying we need a bias to the poor?”
Can libraries of the future achieve this and also meet their economic potential? Nick Poole warned against a “deficit model of library use” where they are for people who can’t afford to acquire books and content. He said they had to play both roles: “We have to deliver a universal service but then we have systematically to target disadvantage and inequality.” Richard Heseltine argued that a plat- form model could cope with an array of enterprises. “Different management mod- els might coexist across the library system as a whole each suited to the needs of a specific enterprise and a specific partner- ship.” He added that partnerships would be vital for “the renewal and sustainability of the services the community needs” but they aren’t easy to put in place when a library service is a single institution. He said: “It’s so much easier to think about partner- ships in relation to specific enterprises than it is to the think about them in the context of an undifferentiated library service.”
APPG Report
A more detailed report on the issues covered above and the many others raised during the APPG roundtable will be pro- duced in the new year.
It will include current issues such as volunteers, technology, data use and data gathering and how these might inform the creation of libraries in the future. Also the future of the profession, and how to make it attractive, about which Nick Poole said: “I do think we have got to build resilience and transferability, we’ve got to be able to say to people you are an information professional, you are a librari- an, you may not be working in your ideal job today but we need to look at how you can move across that sector to find that ideal job.” IP
16 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL December-January 2017/18
NEWS Gill Furniss
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