Archive for November, 2015

Middlesbrough play the community hub card

Editorial

So I’ve just read that Middlesbrough Council are going to call all their libraries but one “community hubs”. Now, ask anyone what a library is and they’ll tell you. People love libraries or at least have a strong mental image of what one is or should be. Ask the same people what a “community hub” is and you may get a lot of scratched heads.  It sounds, and is, like a management term and not one which has organically developed. “Community” sounds like a great positive word and “hub” is very 21st Century.   It’s a term that is used by people who think libraries are on the way out, don’t understand libraries anyway or who have lost touch with the public.  Sounds great in meetings though but why not just call it a community centre? It means exactly the same thing, word for word, as community hub.  The reason is people know what a community centre is while “hub” sounds just so much more now.  When those in charge of such a literate thing as a library start changing the words, you know there’s trouble. And the trouble too often is there is no money and, because of that, intrinsically non-money making things like libraries are now services non grata amongst bureaucrats who don’t care, or who don’t care enough.

The tragedy is that “library” is the strongest brand we have.  Libraries and librarians are trusted.  By changing the name of a thing you change the thing and, that is the hub, sorry, nub. With cuts being so deep, the stand-alone library is an increasingly rare beast because it’s never going to turn a profit.  Cafes don’t bring in the money, people don’t want just another shop and room hire alone is not going to pay the bills, certainly not if one has to pay for all these annoying books and public access computers anyway.  What stands a chance is co-locating all sorts of services from all the other agencies strapped for cash into one building and the library will lose space to them. Done right, there can actually be a lot of synergy in this, the library can be resurgent once more bringing together the whole into something greater than the parts.  Done wrong and you don’t have a library any more; you have just another untrusted council office that people only go to when they have to, plus a whole bunch of people looking (presumably) at their “community hub” cards and wondering what they can take out with them.

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There’s one mobile technology not doing so well

Editorial

Mobile libraries make the Independent today, who mourn the loss of all seven of them in Hertfordshire.  This is mirrored by the announcement from Hampshire that it too may lose its mobile library service.  My records tell me that Hampshire lost no less than 13 in 2011, lost more stops in 2012, and had 2 of the remaining 5 threatened last year so that’s a massive reduction from 18 to none.  Indeed, it looks very much like a long term strategy there to annihilate its mobiles, although more likely (as the famous phrase goes) it was just one thing following another.

The reasons put forward tend to focus on the cost per issue: driving a library to the user  has been known to cost far more per visit than a similar one to a library building In addition, the raison d’etre of mobile was to get to people who had no transport or access to information and councils argue that many now have cars and the internet.  Some librarians report anecdotally BMWs being driven to the mobile library stop or regular static library users commenting that they get their top ups from the mobile. Where none of this applies, councils are often at pains to increase their housebound service where staff (or more often volunteers) drop off books directly to the house.

However, that’s only one side of the story: councils have also been greatly reducing public transport (those buses cost) and so isolation is not something that is disappearing.  There’s some heart rending stories of regular users of mobile libraries now being left with no access to books at all and missing on their regular friendly chats (sometimes one of the few human interactions they have) with the mobile library staff. In addition, the library trend to reduce mobiles (the Independent reports numbers have dropped from 548 in the UK in 2009 to 362 in 2014) is hardly universal. Indeed, other authorities, as in Leicestershire, are looking to introduce more mobile library stops to replace closed branches. In such cases, it seems, the mobile or the smaller static library are in some sort of weird Darwinian competition as to which one survives.

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