INTERVIEW What’s the news?
Has 10 years of poring over public libraries news given Ian Anstice, editor of
PublicLibraryNews.com, the power to see beyond the superficial daily flow of stories? Ian talks to CILIP reporter Rob Mackinlay and warns “the real crisis for us may not have started yet”.
IAN Anstice has been sifting through the public library sector’s news for a decade, spotting changes and high- lighting them to readers who might not have noticed. “What I report on are, effectively, changes to the status quo… I do not report on what stays the same. In the dark years of 2010-15, “nothing significantly new has hap- pened this week” would have been a viable way of describing the majority of library services. I thought the cur- rent crisis would shut off news for a while but there remains a lot of – very different to normal – news to report.”
Man and mission
Ian’s weekly aggregation of stories, and editorial pieces have seen a spike in num- bers: “In terms of my readership, before the crisis, my website was getting around 300 views per day with a (free subscriber) base of around 1,700. Views have now quadrupled or more, reaching over 3,000 per day on occasion and normally around 1,000, with subscribers up as well. I put this down to the driving need for informa- tion and also the capacity of the website to simply add on more pages. The need for digital has also had a very positive impact on advertising revenues for obvious and similar reasons.”
The information professional in him points out that while his years of experience have honed his understanding of the library news landscape, the process he performs for his readers is not a neutral one. “Reading all of the news reports on public libraries for a decade and talking to people at all levels has really balanced out my reporting and views
44 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
over the years, at least I like to think it has… but when it comes down to it, I am a mid-level manager in a public library service during the day and a man with a laptop in the evenings. There will be things I miss and things which I misinterpret. And everyone has their own conscious and unconscious biases.”
Good crisis: start So far, he thinks the sector has done well: “There are three things that have impressed me: While it was all hitting the fan in March, I published an editorial stating that public librar- ies could not safely remain open and a load of people contacted me to say they were thinking the same thing. It’s hard to think back to far-off March days now but to close libraries was a truly radical suggestion even then. Yet Libraries Connected publicly called for closing just days after me (I don’t claim any influence on that), which suggests some very nimble thinking going on from a profession which was very much tied up, at that point, in physical stock.”
June-July 2020
Rob Mackinlay (
rob.mackinlay@
cilip.org.uk) is a senior reporter for Information Professional.
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