Australia’s best community library. Part 1 - Type
What are the ingredients for a great public library? As someone who reviews and evaluates library performance and spends hours (enjoyably) categorising and classifying and crunching benchmarking data, it’s a question that is constantly whizzing around in my head. So to get it all straight I’m going to write down my thoughts over a series of blogs and see what happens.
Dame Agatha would be horrified but I’m going to start by revealing what I think is the answer. Which is …
Every single library is now, or could be, Australia’s best community library.
That’s not a cop out, and I’m not just saying it to make librarians feel good or to avoid offending anyone. When I think about the libraries that I believe are the ‘best’ (and I will talk about them – just not today), they are all different. Different locations, different sizes, different budgets, different look. But the thing they seem to do better than others is that they understand and respond to the particular needs of their community. And as we know that every community is unique, it follows that every library should be unique too. Yes – they all deliver the same set of services. But it’s the mix that matters, and the way those services are presented to the community that leads to high levels of engagement, use, satisfaction and impact.
So first up I want to think about what I see as three distinct types or profiles of library use – Reading … Activity … Place.
A ‘reading’ library is one where there are high levels of readership and borrowing from communities that are on average older, well-educated and have high levels of employment and computer access.
An ‘activity’ library has lower levels of borrowing but relatively higher levels of participation in library programs and higher use of computers. Their populations tend to have more young families, fewer older people and are more fluid.
A ‘place’ library is one where there is a higher proportion of people who use the library as a place to read, study, work, meet and relax.
Every library is, of course, a mix of these three types, but it’s very clear from the data on community profiles and library use that not all libraries are the same. (Which interestingly means that libraries should not be benchmarked against a single usage indicator if that indicator is not highly relevant to their community.) Let me explain.
I’m going to take the 2018-19 data from all Victorian library services and look at three indicators:
Loans per capita
Program attendance per capita
Visits per capita.
And because I’m a statistician and I love bell curves I’m going to calculate the average (mean) and standard deviation (stdev) for each indicator to show how close every library service is to the state average. If the library is right on the average they get a score of 0 (stdev). If they are well below average they get -3, if well above they get +3. (My statistical colleagues are weeping at this massive over-simplification of the normal distribution, but it’ll do).
Finally, I’m going to plot each library service on a radar chart with three arms – one for each of our indicators.
The chart on the left below shows what an ‘average’ library would look like – that is, loans, program attendance and visits per capita are all at the state average (score 0). To illustrate, the chart on the right shows Moonee Valley and Geelong library services in 2018-19. Both have a very even spread of usage, being above the state average on each of the three indicators. There is no obvious pattern of usage that indicates the community having a particular demand for collections, programs or spaces.
In contrast, the chart below shows Whitehorse Manningham, Hume and Brimbank library services. Each of these has one type of usage that exceeds the other two. Whitehorse Manningham is what I call a ‘reading’ library – with a relatively highly educated and aspirational community having above average loans per capita. If you’ve seen the book bags after Story Time at Nunawading you know what I mean. Hume libraries are places where people go to do things, with activities for people of all ages and interests. Hume has some areas of longstanding socio-economic disadvantage, but is growing rapidly as new suburbs are being built on Melbourne’s northern boundary. Brimbank libraries are valued most highly by their community for being a safe welcoming place to study, sit or recharge. Like Hume, Brimbank has a very culturally diverse community, but this is a more established area with an ageing population.
Therefore, whenever we are asked to consider how well a library is performing we can only make a meaningful assessment if we also understand the community it serves – who they are, what they do and what they need. The best libraries know their community – or communities, as a single LGA can often have neighbourhoods with very different demographics (e.g. young families, retirees, CALD groups) and pockets of relative advantage/disadvantage. By understanding their community these libraries are better able to provide the right mix of services at the right time in the right place, and in just the right way.
Understanding library or community ‘type’ also helps in looking at how different libraries and their communities have fared during the COVID-19 shutdown, especially when library branches that are critical community spaces are not available to the public.
In Part 2 … I’ll run through the checklist of things we look for when we hang out in libraries.