Issue 29 Autumn 2000 Children's Libraries in the 21st Century John Dunne - Assistant County Librarian Children's, Schools and Community Services, Hampshire	Collections under which this       article appears:       Libraries

The title of my talk suggests an element of prediction and prediction as we know is an imprecise art. However, what I shall attempt is to look at current Government initiatives and examine the way I see them shaping our future, as well as addressing specific questions which relate to that future.

Firstly, I would like to say that I can't remember a time when the future for libraries has looked so bright. For many years libraries were marginalised in terms of government's perception of their role and of course with that came starvation in terms of funding. The result has been cuts in services, closure of School Library Services and a weakening of specialisms, including children's services.

Much of that has changed, or is changing with the current Government and I would like to briefly touch on five key initiatives which will affect change in the future.

People's Network
Certainly in terms of ICT we are at the forefront of change. The massive amounts of money being put into the People's Network will literally revolutionise our libraries, as well as providing our staff with levels of ICT skills which we could only have dreamed of five years ago.

Literacy
The Government's drive on improving education and standards of literacy and numeracy has had an enormous impact on libraries. Millions of pounds have gone into schools to support the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) and the National Year of Reading. The NLS has had an enormous impact on reading in primary schools and is now also having a knock-on effect in secondaries. School Library Services have been able to offer advice and in some cases exhibition collections which have facilitated the purchase of appropriate books to support this initiative. Public libraries have been instrumental in supporting the National Year of Reading and have used it as a marvellous opportunity to engage new readers, both children and adults.

DCMS Draft Standards
Many of you will know that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has recently produced draft standards for consultation, "Comprehensive and Efficient Standards for Modern Public Libraries: A Consultation Paper". What they are attempting to do is to provide a national standard for public libraries which are in some cases aspirational, but which also indicate an intervention point below which the DCMS will not wish to see libraries go. I think many colleagues will take issue over some of the standards and what the intervention points are and I hope in the consultation some of these issues can be addressed. That said, we have a potential set of standards which will affect the future development of libraries over many decades. In a sense they are defining the mission of libraries, set out in the Public Libraries and Museums Act of 1964, to "provide a comprehensive and efficient service." For many of the lean years for library services, which I mentioned earlier, it was the lack of such standards which led to the decline of many services.

Best Value
As many of you will know, this is an extensive management review, of a kind we have not seen before, which will affect all local authority services. In some cases the reviews will be of a single service e.g. libraries, but there will also be what are called 'cross-cutting reviews' which look at services across departments e.g. services to children. The interesting dimension to the reviews is that there is direct elected Member involvement and these Members are not those who have served on library committees. This introduces an element of challenge which is part of the ethos of the whole process.

Modernisation Agenda
The final piece of the political jigsaw I want to mention is the modernisation agenda which will change the way which local government works. Instead of traditional structures of committees linked to particular departments, these will now be replaced by scrutiny panels. As with Best Value Members' Panels, scrutiny panels will be made up of elected members with no links to particular departments. Again, like Best Value, it introduces an element of challenge to services which is a new dimension in the governing process.

You can see from the major Government initiatives I have mentioned so far, how much we are affected by the political agenda. I think it is important that we are all aware of this wider-dimension to what we do, so that they can engage with it more fully. So having looked at the wider picture, let me now examine the four areas I have been specifically asked to cover.

What are the key issues for children's library services in the 21st century?
I want to focus on two issues here, which I think are the most important: staff and resources.

Staff
If we look at staff, the key issue must be, what skills will they need and will they change from those currently in place? I think the answer is yes; they will change in some ways. The major change will be the development and use of ICT skills by every children's librarian in the country. This of course links directly back to the People's Network which I mentioned earlier. What the People's Network will deliver over the next three years is the training and the infrastructure to support and develop this. Children's librarians will need to be just as familiar with websites for children as they are now with books.

Another skill they will need to develop is their ability to work in partnership with a more diverse range of organisations. We have always been good at working with schools and playgroups but many of us found working with big companies like Asda, who have different aims and objectives, a steep learning curve. Yet, where the partnerships worked well, we managed to meet a more diverse range of the population to promote our services to and established links which can be built on.

There are other types of partnership closer to home where we need to develop our skills e.g. early years. Many of you will be involved in Bookstart and this has involved working with education and social services, as well as Health Authorities. Surprisingly, working with colleagues in other departments in our own authorities is still somewhat novel and this cannot be a good thing. The skills we need to develop are looking outwards not inwards, and looking across sectors and not in the traditional vertical pattern.

I think the other key skill staff will need to develop is being more analytical about what they do. The Best Value process is summed up by the 4Cs: challenge, compare, consult and compete. Every service involved in the review will be tested against these criteria and staff will need to be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their service.

If we look at the 4Cs in more detail we can see how they might relate directly to us:

• Challenge - we are being asked to look at what we do, and why and how we are doing it. In Hampshire, as part of the Best Value Review, we are looking at our stock selection processes, adult and children's, and challenging them against other methods e.g. CD-ROM, supplier selection etc.
• Compare - this is essentially looking at performance indicators across authorities and benchmarking your results against others. The aim of Best Value is for everyone to get into the top quartile but of course that is actually an impossibility.
• Consult - for many of us this is probably the weakest aspect of our approach to service development. What the Best Value process demands is that you define who your stakeholders are and consult with them. One of the other areas we are looking at in our Review in Hampshire is Access. This includes opening hours, mobile library services and equality issues.
  Having defined our stakeholders, consultation groups are being set up with the public. One group is looking at the elderly and disabled and the other children's services, from pre-school to teenagers.
• Compete - this is one area of Best Value where in the main library services do not have commercial competitors as such. The view we are taking in Hampshire, and it has elected Member support, is that book lending services are not subject to competition and we are not subjecting them to scrutiny. However, when it comes to looking at video collections we will obviously have to take a different stance.

Resources
The other area I want to address in this section is resources, by which I mean books and other media. The key question here is, has the book got a future or are we looking at just having internet terminals in all our libraries in 50 years time?

This is possibly the trickiest area of prediction because we are only at the start of the internet revolution. However, the portents all point to more and more internet access. Recent figures predict that by 2002 all 32,000 schools in the UK will be connected to the internet and all teachers and hopefully school librarians, will have had ICT training via the New Opportunities Fund (NOF).

Publishers are already beginning to wonder what the future holds for them and are right to do so. There is no doubt that reference books as we know them are ever more likely to be in CD-Rom format or on the internet. Likewise, some types of information books will lend themselves to these formats, but not all. In the area of fiction, from picture books to teenage novels, I personally don't see a massive change away from the book. However, what might happen is that we have some book publishing on the internet which lends itself to that format e.g. teenage diaries with chat rooms etc. I can see this happening for other genres e.g. picture books, younger readers, etc. but for me the initial reading experience will continue to be provided by a book and because of that, book-reading will always hold sway over screen-reading.

We also need to look at the changing pattern in children's use of books and IT. We are finding increasingly in our secondary schools in Hampshire that pupils go to CD-ROMs or the Internet for all their information enquiries. Apart from the whole business of whether they have adequate information retrieval skills or not, or how teachers are directing them, or how relevant the internet is as a source of information, it has meant that many very good information books are underused. However, what is increasing in use is the recreational books on hobbies, sports, joke books etc. I think there are interesting lessons for public libraries here because by and large, they do not yet have the ICT facilities which most secondary schools provide.

There is one worrying aspect of the People's Network standards for ICT hardware which has now been compounded by the DCMS standards, and that is the number of terminals being specified for libraries. I think there is a real danger that we are going to deplete bookstocks to meet those new standards. I am all in favour of making stock work hard but there is a real danger that children's stock will be the soft option when space has to be found to house banks of computers.

Having said all that, one of the key skills children's librarians have, is their knowledge and enthusiasm for books and we must develop and enhance those skills at every opportunity. We are seeing a marvellous period of creative writing at the moment and you only have to look at this year's Carnegie and Kate Greenaway lists, which have been produced by YLG, to see the richness of writing and illustration at present. Our role must be to engage with that literature, and its creators, so that we can promote that enthusiasm for books to children, parents and teachers.

What will be the needs of children and young people in terms of public libraries?
The key issue here seems to me to revolve around access. By access I mean a number of things including social exclusion, opening hours and awareness of the range of resources we provide, as well as the particular skills children's librarians have in actually knowing the books they are talking about or recommending.

On social exclusion we still have a lot to achieve but the success of homework clubs, another Government initiative shows what can be done. Opening hours and the sheer availability of libraries after years of underfunding is something the DCMS Standards will be tackling. I think the key document here, and one we are looking at in our Best Value Review because it is so useful is, "Libraries for All: Social Inclusion in Public Libraries". DCMS, October 1999. It is concise, informative and practical and I recommend it strongly.

As far as the awareness of our resources and the special skills we have is concerned, I am still not sure we do enough to sell ourselves. Likewise, we forget where children are coming from and most of our developments, including publicity, are top down, rather than bottom up. We had a recent example of this in Hampshire where we were doing a joint list with adult services on books for 'Dads 'n' Lads'. The immediate assumption was that we could draw up the list without referring to anyone. However, having reconsidered this approach, my deputy, Anne Marley, set up a 'Dads 'n' Lads' group in a school and, after an initial slow start, the group took off. After nearly a year in existence and as a result of their work, a list has now appeared which is significantly different to the initial conception. Out has gone sports books and in has come travel and biography. The short reviews of each book are by the dads and lads themselves and we got Anthony Browne and his son to provide a guest slot. We are now trialling collections in four libraries, monitoring issues and offering staff training on doing promotions to teenagers. I think this is a small but interesting example of how we can involve children (and parents) much more in what we do.

The other need children have, which we are only just beginning to address through initiatives such as the Young Writers UK, is writing. How often have you heard some of our best writers, both children's and adult, talking about the influence of libraries on their writing? In the recently announced Blue Peter Award, they invited children to write in to become judges and got 17,000 replies. We need to harness that enthusiasm and interest in reading and writing in our libraries. As well as providing book clubs, why don't we encourage writing as well? With our growing partnerships with other groups perhaps we can harness the skills we need to support this. This whole area of promoting writing is something the Nordic countries, particularly Sweden, are very good at and we can learn a lot from them.

The final element of access I want to mention is the significant change in recent years in the freedom children have to go out after school on their own. Children getting to libraries has always been a problem but the barriers of protection are now greater. I think the way to address this is to continue to have as many organised visits to the library as you can. Class visits can be something of a chore but at their best they provide the widest possible access, to the widest range of resources, which many children get.

How will children's services need to respond?
I think children's services need to respond at three levels: local, regional and national.

At local level, we need to be able to respond to, and initiate, the kind of partnerships I mentioned earlier. These can be within our own authority e.g. early years, as well as with local commercial organisations. We need to build on the contacts made during the National Year of Reading and develop permanent links with them.

At regional level, I think organisations like YLG, SLG, the SLA and the Association of Senior Children's and Education Librarians (ASCEL) play a crucial role in providing a network of support and training. However, I think we need to develop this further. Just as I was highlighting the need earlier to work more with other departments in our own authorities, I think we should work more across authorities. We all spend too much time, often with too few resources, doing our own thing, when pooling our resources would be far more productive. This tendency to only look within our authority applies to a whole range of things from developments such as teenage services, to publicity leaflets. As part of the Central Buying Consortium, which includes a large number of authorities in the southeast, we are making our first tentative steps at taking this wider view. We are looking at two areas: teenage services and fiction categorisation and have set up meetings to explore common ground. This has to be the way forward and if regionalisation is still on the Government agenda for local authority services, we shall be ahead of the game for once.

At national level, I think we have already made enormous strides through the Launchpad initiatives. Reading Safari and its successor, Reading Relay, show what can be done on a national scale. The fact that 85% of all library authorities have bought into these indicates the gap which has been filled. The benefit of initiatives such as these are that they provide high quality materials across the country which themselves can engender local sponsorship. Last year for Reading Safari, we got our local zoo at Marwell to sponsor a bookmark. We advertised Reading Safari on one side and they advertised their zoo on the other - a perfect partnership. I think the national publicity for these initiatives is still not quite right but that will get better and when it does the impact will be that much greater.

To sum up, I think children's services must respond creatively and imaginatively to meet the changing demands on the service.

What will the international picture be like, similar or different to the UK and is there opportunity for greater collaboration?

This is an enormous question and would take a whole paper in itself to do it justice. However, there are common strands and thanks to my colleagues on the IFLA Section for Children and Young Adults, I can give you a feel for some of them.

You will not be surprised to hear that many of the themes I have discussed already are also part of the international agenda. One area I have not mentioned is the concern about the training and development of children's librarians. Like the UK, there are fewer and fewer library and information schools offering specialist children's librarians courses and this is seen as a real threat to library development.

There are also concerns about lack of reading, often boys and reading. In Norway, they have devised specific library programmes to counteract the fact that they are lowest in the league totals of Nordic countries for library visits and book borrowing.

Multi-media libraries and ICT developments are much to the forefront in all countries but there are concerns, as here, about the impact that will have on reading. Another key issue is the level of retrieval skills children will require in order to gain the best access to information.

On the question of collaboration there are a number of possibilities some of which have already begun. Many of you will have heard of the CHILIAS project which involved five member countries of the EC, working together to create a children's website. Children aged from 9-12 from all five countries created a website with information on authors, books, plus reviews etc. The UK authority involved was Gateshead so if you want to get more information you can contact them.

World Book Day seems to me to be an event, now that it is part of our national calendar, to be ideally suited to international collaboration. One of the problems we have with such a strong, international children's publishing industry is that we are not seeing the best of what is being published elsewhere. We don't have enough good translators, the cost of translation is high and apparently, we have trouble coping with foreign names. Perhaps through World Book Day or International Children's Book Day, which is organised by IBBY, we can address this.

The area I think there is a real need for collaboration, which is linked to this, is access to foreign language materials. We have made great strides over the years in providing appropriate books for black and Asian communities. However, I think we have an increasing problem with providing suitable books for children, especially those who are coming as migrants from Eastern Europe. We need to find a way through IFLA or IBBY, or both, to address this need. Although the IFLA Section does not include representatives from every country there is a network there which could be used, as there is with IBBY.

One of the concerns my colleagues on the IFLA section share with everyone is the need to raise standards of services to children. Our Section has already produced "Guidelines for Library Services for Young Adults" and we are currently working on similar guidelines for children's services generally. I think these are important documents in helping to set standards, which can be applied both nationally and internationally.

Conclusion
I said at the beginning of my talk that I believe the future for libraries has never looked so bright. We are living through a period of great change, some of which directly affects us, like the Government initiatives I mentioned. There are other changes, like the Internet revolution, which will impact in ways we cannot foresee at present.

What I believe is constant in all this is for us to have a clear idea of what our mission, as children's librarians must be. For me, the essence of that mission is our knowledge of our resources (books and IT) and our engagement with the reader to enhance and fulfil their lives.