Public libraries. What’s the Use?
It’s been a few months since I last posted to the blog – sometimes the ups and downs of life have a way of taking over. And I started to put together this post while sitting in a hotel room self-isolating awaiting an ultimately redundant COVID test result (despite having had my first vaccination) which will allow me to head home to my family in a snap 7-day lockdown in Victoria. So let’s make something out of this mess.
I was recently invited to speak to a Professional Development Day run by Public Libraries WA on ‘Demonstrating the Value of Public Libraries’. My presentation was to draw on the work on library outcomes contained in the APLA/ALIA Standards and Guidelines for Australian Public Libraries. The 2016 guidelines were the first to address the issue of library outcomes and identified six broad areas of individual and community impact from the services delivered by public libraries.
There are many different ways that public library associations and development agencies around the world have tried to classify library outcomes. There is no right or wrong answer, and this set is as good as any. Most importantly, it draws attention to the multiplicity of reasons why people use a public library. On any given day a library user can access one or more library services (i.e. collections, programs, technology, facilities, information and reference services) and (often with or sometimes without the support of library staff) achieve one or more of these outcomes. And if they choose they could come back the next day and realise a different outcome.
One question we often ask library staff when conducting planning and review workshops is which of these outcomes are more important to their communities. It’s a simple enough exercise – they each have to allocate 10 points to the outcomes. It could be all 10 on one outcome, or spread across two, three or all six. Just no fractions, only whole numbers. There are no right or wrong answers, but it forces staff to think about their community and the many different ways they make a difference in people’s lives.
Over the past two years we’ve done this exercise with 310 staff from five different library services in three different states. And every time, the outcome which tops the list is ‘Literacy and lifelong learning’. Which is probably not too surprising – libraries play a vital role in early years’ literacy, and also through collections and programs support adult and English language literacy.
‘Digital inclusion’ usually comes in 2nd or 3rd, with ‘Economic and workforce development’ always in 6th place. ‘Personal development and wellbeing’ can land anywhere from 2nd to 4th, which is interesting given that’s the impact most likely to be associated with reading for pleasure among adults and youth.
However, the main point for me is that all six outcomes get a reasonable allocation of points, with no real outlier at the top or bottom end. While some staff are putting 5s and 10s down on their choices, most librarians feel the need to recognise that all of these outcomes are happening in their libraries and communities. Which says that there is unlikely to be any killer metric that fully describes the value of a public library, notwithstanding that I love being able to say that every $1 invested in public libraries delivers $4.30 in return to the community (thanks SLV/PLV and SGS Economics).
It's not like Jesse Owens (10.2 sec), Carl Lewis (9.86) and Usain Bolt (9.58) whose athletic prowess, drive and years of training and discipline is defined by a single time. Or a secondary student whose 13 years of school-based education is distilled into an ATAR. Our standard of living is measured by GDP per capita, and our socio-economic status by SEIFA. But how do you measure such a disparate set of library outcomes?
The answer is we don’t know – yet? Which is where the PLWA day ended up, with a shared commitment to get more active in this space and to start asking library users about the value they get from their library service. The only way we will get a better handle on measuring the value of public libraries is to:
talk and think about the services libraries deliver from an outcome perspective
ask library users about the benefits they derive from library use
collect, compile and share quantitative and qualitative survey data on library outcomes
capture real-life stories and anecdotes about the ways in which libraries change lives.
Then we will be much better placed to talk about the use and value of public libraries.