Memorandum submitted by Libraries and
Information East Midlands
Libraries and Information East Midlands is a
membership organisation which provides a strategic voice for libraries
and information services of all types—public, academic and
special—across the region. Our members include all public
libraries and higher education libraries, many libraries in further
education institutions and special libraries, including Lincoln
Cathedral, the Islamic Foundation, the National Tramway Museum
and the British Geological Survey. We aim to encourage and enable
partnership and co-operation between libraries in all sectors,
and between the libraries domain, museums and archives. To that
end we work closely with the East Midlands Museums, Libraries
and Archives Council (EMMLAC), although we are funded entirely
from member subscriptions.
We are very pleased to have an opportunity to
offer some observations to the Select Committee, but we realise
that many submissions will be received from local authority library
services and others well qualified to speak about what the previous
Minister for Media and Heritage described as "the library's
modern mission". Libraries and Information East Midlands
will therefore concentrate in this document on two key areas of
the public library's activities: the general theme of partnership
working and the more specific area of resource sharing.
There is a strong tradition of partnership working
across the East Midlands, and the region's public libraries have
been active in pioneering and supporting a number of cross-sectoral
sub-regional partnerships. Each has helped move forward the libraries
and information agenda, brokering access agreements between libraries
in different sectors, undertaking joint staff training and promoting
the availability of services and resources to learners and information
seekers. The groups provide an opportunity for smaller organisations
to learn from each other and participate in broader strategic
working, and for their users to benefit from the more extensive
resources of the larger partners. Public library users are an
essential resource for many independent learners who are unable
or unwilling to engage with formal education. Partnership working
has improved staff training and awareness and encouraged access
and referral arrangements that enable these learners to benefit
from specialist collections held in non-public libraries. The
success of the sub-regional partnerships would be impossible without
the commitment of public libraries.
Public libraries support students and learners
of all ages, including those who may have lost out in formal education.
A study carried out by the University of Sheffield, entitled "Low
Achievers, Lifelong Learners" investigated the impact of
the public library on people in Derbyshire and Sheffield who had
come to formal learning later in life. In every case, their view
was that they would be unable to pursue their course of study
(often fitted in around demanding work and domestic commitments)
without the support of the public library. Partnering with local
authority education services, local and sub-regional strategic
partnerships, libraries contribute to regeneration and social
cohesion by raising skills levels, employment prospects and aspirations
in local communities. This is made possible because of the public
library's commitment to and expertise in, forging effective partnerships
with a wide range of other agencies and organisations.
Some learning providers and funding bodies,
including Learning and Skills Councils, have been slow to recognise
the contribution that public libraries make to the learning agenda.
Public libraries have therefore had to be creative in their search
for funding to support these activities. The People's Network
has acted as a catalyst for new partnerships with learning providers,
both to increase the level of staff skills and to deliver learning
to new audiences in a familiar and non-threatening environment.
Successful digitisation projects across the
East Midlands have opened up world-wide access to an unrivalled
variety of resources that previously were available only to those
people who were able to visit the libraries where they were housed.
More than this, by bringing together resources from widely disparate
organisations and making them available via the Internet, projects
such as Peakland Heritage (which involve Derbyshire County Council,
The British Library and the Peak District National Park Authority)
have introduced new audiences to the pleasures of local history
and heritage study.
Heritage East Midlands Sense of Place (HEMSOP)
is a further digitisation programme aiming to make historical,
cultural and social information available on the web. Funded by
the New Opportunities Fund HEMSOP involves the counties of Lincolnshire,
Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.
Another excellent example of co-operation and
partnership working between East Midlands local authorities is
the Picture the Past website www.picturethepast.org.uk.
Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Libraries are
working together to digitise many thousands of images from the
public library and museum collections. The collections include
photographs, slides, negatives, glass plates, postcards and engravings
recalling the history of local communities for over 100 years.
A grant of £370,000 supported with funding from the four
authorities is enabling the indexing, scanning and digitisation
of the images to create one of the largest collections of historic
images on the Internet.
Newspapers are now recognised as one of the
most important sources for the study of local history, culture
and genealogy, and local newspapers provide a unique window into
the collective past of communities. Newsplan is a co-operative
programme covering all the regions of the UK and Ireland to preserve
local newspapers to international archive standards and to enhance
access to their content for all citizens. Newsplan was first established
in 1985 and remains one of the finest examples of successful interlibrary
co-operation. Over 1,300 of the UK's most fragile newspaper titles
have been saved by a grant made to the Newsplan 2000 project by
the Heritage Lottery Fund. This unique partnership between HLF,
the newspaper industry and libraries across all parts of the UK
to save the text of the country's most rare and fragile local
newspapers has resulted in the preservation of some 20 million
pages of text. Public libraries across the East Midlands have
worked together on the Newsplan project and in 2005 will launch
a fully searchable database of the region's local newspapers on
the Internet.
The East Midlands has a rich heritage of library
collections, many of which reflect the regional heritage in terms
of individual writers and artists, specific industries and local
histories. Examples include the John Clare collection in Northamptonshire,
the mining in the Peak District collection in Derbyshire and the
Tennyson collection in Lincolnshire Libraries. The recently launched
DiadEM project which is supported financially by MLA, EMMLAC and
LIEM has just begun to map and document the special collections
held in libraries of all types across the region. The aim is to
promote and publicise these resources and to work together to
enable greater accessibility to these collections.
The region's public libraries have a long tradition
of working in partnership to support readers across the East Midlands.
From the early 1990s the public library chief officers have met
on a regular basis with colleagues from Arts Council England (East
Midlands). Much of this partnership working has focused on literature
promotion and reader development but it also recognises the valuable
role that libraries play in a wider range of art forms and how
support for local artists can have an impact on the broader corporate
policies of regeneration and creative industries. In 1999 a three-year
Regional Arts Lottery funded programme for public libraries in
the East Midlands and their readers was launched. The East Midlands
Reader and Library Development (EMRALD) project successfully delivered
training for 450 library staff across the region, a range of region-wide
reader-centred projects and initiatives, the production of a regional
strategy for reader development and the creation of an innovative
interactive website for young people in the 16-24 age group who
are a traditionally harder to reach audience for public libraries.
The benefits of public libraries working together across the region
have been enormous, with high-quality promotional material produced
to support imaginative and stimulating promotions, staff training
and networking to share expertise and most importantly with tangible
outcomes for users of public libraries.
An audit of reader development activity across
the region carried out in early 2004 revealed an impressive range
of partners which individual public library authorities were working
with, from the wider cultural sector, statutory and voluntary
bodies and a number of commercial organisations to deliver their
reader development initiatives. Public libraries have consistently
demonstrated their commitment to working in partnership for the
benefit of local communities.
Libraries and Information East Midlands would
also like to comment on a less immediately apparent feature of
the public library's work, but one which makes an enormous contribution
to scholarship, learning and information. This is the resource-sharing
and interlending activity which has been the cornerstone of libraries
and learning in the UK for many years and which is being transformed
through new technology. The importance of the interlending function
has been acknowledged through the statutory Public Library Standards,
and Libraries and Information East Midlands considers it a cause
for regret that it has not featured more prominently in the strategic
development of the Library and Information Services sector through
Framework for the Future, and the work of the Museums, Libraries
and Archives Council.
In the East Midlands alone there were almost
130,000 interlending transactions including books, playsets, music
scores and orchestral parts, non-print material and serials recorded
by Libraries and Information East Midlands member organisations
in 2003-04. Some of this material reaches a much wider audience
than that of an individual library user, for example the interlending
of playsets and music scores enables the public performances of
creative works and encourages opportunities for increased access
to and participation in the arts. This is yet another way in which
the public library service provides support for the cultural agenda
and impacts on local communities.
Public libraries also make a significant contribution
to the resource discovery agenda that supports resource sharing
and interlending. For example, the bringing together of local
and regionally held information about the holdings of vocal and
orchestral sets in public and academic libraries led to the creation
of "Encore" the internet based national catalogue of
vocal and orchestral sets. "Encore" is of very great
value to music libraries and their users as a finding tool.
The UnityWeb database, which supports resource
sharing across the UK, is the result of a joint venture between
The Combined Regions and Talis. This partnership brings together
The Combined Regions, a body which promotes interlending and co-operation
between libraries on a nationwide basis and represents the majority
of English interlending regions including Scotland, Eire and Wales
and Talis, a major supplier of library software and services in
the UK and Ireland. The UnityWeb database is the largest union
catalogue of holdings in the UK with over 41 million records from
over 500 institutions in the UK and Ireland and over 18 million
bibliographic records. Contributions from local library services
and at regional level benefit the library and information services
community and its users nationwide.
It has been noticeable in recent years that
restrictions on undergraduate borrowing, which are in place in
many academic institutions, have impacted on public libraries.
Many public libraries are now providing through their interlending
services support for material to meet the background reading needs
of local students. Likewise the importance of the interlending
facility for supporting the independent learner should not be
underestimated—through their local public library and its
links with the British Library and the wider library community,
older and out of print books, journals and other materials, items
held in reserve and special collections, and less popular items
such as works in other languages or items of particular regional
or local significance can all be located and supplied for the
public library user.
Increasingly public libraries are harnessing
new technology to deliver services in a seamless way. The development
of virtual clumps, enabling a number of public library catalogues
to be searched simultaneously, is simplifying access for library
users and breaking down administrative boundaries between services.
Library authorities are experimenting with on-line reservations
and home delivery of requested items—a major contribution
to the e-government agenda.
As an organisation working with libraries across
the domain, we recognise the contribution which public libraries
make to delivering major government objectives on learning, on
social inclusion and on economic and social regeneration. We see
at first hand the leadership role which public libraries willingly
accept, the support which they offer to partners, and their commitment
to providing high-quality services for readers, learners, information
seekers and those at risk of losing out in the information age.
We are aware also of a pattern of reducing levels
of use for traditional services and we believe that the lack of
effective performance measures which truly reflect the "libraries'
modern mission" has enabled disingenuous and ill-informed
critics to receive more attention than their views deserve. However
there is no shortage of creativity within the public library sector
and we hope that the committee will be able, on the basis of the
evidence it receives, to issue the sort of positive endorsement
which is badly needed by the sector.
12 November 2004
| 
