INTERVIEW ‘‘
Rob Mackinlay is a journalist for Information Professional.
Doing PLN was an excellent way for campaigners against library cuts to find each other and find out what was going on. Certainly the public became more aware of it. – Ian Anstice
The end of an era for sector’s PLN coverage
Ian Anstice has been a single source of sector news for 15 years, with his Public Libraries News blog. Why did he start, what did he learn and why has he stopped?
MOST Sundays for the last 15 years Public Libraries News – aka PLN – has delivered a list of public library related news stories and an editorial to its 2,230 subscribers and many other visitors.
Asked why he started it, its creator and editor, Ian Anstice says: “I clearly remember being shocked by how little any of us knew about what was going on in other library services. We barely knew what was going on in a neighbouring service let alone any new ideas or news (good or bad) from anywhere else in the country. I assumed that I was simply stupid and that everyone else knew where the information source was. It turned out that, apart from a library blog that the author Alan Gibbons did, and some things from CILIP, there was no such source. This struck me as ridiculous. How were we supposed to know what was going on? To take advantage of good ideas and be warned about anything bad was happening.”
And he was right – the data shows that a lot of his librarian peers wanted to hear about good ideas and know what crisis they’d be dealing with next. The most visited story in PLN’s 15-year existence was ‘When and how will libraries open in England (after COVID)’ (
https://tinyurl.com/openingaftercovid) which had 197,000 views – just over 10 per cent of PLN’s total visits (1.86m between 2010 and 2025). The second most visited page was his best practice page — ‘Ideas and innovations in public libraries’ (
https://tinyurl.com/ libideas) – which had 104,000 views.
20 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL
Bad news
“So I decided to do something about it,” he said, adding that the new phenomenon of blogging made it possible, and that he was propelled into action by a new peril. “This was 2010, the start of the coalition government, and it was clear that bad things were going to happen. So the blog immediately started chronicling what very soon became the biggest attack on public library services in this country’s history. And others could access this, see what’s happening, and feel motivated to do something about it. The right thing at the right time. “I have shown that you can do a comprehensive review of what is going on in public libraries locally, nationally and to some extent worldwide in about four hours per week. PLN has shown the importance of such a news-source and I know many librarians, many of them very senior, used it regularly.”
Transparency
But is the public library sector good at sharing difficult information? “People will not share the bad news about their council or their organisation, they won’t say ‘this did not work’ or complain about deep cuts,” Ian explains. “They can’t, either for ego/career reasons or because they cannot be seen to be critical of their employer.”
Winter 2025
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