of financial crises. These are crowd sourced from heads of service. They include questions like ‘can we close all our libraries except our central library’ or ‘could we get rid of all the e-books’ or ‘get rid of all the books all together and give everyone a kindle subscription?’ “When you start putting them together there are some clear patterns and we can say ‘we were asked that.. and this is the answer’. “We’re also working up timelines for some of these changes, so, for example, how long does it take to close a library? We can show that proposals to close branch libraries are not something you’d achieve in three to six months. So, if your imperative is to find in-year budget savings or for the start of the next finan- cial year, that might not be a sensible op- tion. And the same with moving libraries to community management, or having major redundancy programmes.” Isobel said: “When you hit one of these crises, questions are being fired at you left right and centre. You’re being asked, ‘can you get back to me this afternoon about xyz?’. If we’ve done some work beforehand and collated a lot of these frequently asked questions it gives heads of service time to prepare and find examples for responses. So, when you’re in a crisis situation you’re not having to think from scratch every time.”
DCMS
“I encourage libraries to talk to DCMS at the earliest stage,” Isobel says. “Because there’s a lot of advice they can give to move things in the right direction or head off the wrong decisions. And from the local authority point of view, it’s obvious- ly a lot easier to start from the right place, than to get six months down the line and have to unwind some wrong decisions. “DCMS looks at the context and
January-February 2024
Isobel Hunter.
explores whether there are issues that it would be concerned about. A lot of heads of service have done this and fed back about how they were able to go back to their finance directors and say ‘that’s not such a good idea because the view of DCMS is x and the consequences would be y’.”
She adds that with library leadership suffering from dilution – “because one way to save money is to cut roles and merge senior management roles” – that this direct line to central government “was particularly powerful when libraries are dropping down the local government hierarchy.”
Stay civil
So what is the Libraries Connected advice to heads caught in a survival scramble? “In theory it’s just ‘don’t attack others’,” Isobel says. “Because when the money gets very tight a bun fight of sorts is inevitable. Look at how you can work positively with other departments to deliver mutual priorities, and hence strengthen the position of your libraries. We will flag up some of the tactics that your peers have used, but we’d add that there’s probably not one solution. You may have to try all sorts of different tactics to fit your circumstances and see what will work the best.”
She said that even valid defences will need to be presented with care: “The key players are those at director level, and finance directors whose job it is just to look at the bottom line. And if you are in section 114, you may have Commissioners brought in from the outside, whose focus will be on the bottom line. They’ve got a very difficult job, they don’t always understand impacts or what services are there to do – their main concern is to look at the pounds and pence.”
A positive thread
There is one aspect of the crisis that could play to the positive strengths of libraries. Isobel says pre-existing relationships that libraries have built across their councils will be important. “It depends on each library service, but where they’ve got pro- jects with other services, they have found that service will become an advocate and speak up for them.”
She says libraries are more likely to have these relationships than other council services because “libraries already see their role as convening partnerships. It’s a real shift from what I call the old Town Hall model, where councils delivered services directly to their residents. For many coun- cils the focus is now on building partner-
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