I’m visiting the library in Dunchurch, near Rugby, the very picture of a best- kept village competition winner. As soon as I step across the threshold I can tell it is a community, or volunteer-run, library. One of the staff looks up, calls out a big “hello!” and tells me to “come on in and join us!”. I feel as though I’ve walked through the wrong door and gatecrashed an amateur dramatics society. But I do not have to sign up, or log on, or even show a library card, to use a PC for as long as I want. And when I leave, they thank me for coming.
Councils are increasingly adopting the community model as a way of making ends meet. A few libraries have been turned over wholesale to independent community management, stocked with donated books and run with voluntary assistance. More common are libraries like the one I am in, run by partnerships forged by the council with local community groups, parish councils and partner organisations. “County and community” libraries, as they are sometimes called, are stocked with council library books, call on the part-time services of a council librarian, and are usually housed in existing library buildings, or opened in premises shared with other organisations or local businesses.
How do you turn a council library into something run along the lines of a charity shop? “Case Study Library 4”, subject of a telling DCMS report, was a local library about the size of Dunchurch put up by Surrey County Council in 2012 for community management. Negotiations with local residents put Brexit talks in the shade, having been pursued for “around four and a half years”. The reincarnated library was officially launched in June 2016, with the council committed to continued rent-free use of the existing library building, which they own, and responsibility for maintenance and utilities bills. The package also provided “book stock, IT hardware and software, PR materials, website support, and access to county council services”, as well as an initial grant of a little over £2,000.
Very clearly, then, the council’s goal was to shake off the wages bill. Their sticking point on manpower was set at “a limited amount of staff input for one day a week”. This left the community with responsibility for day-to-day running, and the obligation to muster and manage a volunteer taskforce. A steering committee drawn from the community and two parish councils, with an advisory council member, found that no fewer than fifty volunteers would be needed. An agency was brought in for recruitment. Most who signed up are aged over 60, the remainder largely 25-59, with just a handful of 16-to-24 year olds. The Council trained the first group of volunteers in essentials including health and safety, customer care, internet resources, data protection and the library management system. Most voluntary staff members are assigned a specific role in, for example, schools’ liaison, children’s activities, events, fundraising, and so on.
Six months after the library reopened, there were more than one thousand registered users. They were mostly either pre-teens, or over-55s; the empty middle perhaps reflecting more the national trend than anything specifically local.
I was struck by the feedback noted in the DCMS report, feedback that should be blown up to poster size and pinned to the walls of council library committees: “it is not possible to impose the same sanctions on a volunteer as it is on someone who is being paid”; “volunteers’ expectations of what it is like to work in a library sometimes differ from reality”; “it is important to accept what volunteers are able to offer, and incorporate that into the operation of the library”. There is a call for recognition and respect for volunteers “taking on a role which was once done by paid/specialist staff and that they may not necessarily have the same skills and expertise”.
This is a controversial scheme, seized on by councils as an easy answer to budget cuts, made vulnerable by its reliance on volunteers and fund raising, better suited to villages like Dunchurch where individual affluence and leisure are at a premium, but barely workable in areas that are already underprivileged. It has had the fully intended consequence of job losses; research conducted by the BBC back in 2015 found that a quarter of all jobs in libraries had been lost since May 2010 – some 8,000 in total. Up to 2,000 further jobs have been lost in the years since. One estimate is that 570 of the UK’s 3,850 libraries are now being community run, and that 15,500 volunteers have been recruited.
But the goal of public libraries to provide a standard service nationwide does not apply here. There is no national strategy for the implementation of community or volunteer libraries. Councils may provide some professional librarian time, or none at all. Neither are there standards for range and depth of books, for IT provision, for a gateway to standard online reference works, national newspaper archives, links to the British Library… for any of the resources essential to meeting the obligation of library authorities to provide “a comprehensive and efficient library service”, as has been law since 1964. Community libraries may be run by the nicest folk you could hope to meet, but what they have to offer is pot luck.
*
This is extracted from An English Library Journey, a new title due out in May 2022. Further details to be announced on this website.