ships and working with communities to help address problems and use shared resources and skills.
“For example, in their Warm Welcome work libraries asked ‘who else out there has the skills and resources we need for this, and how can we provide a venue for them to help our community?’ They also used it to build better connections between individuals, so when people left the library they had new friends or other services to support them. Local authorities are keener to work in this way. “I hear heads of service say, more and more, that there’s definitely a trend from across councils to ask ‘can we deliver this through the library?’ or ‘can you get that message out? Can we run this session in your library?’.” She gave Newham’s Citizens Assem- blies as an example “where people from the community are helping the council decide on priorities and strategic planning, they’ve used the libraries for that”.
Funding This view fits Libraries Connected’s longer-term position on funding: “We look at libraries as part of wider services and align ourselves with the Local Government Association line about fair funding for local authorities. Increasingly libraries are not seen as ring-fenced services and they benefit from budgets and resources coming from other parts of the council and other partners. We’ve done a lot thinking about this and we don’t think it’s constructive to ask for ring-fenced funding for libraries – it’s much better to join the call for a review of the funding of local authorities. But at the same time making repeated statements that libraries need adequate funding.”
Leadership time
One of the issues Isobel raised in the previous interview (
https://bit.ly/3UpR4qv) was the complexity of library leadership. She believes it could have great advantages but “the relationships between library leader- ship bodies is something we need to con- stantly work at. The way life is post-covid, there’s no time for thinking or discussing or bouncing ideas around. That is the thing that worries me, that time to do these things is being squeezed out. I worry that we’re missing a trick.” But she said specific projects can create partnerships and bring people together: “There have been some programmes like the Green Libraries programme, where CILIP received funding but then we all had different roles and funding was shared out across some of the partners. That kind of approach where we have a big collabora- tive programme, led by one of the partners, but with adequate bits and pieces of fund- ing can be really powerful. But again the challenge is that it takes time to sit down and plan that.” She said: “It’s not always easy, particu-
38 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
larly when there’s not always a clear line (between the responsibilities of leadership bodies), so I think the main stumbling block is time. We’re all really busy and I think we’re all at risk of slightly over committing because we all have great ideas about what we can do.”
She believes wider challenges could pro- vide arenas for cooperation. “We have the opportunity with AI. The English Public Libraries Working Group that’s chaired by Arts Council is discussing what we should be doing around AI, looking at what each body is doing and how it knits together.”
Lobbying and politics Libraries Connected is also weighing up the distinctions between library leadership bodies as it explores a role in political influ- ence or lobbying. “We’ve had discussions with our trustees, now we’re well estab- lished, about whether we could have a more active role influencing policy within government. We are thinking carefully about the roles of the different library leadership bodies so as not to duplicate what anyone else does and to see if there is a different way we can work that fills a gap and fits our position and personality.” She said: “We work really hard to be apolit-
ical as a charity and membership body. Our members are funded by authorities of all polit- ical stripes so we avoid saying that party X has
got stupid ideas and that party Y is great. “We look for big issues that could appeal across parties. We have a long list. It’s one of the problems with librar- ies, you have a massive list of ‘we can do this’, but we are waiting for the election to heat up before slimming it down to issues that are important and where we’ve got a chance of cutting through the noise with a sensible ‘ask’.”
Clear targets “We’re about to do a policy scoping study, to help us define how we will approach this work and how to best target our efforts. A charity like the RSPCA will have specific policies about changing specific laws to protect animals but in the library world we struggle to come up with those specific policy points – ones that are different to ‘we need more money’.” “It’s also about whether to ask for policy and law change, or to take another route” she said, adding: “At the moment some publishers don’t offer titles to libraries as e-books and the cost is often much higher than hard copy. Should we go down the government route and ask them to legislate or investigate? We didn’t think so, which is why, at the moment, we’re trying to work with publishers to get them to test some new models and the early stages are going quite well.” IP
January-February 2024
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