LONDON BOROUGH OF RICHMOND UPON THAMES
Leisure Services Department Libraries and Arts Services Langholm Lodge, 146 Petersham Road, Richmond TW10 6UX. Tel 081940 0031/940 8351/948 6230. Fax 081 940 7568

Mr John Myers
Aslib, The Association for Information Management
Public Library Review Secretariat
Information House
20-24 Old Street
LONDON EC I V 9AP

Dear Mr Myers

DEPARTMENT OF NATIONAL HERITAGE REVIEW OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY SERVICE

In reply to your letter dated 12 May I am enclosing this Authority's response to your invitation to make a submission.

I know the Authority is looking forward to receiving your draft report for further comments.

Yours sincerely

Head of Libraries and Arts Services

REVIEW OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY: response of the Leisure Services Committee of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames

1 The FREE 'CORE' of PUBLIC LIBRARY PROVISION

1.1 The public library has been provided in this area for over 114 years. The service has high membership levels since there is a strong tradition of library use in the local community. The expectation of residents is that the public library service should meet and continue to meet the recreational, educational, study, economic and information needs of themselves at various levels and of their children. The full costs of providing this service should continue to be one of the tangible returns for taxation at local and national levels.

1.2 The Public Libraries and Museums Act, 1964 in defining the statutory free service in section 7, as "comprehensive and efficient", is imprecise in quantitative and qualitative terms yet enabling in allowing library authorities to provide services which they determine to be needed by their communities.

1.3 The Act in permitting charges for access to non-book materials does erode the principle of free access to library materials and information. The extreme pressures which local government is under to sustain services with reduced funding, is not hospitable to a widening of the range of materials which are provided free at the point of use, regardless of the fact that the same messages are carried by different media.

The Review needs to recognise the need for adequate funding, to encompass the higher costs of providing access to non-book media in order to sustain the public library service in years to come.

1. 4 The disadvantage of both the lack of service guidelines in terms of resourcing and of the local government financial context, is the inability to protect the service from progressive cut-backs. In this Authority efforts have been taken to avoid further cuts to opening hours and to the bookfund, yet the community would like better access to libraries and more books on the shelves. However, there is no new money and a continuing pressure to provide less of the 'free core'.

2 NEW SERVICES

Information

2.1 The Act does not give the emphasis to the contemporary role of the public library as the primary information resource for local communities. There is a mention of reference use in section 7(2)(a) and an ambiguous inclusion of 'other information as may be required...' in (b). In this Authority, public libraries are local information centres, providing community information, details of council services, they act as referral points for local and national networks and provide access to consultation papers, planning applications, council and committee agendas and minutes. The local viewdata network is run by the libraries service promoting self-help. We will shortly be installing On-line Public Access Catalogues (OPACS) and our viewdata service will be available from the same terminals.

We consider that the role of public libraries in collecting information, organising it for use and making it as accessible as possible is a core function.

2.2 Services for business

The provision of public library services to support local business and economic activity has been carried out, particularly by the Reference and Information Service, for many years, When there was a direct link between Councils and commerce and industry through the business rate, these services were regarded as a tangible return. Employees of companies, working in the Borough are entitled to use the library service under the Act. We were concerned that a recent interpretation of "persons" in section 7(1) should be construed as not empowering the library authority to provide services to local business. 'Person' embraces bodies corporate in other areas. we do not see why such services should not be covered by the Act; similarly voluntary groups are important users.

2.3 Open for Learning

The role of the public library in providing for personal development, continuous education, supporting retraining and the acquisition of skills has been given a sharper focus with the establishment of Open for Learning Centres. The insistence of the Employment Department that this service is more than providing materials on shelves, that there needs to be support from staff, an advisory service and links established for tutorial assistance, reflects the important support public libraries provide for formal and informal education.

2.4 School Library Services

These services have been provided by public libraries for many years, yet the statutory basis is uncertain. There needs to be a statutory requirement upon schools to provide library and resource centres to meet the needs of the curriculum. Self-evidently as no library can stand alone, the local support of a Schools Library Service to extend the range of material available should be part of this mandatory provision. In this authority we also provide an off-air recording service for educational broadcasts on radio and television for schools.

2.5 Generally the services in this paragraph are not new ones: a public library which is able to respond to community needs, to provide new and innovators services to stimulate use and access to knowledge and cultural experiences, will at a local level, be acting in the best interests of users and potential users.

3 FURTHER PRIORITIES

3.1 As far as many of our users are concerned, we need to ensure that we can continue to provide them with books, other materials and information. That is to sustain access to existing services, rather than seeking out the new and different. Certainly there will be an increasing shift to new media, but both the emphasis on books and on the library function should be sustained .

3.2 We will ensure that the best possible management systems are employed to relate provision directly to community needs, to provide value for money and to achieve a quality service.

3.3 We have, in common with other public libraries, extensive local studies collections. These present sizeable conservation problems both now and in the future, with existing funding we will never complete our programmes and materials could well disappear.

FRAMEWORK FOR LOCAL CHOICE

4.1 The public library service is one of the few Council services which in this Authority has a visible and active presence in virtually every community. The service aims to be responsive, within the financial limits, to the library and information needs of those communities. Yet it needs the Borough-wide strategic framework to maximise the use of resources and to provide staffing support. Similarly the Authority's libraries are dependent upon the Library Region to meet specialist and other needs not provided for locally.

4.2 The need for resourcing guide-lines and adequate funding, referred to in para 1.4, is important to provide a framework for local choice. The choice should be between providing a basic service and something more, either generally or for specific client groups. At present with no bed-rock upon which to base provision, extra provision for the needy can only be made at the expense of other service areas.

4.3 Local choice needs to be channelled through customer care policies. If choice is going to be governed by financial decisions which are not being taken by the local authority, then the democratic processes of accountability are not working.

5 FUTURE FUNDING

5.1 There can be no major alternative than to continue to fund the public library service through local authority finance. In this Authority, the cost per resident for sustaining the public library service is 44p per week. This contribution to a shared community resource with access to thousands of books, to information, to a choice of av materials enables individuals far more than each or even families, could acquire by themselves. For a few more pennies a week the service could be improved immeasurably - but then the Authority is capped.

5.2 The amount of money which can be raised through income, of which fines is the largest component, cannot be more than 8%. The financial pressure to raise income rather than to cut services, does cause some services to be questioned as 'viable' when they are unable to achieve a 'proper return'.

6 MARKETING

We use this term in this authority to cover the whole process of investigating demand, tailoring services to meet this demand, publicising them and fine-tuning the services in response to patterns of use and surveys of users. We regard this and customer care as good practice. Within the Leisure Services Department we employ a Marketing Officer who has provided invaluable help both with core service provision and with special events and festivals.

7 SPECIAL GROUPS

7.1 The needs of special client groups, particularly those who are disabled, require a higher delivery cost and effort on the part of the library authority. We have Equal Opportunities Policies which require that Council services are provided for all, yet we are mindful that we are unable to devote enough resources to meet needs adequately. For example, the visually-impaired require a substantial investment in talking books, the full text editions of which are expensive. We need, to undertake research with specific client group needs, to identify people within the community, then to deliver services to them. We know that there are probably twice as many potential house-bound users as currently served, yet this service requires books to be out of circulation longer than to ambulant users. If community care programmes were better funded than some account of the need for access to books and other materials could have been made. Children are regarded as our most important client group and we are accordingly ensuring that all staff receive training, that we provide the best possible range of materials for them that we can afford. We are adopting the Library Association Guide-lines for this service.

8 SUMMARY

We have in Richmond upon Thames a literate and demanding community with a higher than average percentage of socioeconomic groups A, B & Cl. We have over 100,000 currently registered as library users out of a population of 163,000. They have high expectations of what the public library should be providing, and are critical of our inability to open for longer, have better selections of new books, have in-depth monographs and a wider selection of magazines. Local MORI surveys have shown that the public library service consistently scores the highest satisfaction rates of all services which are used voluntarily. The community appreciate the service and want it to continue - and be better funded.