but the question is who would pay for it. I did not have time to look deeply into the reasons for what was happening or finding the truth on the ground. I did freedom of information (FOI) requests on occasion but the bad councils are very good at avoiding answering them fully and the good ones will sadly have to spend time answering them. So they are a blunt tool at best. Many people confidentially emailed me with ‘the truth’ about what was going on in their service, but I could not tell how factual it was, without a lot of investigation which I did not have time to do. And, of course, if I got one thing wrong then I could be sued for libel and that would not just be the end of PLN but also cause me deep financial problems
Analysis
Ian says: “Factual analysis of what is successful and what is not would be great. There’s too much gloss and good-news- only. The sector should be willing to pub- licise its failures as well as its successes, otherwise it cannot learn. Simply quoting statistics and avoiding the trend up or down is misrepresenting the actuality of the situation.
Ian Anstice.
He was not immune to these conflicts of interest either: “Throughout all the time I was doing this, I was employed by a coun- cil public library service. I had to be very careful about what was said and could not say anything about my own service which, thankfully, did not go through serious cuts. I know also that my seniors within the service came under pressure occasion- ally to limit what was said – I think some other senior librarians thought it was done in paid time – but thankfully I was allowed to continue.
“But, one thing is important here. Librarians can complain about cuts to li- brary services and can campaign publicly. But they cannot do it for their own library service. And of course it could damage their career prospects in the future, so perhaps it is wise when they don’t.” He said: “We need to understand what is going on to be fore-warned and learnt from it. There’s so much good stuff going on and, being we are not in competition with each other, there’s so much mutual benefit. It’s been great to see other infor- mation-sharing coming on in the sector. Brilliant in fact.”
Catalyst
Through PLN he discovered that report- ers “were very keen to know what was happening in the sector and a lot of them were very supportive of it. I have supplied news to most of the main newspapers, to many news channels.”
Winter 2025
A lot of that news was cuts to the sector, and although negative it helped the sector to campaign. Ian adds: “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. Compare public libraries to Sure Start Centres – there was no-one chronicling threats to them coun- cil by council and now they’re basically gone. Not the same thing of course and I only played a small part, but I did play a part, and of that I am very proud.”
Journalist or librarian?
“I approached the subject like a librarian. Everything I said and listed was linked to the appropriate factual source. After some settling down, things were categorised in never-changing categories (national, international, local etc) and major changes were summarised at the top. This came in very handy when national attention came to the site and it was checked by Full Fact that gave it a clean bill of health. I also remember the editor of the Independent phoning me one day and asking if I could back up the number of libraries listed as ‘under threat’. When I told him it was linked and he could check, he loved it. The story was on the front page the next day.”
Investigation
However, he said there was a need for more investigation and analysis. “There could easily be a full-time job out of this
“The tragedy is that the sector is not wealthy enough to support someone work- ing not in their own time. I did get some advertising, and it was greatly appreciated, but I was still earning way below minimum wage per hour worked on PLN.” But he added that PLN probably couldn’t be replaced by a sector body because the interconnections between them would make reporting difficult, adding: “Certainly, no editorials could be written the way I did them. So I suspect it may disappear.
“The sector itself needs to weigh up its interests. One man on a sofa doing it on a Sunday morning should not be the solution… PLN has shown the importance of such a news source and I know many librarians used it regularly.”
Too complex
Another problem for anyone trying to report on the sector is its complexity. “The sector got vastly more complicated from 2010. The old MLA was abolished and some of its functions, not all, were moved
‘‘
The sector itself needs to weigh up its interests. One man on a sofa doing it on a Sunday morning should not be the solution…
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL 21
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