Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 52)
THURSDAY 10 FEBRUARY 2000
DR BOB
MCKEE,
REV GRAHAM
CORNISH, PROFESSOR
ANDREW MCDONALD
AND MS
GUENEVER PACHENT
40. For many people in the past, and I accept
it is an image that has gone, I hope it has gone, the library
was a rather forbidding place where people said "Ssh"
if you talked and they were lined with lots of books, all a bit
hard and many of them which lots of people did not want to read.
(Dr McKee) It has gone in libraries, the sad fact
is it has not gone in the media. If any of you have seen the coverage
of the new appointment of the British Library you will know exactly
what I mean. The media still portrays libraries in that way, newspapers
and television, everyone thinks of Ronnie Corbett and programmes
like that. It goes back to Hancock, does it not, actually, the
sort of "ssh" and "sorry" days are gone. Libraries
are very busy, very vibrant places and very inclusive. I think
it has already been said it is the place you can go in, you do
not need money, you do not need a specific purpose, you will not
get hassled, it feels friendly.
(Professor McDonald) Could I just develop that very,
very briefly because I think this is really very, very interesting.
You will be aware in the North East we have tried the University
for Industry concept since 1997, and have encouraged about 15,000
new lifelong learners back into learning through this exciting
concept. The interesting thing in this context is we have 100
learning centres throughout the North East in places to suit people's
lifestyle but what is the most used learning centre of those 100
learning centres? It is the public library. At the cutting edge
of learning innovation we have rediscovered the power of the public
library and it is fascinating that most of these lifelong learners
choose to go to the public library for learning support. I think
that for me this almost turns the image problem on its head and
people are voting with their feet. The issue is how can we develop
public libraries to support this new lifelong learning better.
(Dr McKee) I cannot resist this, Chairman, does that
mean that in Sunderland the public library is the stadium of enlightenment?
(Professor McDonald) Indeed, we have a learning centre
in the Stadium of Light.
41. I am almost tempted to ask whether in view
of what you have said, Professor McDonald, that maybe you should
be changing the name—
(Professor McDonald) We did.
42.—of the library.
(Professor McDonald) Oh, I thought you meant change
the name of UFI. You can call it what you want but libraries always
have been learning centres and always will be learning centres.
They are a wonderful opportunity for learning.
43. It is the image thing.
(Dr McKee) On the other hand, I think local people
know what library stands for. The concept that lies behind that
of neighbourliness and accessibility is very, very powerful, so
do not change it. It is a successful brand, is it not?
44. We have talked about books and IT in libraries
but certainly in the local library I go to increasingly infrequently,
I have to tell you, you can borrow also videos and you can borrow
CDs. I do not know about CDs but presumably you can do that as
well. How much of your budget is that sort of material rather
than the IT taking up? Does that allow for your books whereas
the IT does not?
(Dr McKee) I will ask Guenever to talk about the detail
of that in a moment because she is the practising librarian amongst
us in a public library sense but increasingly one talks about
the materials fund rather than the book fund. The point has already
been made that some of the new digital technology is provided
through separate funding currently through the New Opportunities
Fund. The multi-media provision that you are talking about, I
presume, Guenever, is an extension of the traditional book?
(Ms Pachent) Yes. Local authorities obviously choose
their priorities for their library services. There are some which
invest quite heavily in music and videos with the cultural perspective.
Others invest quite heavily in order to generate income and I
think that is probably more common than not. Therefore, many authorities
spend that money in order for income to come back to help fund
other services, including books. You get a mixture but it is not
usual to see the money being spent on videos at the expense of
books and although we do tend to see letters in the press to that
effect it is not usually the case.
45. Can a local authority actually generate
sufficient money from videos and CDs to do any more than replace
the ones which get damaged?
(Ms Pachent) Yes.
46. They do?
(Ms Pachent) Yes, absolutely. We could not do without
it.
(Dr McKee) Certainly in my old authority the video
collection, the tape and the CD collection were self-sustaining.
It paid for itself in terms of expanding the stock as well as
replacing.
47. What about the grave danger of pirating
you are opening up?
(Dr McKee) I am not sure that it is a great danger,
is it?
(Ms Pachent) We make it clear to people who borrow
these things what the legal position is and clearly they should
not be pirating such things. No, we do not see it as a problem.
(Dr McKee) Chairman, one of our panels is the British
Library's expert on matters of copyright and intellectual property.
I do not know whether he would wish to comment on that?
(Rev Cornish) Yes. I think one of the problems for
public libraries is, firstly, that under the present Copyright
law, which was implemented because of a European Directive, they
are inhibited from lending material such as videos, sound recording
and CDs and so on unless there is agreement with the copyright
owners. We are delighted to say most copyright owners have been
very co-operative about this. It does prevent public libraries
from lending the most recent sound recordings especially in the
pop area, which is quite understandable because that would obviously
have been a great temptation to borrow one CD of a pop group and
then run off numerous copies for your friends. There is an embargo
for the first six months or so of such materials but obviously
the owners themselves do not recognise piracy as a really serious
issue any more than if you buy one CD you are just as likely to
make copies of it for your friends as if you borrowed it from
the library. They do not see it as a threat, so we certainly do
not. It is a good example of libraries working together, in this
case with owners of intellectual property, to deliver and develop
meaningful services to the public.
48. To show I am a total anorak, of course these
days with MP3 you can buy one CD and give it to everybody in the
world basically.
(Rev Cornish) It will be interesting to see how that
develops in the future.
49. A lot of libraries, particularly the national
libraries, hold materials which are unique, no-one else has them,
but the British Museum has a copy of the book and that is the
only copy or the Bodleian Library and Oxford University have a
copy, whatever it might be, that is the only copy. It is only
going to be accessed by somebody who comes along and goes to the
British Library, becomes a reader and checks it out. So what is
being done to digitalise all your material, particularly those
which are unique to your library? By the way it is not just the
national libraries, local libraries hold local history and things
like which nobody else has.
(Dr McKee) I think that is right, I am glad you made
that last point. There are a number of issues here and there has
been some concern where the national library has gone down to
a single copy which could be used for reference, could be used
for lending. Clearly the more desirable situation is to have a
copy for reference and other copies for lending. There is the
issue which is very current about major national specialist collections
in the possession of individual local authorities where the local
tax base is insufficient to support something which is regional
or national in its value. I think what is being done with digitisation
is as much as is financially available. The British Library has
a digitisation programme subject to its grant-in-aid. Local authorities
are starting to look, with the British Library, at a new programme
called the Co-operation In Partnership Programme and within that
a bid to the New Opportunities fund for something called the People's
Heritage. The People's Heritage is exactly about the digitisation
of local history collections, local studies collections, in the
public library sector, working with the national library so that
what one ends up with is a national collection of resources, wherever
it is held, available digitally. The problem, frankly at the moment,
is the finance to resource the digitisation. A key element in
this will be the £50 million available from the New Opportunities
Fund for concept development.
(Rev Cornish) If I could pick that up, Chairman, the
economics of digitisation are very, very complex because it is
an expensive process and what you really want to do is concentrate
on material which will be of value to a number of people. There
will be little point in digitising a book or a manuscript which
is going to be required only by one person in one location in
the country. There will be all sorts of complex economic problems
in doing that sort of thing where you might use the same technology
to release something which could be available to a large number
of interested persons all at once. The other side of it is we
in the British Library have digitised a number of important documents,
the most prominent one, of course, is the Boewulf manuscript and
part of doing this was to enable people to have much wider access
to this very famous and important piece of literature and also
to reduce the number of people coming to St Pancras who wanted
to see it. You do not always want a large number of people handling
this sort of very valuable material. Our experience was, having
digitised it, the demand to see the original rose three fold.
This is analogous to you seeing a pop group on the television
but there is nothing like actually going to Wembley Stadium and
seeing them perform in reality. You have to be careful with the
psychology of digitisation.
(Professor McDonald) I think actually that is a hugely
important point to reinforce. There has been a lot of discussion
here today about electronic versus, is it print. In a way the
customer will decide, but it is also a question of what is available.
One thing that is very clear to us as practising librarians is
that rolling out a lot of electronic services stimulates demand
for traditional services and I think that is ratherwonderful.
It is all about increasing the use of information. I do not want
to convey that it is one or the other, it is a mixed economy,
and is likely to be a hybrid economy for a large number of years
to come, but one does stimulate the other.
50. When you say a large number of years to
come, what do you mean by that? I am wondering how much you do
look to the future. I was being slightly provocative, I accept,
in the last line of questioning I was taking with the last witnesses
but there is a sense in which this is going to change. A CD-Rom
or off the Internet, whatever it is, a Shakespeare play in my
view is much better than reading it. The actual play being performed
by top actors or whatever is better than reading it. How far do
you go down the future looking at where it is all going?
(Dr McKee) It is about the mix of resources. I suppose
this discussion could have been had 150 years ago and people would
have said "Well, when there is universal literacy and education
and high street book shops we will not need books in libraries,
will we?" Somehow that has not happened and I suspect the
same will be true of technology. The wider mix of resources is
the unique offer the public library makes. To take your Shakespeare
play analogy, you can read it in a library, you can look at it
on video, you can look at associated material like Shakespeare
in Love or whatever, you can get a whole mix of stimuli and
there is nowhere else that offers that. I think that cannot be
replicated. Certainly it cannot be replicated on a single computer
screen unless it is a pretty wide computer screen.
51. Presumably you hold the few Shakespeare
plays that have been done so far on CD-Rom?
(Dr McKee) Yes, and the interactivity, absolutely.
(Ms Pachent) We cannot be clear where the future is
going to take us and how fast society is going to move in the
use of technology and books and the move from one to the other
but I would go back to the issue about the number of people we
are dealing with and their culture and that is going to determine
as much as anything the speed of change in libraries because,
although we see there will be both, there is clearly going to
be a change of emphasis, I think, around numbers of bookshelves
and numbers of PCs, services that are at home rather than in the
library. It is going to be people who are going to show us how
quickly we move and I do not think we are clear at the moment.
52. I think we will move very fast.
(Ms Pachent) Yes, some people do.
Mr Maxton: I have believed in that for
a long time.
Chairman: You have believed in that for
a long time and occasionally you have been right.
Mr Maxton: More often than not.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
Again, it has been extremely valuable. One of the interesting
things is that when we deal with a subject like this we do not
deal with information, important though that is, we deal with
ideas as well. Thank you very much indeed.
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