From Lending to Learning: The Development and Extension of Public Libraries

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For what are libraries if not for learning?

As I write this introduction, a debate on BBC Radio 4 suggests that in order to effect public sector efficiency savings, volunteers should run public libraries along the lines of charity shops.¹ There are regular announcements of this type in the media, with yet more initiatives to change public libraries – to breathe new life into them, to put new energy into the service and to take new approaches that range from raising noise levels to the provision of coffee and chat facilities. At the heart of all such announcements lies a very important, yet simple, question: what are public libraries for?

In recent times the public library question has intensified and become a topic for passionate debate both within the librarianship profession and outside. Political, economic, social and more recently environmental and technological factors sway the debate in different directions. Many side issues cloud the debate: there is a tendency to take specific instances supporting any of the many sides and generalise these into received opinion. There are also many intractable issues often appearing mediocre, such as public library users’ tolerance of noise levels. There are moral dilemmas, such as use of the internet to view different types of material, censorship and freedom of information. There are resourcing issues, professional development issues, social inclusivity issues, issues of equality and diversity. There are high-level governance and performance issues, and there are locally focused issues such as opening times. There are even issues about how best to arrange the books on the shelves to maximise impact.

This book sets out to contribute to the wider debate by raising the issue of learning in public libraries. I do not wish here to write a ‘standard text’ on the vast and increasingly complex public library as an institution. This has been done by many over the past century. Nor do I wish to write exclusively about learning in public libraries without providing a fuller context. To write a typically academic or even a vaguely scholarly book about learning in public libraries would narrow the audience – surely a weakness when it is a widening of the audience that is required. Somehow to approach this book without exploring the dimension of my own personal journey within public libraries seems wasteful. While the approach used considers a theoretical perspective, in for example the exploration of policy, the main tract is grounded in advocacy for the support of learners by public libraries. I have witnessed learners, both formal and informal, use their local library to pursue their own personal goals, with or without the practical support of the public library. This national institution – which depending on one’s viewpoint has either lost its way in the political morass of national library policy, or is struggling to uphold the higher cultural aspirations of society, or fails to respond to the needs of the socially excluded or simply sells great coffee – deserves the fullest debate affordable.

The history of the public library is fascinating and there has been much written about its origins and early development. Most notably, exploring the origins and providing a historical background through an almost chronologically forensic approach, Thomas Kelly (1977) in his comprehensive history gives his reader perhaps the most complete overview of the public library movement. Such historical accounts of the public library are of obvious benefit to those with an interest in the movement, but also provide rich material for those with an interest in nineteenth-and twentieth-century politics, tracing, as many do, the central government debates of the time and in many cases the local politics of emergent industrial centres. A more sociological viewpoint is given by Black (1996), who uses the public library as a vehicle for analysing a range of social and intellectual issues, and writes with great originality. Black’s treatment allows writers on the subject to move away from the public library as passive institution and see it and its impact in a wider context. Usherwood (2007) draws on much research to tease out with passion and authority the arguments about the role of the public library: ‘Should it be a place where every one can access minority tastes, a place for the unpopular and the experimental?’ He is, in essence, concerned about whether ‘public libraries are in danger of being downgraded and their values eroded by a combination of commercialism, cultural relativism, and mistaken egalitarianism’.

Most recently, McMenemy (2009) provides an accessible contemporary overview of the public library that covers the key issues emerging for the coming decade.

Before they were officially ‘founded’ the core activity and usefulness of free public libraries were questioned, and during their birth their philosophy and clarity of strategy were raised as concerns. William Ewart, the Liberal politician who brought the Public Libraries and Museums Bill before parliament in June 1850, argued the case for free libraries supported by ratepayers. He was opposed primarily by Colonel Sibthorp (member for Lincoln) who, according to parliamentary records, observed:

These were not times for spending money in the way proposed, when it might be much better expended in providing food and employment for the people. When they had done this, it was time enough to provide amusements and recreation of the character to be provided for by this Bill. Instead of endeavouring to afford them industrious and profitable employment, he supposed they would be thinking of supplying the working classes with quoits, peg-tops, and foot-ball. They should first teach the people to read and write. What would be the use of these libraries to those who could not read or write? (Hansard, 1850)

There were other objections to the Bill: one based on a concern that by building public libraries the amount of alcohol consumed by workers would decrease to such an extent that the malt trade would suffer; another objection, which had more sense to it, was that the Act itself simply wished to provide for local authorities to raise the capital cost of erecting library buildings, but where would the books come from? The presumption, wrong as it turned out, was that they would be donated by philanthropists.

While the workings and machinations of the modern public library are indeed fascinating, of more value and interest, certainly for the arguments I wish to set out here, is the impact the library has upon its community and society. More precisely, the aim of this book is to explore and in part champion the sometimes explicit, sometimes tenuous, link between the public library and learning.

As public libraries diversify their services, researching and writing about them become more complex tasks. For this reason what you will read between these covers is not a textbook approach for library staff or students, nor an academic treatise on the public library debate; it is quite simply a call to understand the library as a space that supports learning. How librarians see the public library is unavoidably different from how it, and indeed librarianship, is understood by the majority of people. Almost everyone, thanks to the principle of universal access, is aware of, and entitled to use, their public library. What I try to explore is the dimension of learning that is facilitated, encouraged and supported by the public library.

Uncovering, assigning and sustaining a role for the public library in early twenty-first-century Britain are deeply complex tasks. There is a facile equation of libraries with learning via the provision of books. A equals B, and B equals C, therefore A equals C, which would seem to fit for the library service. Libraries were set up to manage the distribution of books, and books support learning, therefore libraries support learning. But of course the flaw with this is that books do a lot more than support learning and, more recently, libraries do a lot more than manage the collection of books. Throw into this the emergence of new technologies that support learning (not to mention entertainment), and things become slightly less straightforward. Now take into account the nature of the leadership and management of the public library, from, at one end of the spectrum, national government policy, through oft-times petty local democratic manipulation, to the chief librarian’s desk and thence to the dedicated staff on the library counter. Observe the resource-starved environment that forms the backdrop to the public library service, and try to comprehend how it is made accountable through inappropriate ‘business’ processes for a decline in national book-borrowing trends. You begin to get a true picture of the complexity of the