Major Trends in Libraries in the UK

Introduction: Anne-Marie Schwirtlich, CEO and State Librarian

Welcome Adie and Chris Batt and to hear Chris speak. This morning Chris is going to talk about why do we need libraries, why do we need public libraries, why do we need libraries. Chris is the Chief Executive Officer of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in the UK, a council that provides strategic advice on behalf of users of museums, libraries and archives. He is someone who has been associated with the three sectors for almost three decades, he is particularly concerned about how we present a cogent narrative on behalf of organisations like ourselves to demonstrate the value that we bring to our communities and he is also extraordinarily interested in information and communications technology and the way that we can network and be community and network hubs, and that is demonstrated in the work he did on the People's Network. This morning Chris has a presentation of about 50-55 minutes, which is why I want to start straight away, after that he is really happy to have questions, conversation, general loitering, but he also understands that if you need to slip away, please, you need to slip away, so don’t feel bad about that. Without any further ado can I ask you to welcome Chris Batt.

Forum: Chris Batt

You always learn something new when you do presentations in different places. I am one of those speakers who tends to move about a bit, this morning that's a bit of a high risk activity because I may fall over and so if I've got this but I also tend to use my... you may not hear what I say so I've now discovered why they put clips in shirts. How about that? I am nothing if not adaptive so if that works for the technicians over there then that's fine.

This is what it says on the title and we’ve been travelling around, this is now our fourth state and capital in about just over a week, and some of the audiences have been mainly public library managers, workers and some a bit of a mixture. This starts off being called ‘Do we really need public libraries?’ because it’s been a focus of challenge to those managers but it is my belief that there are many things embedded in this which are probably as of much significance to the State Library and other kinds of libraries in the sense of trying to build a firmer philosophy for libraries within a century when so many things are changing.

Some very simple facts just to get past those, I always feel that one shouldn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story so this is the only slide that's got specifics on it. The key thing to remember about the library service in England, which is the focus specifically of what I'm talking about today. It has been on the public policy radar since about 1850, we now have 149 local authorities delivering library services with about 3,500 libraries and an annual expenditure of something just under a billion pounds a year, over 20,000 staff and regular use by about 50% of the population, so that is kind of a sense of where they are. If you want you don’t need to write all of this down, I will be leaving this presentation, but all of this comes out of something called the Digest of Statistics which you will find on the MLA website, the last one was for 2006, so you've got this and much more in terms of statistics about services to look at there.

My view is that the facts tell us something about the popularity and the presentation of the reach of the service, but we need to think a bit more if we’re trying to work out how we argue for libraries in the current century, how we ground it in much more about the lives of every citizen and it does strike me if we look back 150, 157 years now, that there's a series of stages that demonstrate the role of the public library as a revolutionary organisation changing the way that communities and individuals and society has opportunity. Thankfully it has been a relatively benign revolution but it is still revolutionary in moving forward and libraries themselves have evolved to do that, but if you look at an image like this of a library, any sort of library, if somebody who was using libraries in 1850 went in they'd actually still see a lot of familiarity, books on shelves, staff, some libraries with closed access, but that sense of a storehouse of knowledge which is presented in a way that is still very similar to the libraries that we see today and that's unlike almost every other publicly funded resource, or even if you walk down the high street and try to imagine what a bank was like in 1850, for example, or a post office, it would be very different - not least in the UK; you can hardly find post offices or banks anywhere on the high street because they all want to be cyberspace.

Back in 1850 the whole value of the library service emerging was to start to move towards universal education focused on enabling those people who didn’t have the basic skills or the opportunity to learn to start to do so, and continued to do this to help individuals to learn new things, to understand the world around them in new ways and to move beyond their dreams. And something which we tend to forget is that it is a collective activity that's lasted a long time. There is an argument to be put forward that the public library service represents the first institution that was into recycling and the first environmentally friendly public service because it is taking an asset and it is using it as much as possible, it’s recycling it. Not sure that's a compelling philosophy for the future particularly but it is something to remember, it is a way of doing something that would be impossible in any other way.

But just to ground that revolutionary role a bit more in the reality of what public libraries have done, it is to see how society has changed and opportunities have changed while libraries have continued to respond in actually by and large quite traditional ways to the communities and individuals they serve. Just to take three indicators, and you'll be relieved to hear we’re not going to travel from 1850 to 2007 year by year, we’re going to just take three shots at trying to answer these questions - the price of a book, newspapers and magazines as an indicator of alternative information and knowledge sources and other media. In 1850 the length of time it would take an individual to work to earn sufficient money to buy a book is 60 hours. Now 60 hours is probably slightly under the working week then, so it would take perhaps around about a week’s salary to earn enough money to buy a book, given that that salary would have to pay for all the other things that somebody was needing to do to survive, like eat and have a roof over their head and get clothes and things and raise a family. A book was clearly at that point a luxury item for the rich to acquire. In the UK at the time, 1700 newspapers and magazines and no other kind of media at all that anybody could use.

Let’s jump forward to around 1950 after the Second World War, when we could start to see that blooming of mass media, that investment in alternative resources, by then it only takes 10 hours to earn sufficient money for the average worker to buy a book. Now that's still quite a lot of money for a week if the average working week was 40 or 50 hours a week; that's a whole day's work roughly that you could need to do. We’ve got 10,000 newspapers and magazines and we’ve got the cinema, we’ve got the radio and in the UK we’ve got one channel of television nationally available.

Let’s come up to 2005. You could call it Web 2.0. I call it the Google Generation. How long does it take to earn enough money to buy a book now? 20 minutes. So from 60 hours it has gone to 20 minutes. How many newspapers and periodicals? We can play a guessing game here but that would probably take us all morning; there are now just under 200,000 newspaper and periodical journal titles available in the UK. Interestingly, I don’t know whether you have the same phenomenon here. You can go into our large newsagents at lunch time in city centres and you can see office workers standing in front of the magazines reading them. They’re using that wide range of journals available, nice and glossy, unsullied by the readers in the library, they’re using it as a reading room. So there's a shift there and there's just a journal and magazine out on every possible subject you could ever think of. We’ve got, I don’t know, it is always changing, something like 500 television channels, so media has changed dramatically. The Tait Gallery in London, with another museum, is now going to start their own television channel at the end of this year so they can just broadcast stuff about their collections, to show programs they make and to show other public service programs, and we’ve got all of this as well. The internet, mobile telephones, broadband more and more and even in the short period that we’ve had the internet and emerging broadband, derived services, so people are building digital collections, they’re doing personal learning environments and things like that.

So within the context of all of that change that we’ve now seen in recent years, there's an issue about whether the glass of water is half full or half empty. Are public libraries or indeed the broader library landscape on the way up or on the way down? The public libraries remain the most popular elective public service. People choose to go to them, they don’t have to go because it is school or they don’t have to go because they’re unwell and need to go to the doctor or the hospital, they choose to go to public libraries. Visits are increasing, many people see the library as a place for personal learning and certainly if anybody suggests closing a library in England, the middle class of the country come out with their banners and their petitions to start to defend the barricades to ensure that it remains open. Indeed it is interesting that many of those people don’t actually use the library but they are still prepared to lie down in the street in front of the bulldozer and stop anybody doing anything.

However, on the other hand there's an issue about the degree to which the variable resourcing between those 149 library services, some are good, some are not so good, some are struggling, some local authorities don’t place the same values or priority, that's the word, on the investment, book issues are falling. One could argue that how in the 21st century can we continue to deliver what we would like to see as a national service to all citizens 149 times; there must be economies of scale in there. How committed, how far, we could again have an interesting discussion about this, by and large my experiences in talking to groups and in spending a long time working in libraries and working with librarians locally, regionally and nationally is that people tend to think about customer service and delivery in a high-quality service rather than reflecting on what the future might be like, and at the moment we do need that sense of admission about what the future will be like, so where is that going to come from.

Finally on that way down thing, in the minds of policy makers nationally and politicians regionally and locally, by and large public libraries and perhaps other institutions as well are seen as being a low priority - they're fine, they’re mostly harmless, the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy thing. So we see this paradox thing that while loans are going down, library visits are going up. And in a way we can argue that that's not surprising given the kind of tensions that our societies are now facing in terms of a growing recognition of the importance of the individual, the sense of identity, trying to encourage people to develop themselves through life learning, learning for life and all of that, and yet still in an environment where we depend on that global community to work together. The best example I can think of to say - the problems that happen being in a global community is what happens when in China toys are made with substandard paint or whatever which means that across the globe Christmas is ruined. We depend on that global network in a way that we didn’t before.

We have that tension between those people who have sufficient money but insufficient time to actually take benefit from it, the money-rich, time-poor and those who don’t have money and we do have more of those now, that gap between the time-rich, money-poor and the money-rich, time-poor is growing in the UK. Technology of course, the whole area of Web 2.0 and the move from the knowledge universe to the knowledge multiverse is so there are many different agendas but what I like to call the difference between fict and faction. And at the bottom this is a piece of evidence collected from a study done by the Institute of Museum Library Studies in the US, looking at students using university libraries where the general trend was to say that if it is not on the web it doesn’t exist because the students use the library as a place, a convivial place, to meet and study but they don’t use the resources sitting on the shelves.

Just to kind of flag up some of those issues in reality, because it does seem to be that if we’re going to try and see how public libraries and other public institutions delivering these resources are going to flourish in this century we need to understand more closely how consumer behaviour and expectations are changing. I indicated that the change between 60 hours of work to buy a book and 20 minutes is a significant change and the fact that you, I am sure you are all three for two buyers in book shops, to buy the cheap paperback you’re getting the bargains. Research in the UK shows that people that do that don’t actually read the books, it is just a marketing ploy and everybody thinks 'Oh, I might read that one because I'm kind of getting it for nothing' but by and large they don’t get read and they probably end up at charity shops. But this work-life balance thing, this is an important image for me, this is the 6:53 from East Grinstead okay, and this is the train I get on in the morning, I get on further downline so by the time I get on the train there are loads of people on there, the 6:53 from East Grinstead actually contains more computing power than the whole of the United Kingdom did 15 years ago. Now there's a thought isn’t it? I don’t think it is the only train that's like that, it’s the only one I get on. And that change in behaviours, when I used to travel many years ago on the trains to go to work I used to have a game of trying to spot which libraries the books came from that people were reading, looking at the process stamps and things like that on top. Sometimes quite a dangerous thing to do but it was interesting, you could track how people were using library services. You can do that now because nobody is, they’re lap topping, they're using mobile phones, they’re on the phones having meetings while they’re travelling to work, they’re using Blackberries, they’ve listening to iPods, now more people are listening to the radio on their mobile telephone and things like that and if they’re not doing that they’ll be reading the free newspaper. So the whole pattern of behaviour of society has changed and I think trains are a microcosm of that happening all over.

There are things like Second Lifers. How many Second Lifers here? Hmm, okay. Come out, come out wherever you are! Well Second Life is an interesting phenomenon and probably a step on a journey, but probably a whole new set of behaviours. Last weekend I think was the first live symphony concert which was performed in Second Life. There are a number of museums now mounting virtual exhibitions and there's at least one library that I know about that's bought an island in Second Life to run services there for people, so there is a whole range of things happening there. Becoming a bit more mundane, but one of the rock beds of public libraries in the UK is the ability to lend DVDs and make money on doing it. Now Amazon is offering competitive prices delivered to your front door and no due date at all, just send them back when you've finished with them. So we’ve got commercial services now starting to eat into public libraries.

E-Books, I don’t know if you're into e-Books, well welcome to the world of the first e-Library and it seems to me that the concept of the e-Book was completely daft because it was trying to use an old model of delivery to deliver something completely new. This is actually a specialist library for pilots, so you can buy this little gizmo here, it doesn’t use a display screen like a computer, it uses electronic paper so you can read it anywhere, but it contains within it all of the technical documentation and all of the charts, all of the checklists that the pilot needs to fly an aeroplane. They don’t need all of those, those big black cases that you see pilots carrying, they’re more likely to have a bottle of whisky and some sandwiches in it just to keep them going while they’re flying.

Some time a publisher is going to realise the value of offering every individual that wants it their own personal library, all the books they ever wanted to read and at the moment this can probably contain a hundred books, but they will be soon be able to contain 10,000 and not just books as we know it but books where they’ve got video embedded in them, where you can go into the book and it is hyperlinking you through to web-based services and it will just slip in your pocket like a paperback. So the role of a library in the future may simply be the place where you go and recharge the battery in your electronic library and all sorts of other things. These are kind of Web 2.0 things, which is another step on the journey.

LibraryThings - do you know about that? You can all now become cataloguers - Shelfari, Bookclub Online. BookMooch is quite a good one because this is a community-based interlibrary lending system which relies on citizens to pay the postage to get the books from different places so you can stop having to worry about transporting books. Or Book Crossing, we’ve been experimenting that as we’ve been travelling around, we’re leaving books around Australia to see where they get to, so another way of sharing, so all sorts of match ups and things. Who needs a reference library when you've got Wikipedia? We’re doing this steadily at the moment because at least we know what to look for when we arrive in a new city and look for the State Library.

So I mean, and all of this is about a question which I genuinely get asked by politicians - why on earth do we need libraries when we’ve got all this stuff networked and all these new things coming along and we can see books maybe or writers' objects in museums but why do we need libraries? It seems to me that this is the critical issue that we’ve got to address if we believe that, which I'm sure you do, that libraries are a valuable asset to your community. We’ve got to embed them in a new revolutionary agenda and I would argue strongly that that's about the knowledge revolution and that's about unlocking the knowledge that's now available in many forms and making the connections between those assets and citizens that want to use them, to make it much more ubiquitous than it is already. So that seems to be the underpinning issue and if you, you may have seen this quote from Manuel de Castelle, the point he's making is really that all of these new channels, the question of what's trusted, what's public and what's private and that's a really interesting issue now because you don’t know do you, and that blurring so that what you think is fact is really faction, means that the danger is when we get to a completely networked society when all of that knowledge is there, people are totally bewildered by the whole thing because they don’t know what to do with it, it is not filtered at all, it is not managed.

So let’s start to explore some of the issues of how we make that happen. Strategy one is that it doesn’t seem to me that that's a very good strategy to follow. I think there are some people that genuinely believe that the internet is as transient as the hula hoop, for those of you who remember what a hula hoop is, some do. Though we could route our arguments for the future in this sense of libraries have always been important so they ought to carry on, kind of as it says there - it is our belief and our emotion we feel it strong, we’ll try and persuade people; I don’t think that's going to be very good. We can try the UNESCO manifesto because that's an international statement, it is of the value of library services and that they give free access to the whole world of knowledge to citizens and they create democracies and all of that but I'm sure my politicians would argue that they think that they’re already so we don’t need that. Or we can obviously try and think about how we adapt to the change in new agendas.

What I wanted to do was give you examples of some of the things we are doing to start to bring that about in our library services and there were three areas that I call incremental development, which is helping people to do better what they’re already doing. Synoptic change, which is really about doing brand new things and then perhaps one of the most important things, build a better narrative about what the services are able to do and I’ll skip through these. Again, much of this material is on the website, this is framework for the future which was a 10-year vision for the transformation of the public library services in England. Minister of Culture back in 2002 wanted this and it was put together, we helped to put it together with the Department of Culture to provide what it says, national intervention to improve local services. Now it is an important document and it has driven transformation because we’ve had, not a very significant sum of money, but for the past five years we’ve had two million pounds a year to progress what is referred to as service transformation. Now this is about engaging with services to help them to change, now that's an important thing, this is not about having new money to give to services that they continue to have forever. This is money which is a catalyst for changing the way they operate. So the idea is that you intervene to do something and then you take the money away and do something else but whatever you did continues to be undertaken and developed in those services. It had four areas, overall improvement; books reading and learning; community and civic places, it was actually called - shortened to community place here; and digital citizenship. In terms of improvement, this sense of trying to drive change and continuous improvement, it focused in these kinds of areas. The creation of national library standards, which have been in place now for almost five years, and those standards have been a challenge because they were set fairly high but at the end of each year the minister produced a list of all library services publicly available showing how many of the standards they met. And during the period that they’ve been in place the number of libraries open on a Sunday has gone up four times and the level of investment in the purchase of resources has nationally continued to improve, to increase above the level of inflation. So standards have certainly helped service managers in local authorities to argue to their politicians that they need to improve to meet them and they’re embedded in broader targets set within those local authorities so that’s important. There has been peer review of finding local authorities that need help and putting together teams to help them, so where a library service is failing a team of other professionals from other library services, some politicians, some management experts and things like that will go and collectively work with that service to help them.

We’ve run leadership training on an industrial scale for the first time, as far as I know; over 450 people have been put through a residential leadership program. All the chief librarians in the country, all their deputies or equivalent, and at least now it is more, at least one person who looks as if they’re going to be a future leader and that's been about training and new skills, creating a new sense of focus for all of those senior people and also getting them to work together. I won’t say any more about that because we have somebody sitting down here who has been on the leadership training course and she can speak about that to you afterwards if you want to, it is the lady sitting down there.

Then strategic marketing, trying to produce a national sense of identity for library services, and this is the most visible sense of what we’ve done, they are actually now becoming quite internationally renowned because New York public libraries have now taken the design of this and are using it, and we’re just in negotiation with the Province of Alberta - they want to use it as well. But this is a document, it is an advocacy document, and as it says in it, it is for those people that love libraries and want to share the message with others. So it has got some very simple things about how libraries are developing, their role in the community, kids, learning, the economy and the wow factor of libraries. And we are going to, with great ceremony during today, going to hand over a copy of the Little Book of Public Libraries to Anne-Marie for all of you to fight over. You can have a raffle or a lottery or something for it for anybody who wants it, but just to give a sense of what it is like.

We’ve invested in, and the government has now invested in, a whole range of new opportunities to books, learning and reading. I'm just picking up two very quickly here. Bibliotherapy - there are now doctors in England who when they consult with a patient, if they think it’s the right thing to do, will write a prescription for a book in the library rather than for a prescription drug. Because if they believe that increasing the knowledge of that person about their disease or their emotional difficulty or whatever is the best approach to help them to understand. They’ve been trained to know that there are resources in the local library that can be used to do that and that's a very low-cost activity, you can easily start to train doctors to understand those things, and we know that library catalogues are online and actually easier for them to search than the online pharmacopeia that they’ve got to use to find drugs. So bibliotherapy has been a real success. And Bookstart, which is a series of interventions for pre-school to get kids to have books and learn to read. At eight months when the health visitor sees the child, the kid is given a bag of books and an invitation to go to the library, ditto at 18 months, and then at three years they get a box of books in what are called the early-year setting - nursery groups and play groups and things like that. So that there's constant exposure to access to reading both for the parent and for the child before school, because the evidence has shown that kids that are exposed to reading and books before they go to school learn much more quickly when they get to school. This is a little trick you might want to know, one of these three people until recently was our Minister for Culture, and getting pictures of your minister in anything you do is a sure fire way of getting them to remember so that's just something we did.

The community place - again this is obvious stuff in a way - but improving the quality of the environment for the citizens, matching the library as a place with the needs of the users, whether they’re students or whether they’re citizens in the community, whatever. And this was one activity which was to involve families coming together to use the library and getting them to express their views about what they thought about the library. And we produced a little book. Again and again they’re going to be handed over, about families love libraries, chairs the environment, the kid that can very clearly see what a computer looks like but is struggling still explaining how to spell it. So that kind of thing is a national mechanism for starting to get people to understand in detail the granularity of what their library can do. Of course books on building better libraries, we’ve produced this, it is on our website, it has proved very popular.

We’re now managing a website which has now been extended to include university and college libraries of case studies of new libraries with their specifications and all of that sort of thing. As a result of all our work, we’ve managed to persuade the government to give us a relatively small sum of about 18 million pounds to continue to invest in building new libraries and redeveloping them. But this is a program which is focusing first on not... you can build the best looking library in the world but to get this money you've got to demonstrate that it is going to be a library that really fits into the community it is to serve. So the whole basis of it is to make the service managers think about what they should be doing for the community that they’re serving, what sort of library, whether it brings in other services, whether it's hours of opening, its position, whatever. But it is community first and then the building and then you get the money to build it.

In terms of improvement and innovation, just a couple of things, because this is important. Some of these are issues that are still in play. It has always concerned me that while we can travel to the other side of the globe and I can take a piece of plastic out of my pocket and I can use it in a shop or a hotel or anywhere else, a restaurant, and I can buy whatever I want and it is a Lingua Franca, it’s called a credit card. If I have a library ticket, invariably it will only work within a distance of about 20 miles from the library, so if every public library in England has its own library ticket that doesn’t usually work in another library service and different procedures for periods of loan and charges and cost of reservations. So whereas every citizen expects things to be consistent wherever they go, and we now provide for example online reference resources once for the whole of the country and anybody with a library card can get access to those at any internet-connected terminal on the face of the globe, but they’ve got to use their own library card for it, there isn’t a consistent library card. This is a study looking at putting in place one library card for London, 33 authorities in London and everybody thinks if London can do it then the rest of the country can, its the test bed. It is the thing to do because it doesn’t make any difference to anything apart from the emotional sense of local authorities wanting to hang onto their own identity when actually their citizens couldn’t care less. The political boundaries mean nothing to normal earth people.

This is a study looking at another area which is having a one-stop procurement system for the whole country. Because, again, does it matter where the books come from so long as they are the books that are needed and they’re purchased, there's other resources as well but it is purchased at the lowest possible cost and now actually the libraries and our National Health Service are thinking of joining the scheme as well once it is up and running. So why on earth are we doing it so many different ways in so many different places.

Now let’s just move on to what I call the synoptic change, and I can do this very briefly because you've probably heard all about the People’s Network already but this was a project that came out of the white hot revolution of Blair’s arrival as Prime Minister. He was looking for things to do that were going to transform society, and we had a project collectively, nationally ready to go which was called the People's Network. So we had 170 million pounds to spend putting in terminals in all public libraries, to train every library worker to the level of the European computer driving licence and then spend 50 million pounds on new judicial content.

The only thing I want to mention on here is that interestingly it is now quite clear that the implementation of the People's Network actually drove the broadband revolution in the UK. It was negotiating low-cost broadband across the country that gave local authorities the opportunity to roll out networks and that got fibre in the ground where it wasn't and it rolled it out and that's now a fact that a relatively modest investment of one hundred million pounds to put in the physical infrastructure has transformed so that almost every citizen in the country now has broadband running past their front door. This is a quote from our own minister that the People's Network has ‘built a bridge across the digital divide’. I am not going to go through all these statistics but in the first three years it created 50 million hours of internet access and transformed the whole country’s perception of... sorry 50 million user sessions were taken. The bottom figure, which I think is my favourite, from detailed research we now know that 100,000 people made new friends. So there's a social change taking place.

We’ve done a lot of research, this study is on our website, here is someone who is elderly who is using the library terminals to keep in touch with family and also to interact and do shopping and other things and a shorter statement, someone who found that it gave them the ability to get back to learning - really important messages.

Now the third part of this is I think for us as the strategic body for museums, libraries and archives, the most important issue in terms of what we should do. Build a better narrative - and part of the strategic marketing I talked about with the Little Book of Public Libraries included the employment of some brand specialists and some strategic marketeers and experts on trying to understand how you match supply and demand. I don’t know if you use these people but they all look about 15 and they all seem to speak a language that I didn’t understand at all. I found it very frustrating because they just didn’t seem to see the same things and think about things in the same way, but anyway... The point is that at one point in what they were doing we asked them to identify all the words that people associated with the public library to help us work out what was going on so that we could start to focus down, well this isn’t on that basis a great deal of help, I think it is quite a pretty slide to look at. But you can pick out anything you wanted to and indeed this actually applies to many library-like institutions these words, and then they say right at the bottom if you can see it, why not use the word library and yeah why hadn’t we thought of that!

Then they said the strength of the public library is that it is difficult to pin down what it does. So where as that they, where are we going with that because what we’re trying to do... if we’re building a better narrative it kind of is exactly the wrong message to give to politicians that we do everything because they think that's not going to get us anywhere. We felt we got much further when we started to talk to political advisors, a political advisor quite close to our new Prime Minister who said this and what he was saying is that don’t try to do everything at once, just identify what you need to do to raise the profile to get that sense of the message across about what libraries are for in the 21st century society. And this is what we are trying to do, is to get on the radar of national policy, to position the library service as an integral part of policy making within government, because we believe that it is a really powerful tool to do that. And to do that we need to look at these three issues, build the evidence base, get the compelling stories, get the powerful messages about how people's lives are transformed, to demonstrate how this fits into public value models and then most important of all to get everybody, everybody who works in the institutions to be signed up to it. Because if one thing is sure, if we go and talk to ministers, which we do, and we give them this really passionate message about what libraries can do for their policy agendas and they go and talk to somebody else wherever it is who they know - say it’s the chief librarian - and say you don’t want to believe that's a lot of rubbish, we’re actually doing this. That blows any chance of getting at the table, on the radar, or whatever, completely out of the window because there are so many conflicting views already being presented to politicians. It has to be a common narrative that goes across the whole of the agenda.

Now in terms of evidence, we’ve done a number of things, this is an example of where we’ve undertaken what's called contingent valuation and this covers museums, libraries and archives. British Library have done this as wel,l where you ask your community of potential users if there wasn't a public library service or the library service or a museum or an archive or whatever, if there wasn't one how much would you be prepared to pay for it. The people of Bolton said they would be prepared to pay twice as much for it as they were already paying in their taxation, which is an indication that their value was higher than the actual cost and that's good news, so that's good evidence.

We’ve looked at the public library in a knowledge economy, the study to see in that emerging economy where we’re now faced with the situation that within our societies the future value of our societies is much more going to be from here up to here rather than from here downwards in terms of the creativity. It is going to be what goes on in the brain box rather than the strength of making things and selling things that are manufactured, so the knowledge economy is important. We’ve built a service evaluation framework that covers museums, libraries and archives and other institutions and I won’t delay on this too much because you can go to this website called inspiringlearningforall.org.uk, which is a tool for the evaluation of learning outcomes, so it tells you how you’re succeeding in changing people’s lives, and we’re now developing social outcomes as well as learning outcomes and it has been proved very effective, our department of education thinks it is great, the BBC is using it and other cultural institutions.

The second thing I mentioned was public value and I think that this is important to remember, that public service is different to the private sector, we’re not trying to measure the same things. We’re spending people's money - this is Mark Moore’s model of what public value is and there may be different ones that you use, but it is important to position what you’re doing within that public value context, to look at how you measure the success of services that are delivered, the things that people want, how it changes their lives and that services are trusted. And we’re focusing really hard to demonstrate to policy makers and politicians in every way that that food chain that goes from money invested through to public value delivered and we can position that for us and our public library service within... this is called a white paper in our country but it is a rather sickly green what I'm looking at... Oh, it is for you as well, which is saying that in the local communities these are the kinds of things that it expects services to address, so services and outcomes. But if you look at those, they’re all things that libraries do already. So we’re already seeing a consonance between public policy and what libraries do so the narrative needs to get the message across it is already happening.

Blueprint for excellence is the last part of what we’re doing on this and this is very much work in progress. Blueprint is the document that's been out for consultation and we’re just analysing the consultation so I can’t tell you what the results will be, but its intention is to produce what it calls a radical vision for libraries in the future, identifying the common ground for libraries so we can get that strong narrative out. The camel is there not because it is any kind of branding that we put on it but we have a phrase that a camel is a horse designed by a committee and we’re reminding ourselves that this is not something which is a consensual document, we’re not saying we want to listen to everybody and make something that meets all their requirements but we want to sound out some radical ideas for people. But not that radical really, because they’re all the things that you would expect us to be addressing - what are the roles, what is the improvement agenda and things like that.

The purpose of the library, universal entitlement, trusted, reading of course, but access to knowledge and information throughout life, something which is the foundation of certainly libraries but also museums and archives, that they drive learning for life in a way that the formal education system never does. People leave college, university at 20, 22 and spend the rest of their life struggling to learn. They may struggle to learn when they’re at school and university as well but our institutions deal with those issues. A kind of metaphor for it and one that we’re going to pursue quite strongly is this, that the vision of the future will be a service which in one form or another has to have these three components. It needs to be a place because it is clear that that sense of public realm is important within communities and that the community place, the library, can offer a really dramatic and important part of that. But libraries need to engage in the online world, but they also need to be much more seen as development agencies; agencies driving community improvements and that's that point about public value and meeting other agendas, whether it is education or whether it is improving early years, whether it is dealing with bibliotherapy, all those things that were listed in the white paper, that was green, about families and the economy.

The library has a powerful tool to provide in terms of creating itself as an agency. We could then start to map - and you don’t need to read everything that's on here because this is quite UK focused - to look at those areas of activity and then map what you can do once and what you do many times. What you do nationally, what you do locally, and you can do it at the bottom as well or the back office admin stuff and you can then start to produce a standard framework for all of the libraries that still gives that opportunity for local flexibility where it is needed but in terms of delivering a highly effective, cost effective service against a national context then it works very effectively.

Okay, just let’s look at a very few of the things coming out of it. In their own way these are all English public libraries. Now some of you may recognise one of them, does anybody recognise any of them? Well done. What's known as the late 1960s supermarket style outside actually is a wonderful building inside, it is like Dr Who’s Tardis, it transforms as you go through the door. The one on the left-hand corner at the bottom is the Jubilee Library of Brighton that won an important architectural award and has been highly successful. The top right-hand corner is a bit different; it is a nascent library, it is called Topping Fold and it is in Bury, one of those library where hardly anything happened but then they got a new service manager who decided in a very stressed community, lots of drug dealing and that sort of thing, she would go out and drag in people to use the library and she did quite literally that, dragged the community in, got them to be involved in redecorating the library, getting it re-energised and quite often now the library is run by the community when there are no staff around. They wanted to brighten up the community, so the library now lends gardening tools and things like that. So it is very much a community focus and it just looks like a derelict place outside but it is a spectacular success inside for the community. The bottom right-hand corner is a bit different because this is the book swap at my local train station, all those people that get on that train with all the computing power haven’t got time to go to the library so they drop off the books they didn’t read from their buy-three-for-two down there and people can pay 50 pence and they can get a book. So in a way a public library, but undermining the role of the public library, sorry county public library.

I am not going to delay on this because it is going to pre-empt too much what we actually come up with at the end. But the indicators that are coming out are the things we would expect in terms of where we’ve got to engage, the narrative, that shared mission, focusing on the community that the library serves, looking at the infrastructure, improving the buildings, but also re-inventing the librarian, recognising that the skills that most librarians have are probably not enough to deal with services in the 21st century - project management, program management, fund raising, the whole area of partnership building, learning. Dealing with things like the health centre and simple things like information technology are not natural skills that are provided as far as I know in any school of librarianship I've ever seen, and I've been an examiner in three. And all of that, those new skill sets need to be worked on, and how you govern libraries in the future, what should be national, what should be local, how you involve consumers and all of those things, those are the key issues and I've talked about lots of them already that we should be driving forward on.

So just let me wind up now with saying a few things about what the library of the future might have as its components. We saw this circular diagram, this is sub-Olympic - we’re warned off using any more circles in this because the international Olympic’s committee hold the brand so close to their hearts. But I reckon what we’ll see in future is libraries always engaged with those three components but some will be bigger than others depending on the circumstance, so some libraries may focus very much on building access to electronic assets, although I can’t see why you’d ever do that more than once because it has got to be cheaper to manage it once. Or a library might see that it needs to really focus on the development agency side, a bit like Topping Fold library where they needed to go in to build a community up to give them a sense of identity and strength. But any library that is going to be successful in the 21st century will need to be a place, inhabit cyberspace and really be driving long agendas of change for the community of users.

So we’re going to see these things, we’re going to see the need for clarity about what we would call national, regional and local, I'm not sure that you would call it federal, state, regional or local but whatever the words are you need to disaggregate and decide and come to a consensus on how it works for maximum value to whatever community of users you happen to be serving. It is going to be about partnership, so that the partnerships we build with education, with the health centre, with local government generally, is what will drive forward the value of the library service and give it that strong narrative. People will work together and it won’t just be with other libraries, it is going to be about working with other institutions like museums and archives, who are other knowledge institutions, particularly in cyberspace to join together resources and it needs to be consumer and citizen focused whatever the institutions. I've mentioned this, but some other words here that we need to find in our library - workers, radical, risk takers, passionate advocates, knowledge managers, those are the things of the future. If you think you fit the bill then we’ve probably got a job for you.

Aligning with public policy, these are the issues for us, but just to reinforce it. In terms of that development agency role, we need to show how the library can underpin these issues because the people that provide these agendas, I said that the public library service cost a billion pounds a year, well for the national departments that run these kinds of programs, a billion pounds is kind of the roundings, the underspendings they have on the one program. I mean it is small change so if you can pin yourself into other people's agendas money is not the problem, the narrative is the issue, telling the story.

Our services are so trusted - this is a question about who is the most trusted organisations on the internet, and what do people say? Museums, libraries and archives, more trusted than the BBC, and look where the local council comes, it is sixth in the list is it, something like that yes, seventh in the list, sixth, can’t count. And that's something to cherish that because remember that was another part of the public value model.

So what should we aspire to, you'll be relieved to know we’re almost finished now, so we’ll just wind up with this. This thing about knowledge, knowledge is an important word for the 21st century and actually libraries of all sorts are the powerhouses of knowledge, but it will be the nuclear reactor of the future for sure, it will drive creativity but we need to make sure that lifelong learning is a universal opportunity for every citizen.

To recognise that what libraries already know, that the interface between the resource or the member of staff and the user is a personal experience, that's the fantastic thing about libraries, it’s a personal experience. In the future, content will be much more important than institution. In cyberspace nobody cares where the material, information, knowledge comes from, not in the first instance, except to know it’s a trusted institution, but the content is more important than the institution and if you do it right that will drive people to the institutions people want to find. So institutions must work together.

Now William Gibson said in Pattern Recognition 'The future is already here, it is just not very evenly distributed', and in a way I think demonstrated some of that, the building blocks of the future are already around and we need to see within the narrative that we need to do these things, to recognise, to have strength and passion about the fact that libraries are already critical tools for solving people’s problems, for helping them to adapt and change, that knowledge and understanding builds better citizens and better citizens build better communities.

But there's another issue about the future that's already here because we can think, particularly in a digital world about what's going to happen in five years time and what's web 3.0 going to look like and web 4.0 going to look like and so on but we’re still faced with the fact that the future is already here. Now this young lady is in a library, starting that process of pre-school learning that's going on with the library service. Now I don’t know about you but I can remember that my early experiences of libraries and museums, I can’t say that pre-school archives featured very much, but in a sense influences you significantly for the rest of your life because people say when I was a kid I can remember going to the museum and that's what made me what I am today, as they’re sent to prison or something. But what this young lady experiences now will affect the rest of her life, she is the future, she is a very important future because I know, which you don’t know, that in 2040 she's going to be our Prime Minister and she will have been influenced now by... you see what I mean - that's the future that's already here and these are the cabinet ministers.

So, last slide. At the heart of all of this, our narrative will be about creating a universal right to knowledge. Now what they say about technology is that technology only works when it becomes invisible, so telephone is a good example. Who thinks about how a telephone works? Nobody, because it is not based on language, you don’t have to speak French to use a French telephone, it is a universal, invisible product. This kind of stuff is certainly not invisible at the moment and accessing knowledge is not invisible, it is not something that people do completely unconsciously, whereas I think our target is to turn knowledge into a utility like electricity and gas, all of those things which we get worried about when they don’t work. The lights don’t work - what's going on? The utility I think which works better as an analogy than anything else is that we should see knowledge as a trusted accessible utility that's as easy to get as running water. Cheers.