An important new report into public library services has been produced by the Carnegie UK Trust.
The Trust continued Andrew Carnegie’s work of funding library buildings and the public library service from its inception in 1913.
But that was nearly a hundred years ago. It’s a very different picture now. Public library services are under threat of cutback and closure, and some politicians are even questioning the value of the service itself.
To me it seems obvious that a locally accessible library service is essential, if we think of ourselves as a proper democracy where there should be equal access for all to information, education and the creative entertainment that books provide. Without libraries we cannot provide this most basic human right, which can have huge personal, social, cultural and economic impacts – as Andrew Carnegie’s life shows.
Or, indeed, as Alasdair Gray’s life shows. Here’s what he wrote about a key aspect of Lanark, which is not only a landmark in Scottish Literature, but reflected the city of Glasgow back to itself: “The notion of Lanark and Thaw's stories being parts of the same book came from The English Epic And Its Background by EMW Tillyard, published in 1954, discovered in Dennistoun public library. It astonishes me to think there was a time when the non-fiction shelves of libraries in working-class Glasgow districts had recently published books of advanced criticism!”
The Carnegie report reveals some encouraging things about our current use of libraries. 61% of Scots have visited a public library during the last year – more than in Northern Ireland (40%) or England (50%) – while 76% felt that libraries were very important or essential to their communities. Significantly, there was very little variation of attitude – just 1% – towards library services between those from the most deprived and least deprived communities.
The report also reveals that the most prolific users of libraries in Scotland are women who are avid readers, who have children, and who are not in work full time. “Scotland”, it states, “was the only jurisdiction [in the UK] in which all four factors were associated significantly with frequency of library use.”
This is further confirmation of the important role libraries play in community life, and chimes with Scottish Book Trust’s own statistics, which record huge year-on-year growth to 500,000 attendances for the Bookbug song and rhyme sessions for very young children in libraries in the 2010/11 period.
But perhaps the most interesting statistic is that while 76% of Scots think libraries are essential, less than half (47%) said they were essential to them personally. This suggests that the principle of having a public library service is ingrained in our thinking, but that it is not necessarily matched by active use.
Perhaps library services in Scotland need to improve the way they attract users and create long-lasting relationships with them. There is a great deal of work and thinking going into this, alongside a lot of existing good practice. The hugely encouraging thing is, as the 76% shows, libraries are knocking at an open door as far as the Scottish public is concerned.
The Carnegie report can be read here
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