Keywords
Citation
Hannabuss, S. (2010), "Equity and Excellence in the Public Library: Why Ignorance Is Not Our Heritage", Library Review, Vol. 59 No. 8, pp. 640-642. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531011073182
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2010, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
“Excellence is not about elitism, neither is it restricted to what is sometimes characterized as literary fiction of high culture”. “Promoting and prioritizing high aesthetic and other standards does not make public libraries culturally exclusive”. These two quotations (respectively from pages 129 and 102 of Bob Usherwood's engaging polemic) capture at least one of the positions he takes up in this restatement of public library values. It is also a call for focused leadership in public libraries, for a renewal of commitment in a time of paradox – the paradox being that of increased political rhetoric about social inclusion and information literacy, but at the same time less and less use of public libraries and more disintermediation because of the internet.
The second of these arguments takes a familiar form – an advocacy for value rather than volume, for a response, yes, to political change and social policy but also a determination among professionals not mindlessly to buy into the belief systems of the information age (for example, that ICT is a cure‐all). In a way, the book is a curious mixture of the old fashioned and the new fashioned. Let's not forget the traditional roles in education and self‐improvement that the public libraries have played across the decades (the old) while at the same time we've all become economistic and assessment driven and have learnt to address challenging socially inclusive policies (the new). But none of that means we have to forget quality. A concept of “the best” will always be elusive, and usually involves a value judgement. But value judgments are based on beliefs, and professional librarians have not forgotten theirs, even though some Jeremiahs might believe so.
By this token, the main text of this book (131 pages of it) lays out the terrain – that public libraries are, like broadcasters, the book trade, and many cultural enterprises, caught in a fast‐changing world of commercialism and populism. For libraries some believe this has led to populism (at the expense of elitism), demand‐led rather than professional‐led library strategy, marketing spin rather than substantive service delivery, a shortage of suitably entrepreneurial leaders, and a loss of quality and value. At the same time, public libraries have always been associated with the social and cultural capital of a civic society, with self‐improvement and personal and community development, and so equity should be high on their agenda. Amid the rhetorical clatter of government policy‐making, where these issues are made to seem not only self‐evidently good but also self‐evidently achievable, public libraries, for all their sound day‐by‐day work, seem almost silent and invisible. For all their value in serving excluded and specific groups within the community, there is a perception that public libraries are traditionalist, elitist, and obsolescent.
Managerialism seems to have offered some “solutions”. The information age has offered yet another – ICT. Both, in Usherwood's view, miss the point, even though it's never an either/or – it's very much a both/and. “The public library should emphasize, encourage and embrace excellence”. Excellence is achievable, indeed definable, from a fusion of all these strands and stances – the historical role, inclusive access, responsible service delivery, accountable methods, sensitive response to demand, and appropriately customized entrepreneurialism. The opportunity cost is ignorance – such as racism – undermining the cultural capital that politicians bang on about and which, believe it or not, public libraries have been delivering all along. It is probably because we live in a populist, consumerist, and postmodern world that the perception that public libraries are fustian is so widespread.
I can't help thinking that, for the readers of this book (who will almost certainly be library and information practitioners and students at various stages), this will be preaching to the converted, good stuff though it is. Goulding (in an earlier Ashgate publication) argued that strategic leadership in public libraries was in need of an overhaul, and this sentiment emerges in the book by Usherwood. He comes highly recommended from his numerous earlier publications, both while at the University of Sheffield and now in a more freelance role (as an emeritus professor).
Even so, it is a strange mixture of a book for another reason: as a project it seems to have started out as a research survey into equity and excellence in the public library. Pages 13‐46 (appendix one, sent to a large number of English public library authorities) reproduce the questionnaire, and raise some interesting questions about equality and education, and community and populism. An even longer appendix summarizes the responses to the survey, covering issues like commercialism, demand and customer‐driven factors; stock and its selection; and elitism, excellence, and decline.
Picking up on two of Usherwood's summaries of responses: firstly, on the question of whether public libraries should actively try to strengthen communities through education, there was general agreement that they should, although a minority of respondents appeared to be uneasy with the concept of education. And, secondly, on the question whether public libraries should prioritize high aesthetic standards, more respondents agreed than disagreed, though several remarks reflected a discomfort with defining standards. The actual findings from the survey come through in chapter 12 (the last one), on equity and excellence, but appear hardly at all earlier on, where the arguments and evidence tend to draw on wide reading, supported here in a large bibliography which does not need to be as large. Intelligent readers will, I think, connect up the dots between the text and the survey evidence, because both push in the same direction. But I think that this reveals that yet again we have another book in the field that has been scrambled together.
I get the impression, too, that Usherwood was rather surprised at the end that his text was so polemical. It is more than a reiteration of traditional and current public library achievements and values: it really is a polemic – ICT is not enough; social inclusion agendas from policy‐makers need interpretation and public libraries need proper support to implement them; excellence and quality on the one hand, and being popular and ensuring egalitarian access on the other, are not mutually exclusive. There is an endearing and Hoggart‐like sub‐text to the book: Usherwood's own tribute to public libraries as vehicles of personal education and improvement, helping individuals to transcend class, and access culture as well as information.
The public libraries, in offering an alternative to the market, have the capacity to underwrite this change. This is quite distinct from state‐supported social engineering and indoctrination. The zeal today for the library merely to be relevant and accountable out of these elusive but tangible values. I'm not at all convinced that Usherwood has demonstrated a connect between his own arguments and the views of the public library leaders, and, from the evidence here, that the respondents to his survey demonstrate much more than a wish to be all things to all men and women and to be wholly reasonable human beings.
Usherwood does have a point that the public library is seen to be out of step with modern society, that leaders are so busy with service delivery and fire‐fighting that some confusion arises about strategy, and that commercialism and populism have changed public libraries perhaps fatally. The flavour of the book is a call to arms, like those of Ezekiel and Habakkuk in the Old Testament, while the price of ignorance, rather like the price of sin, is a severe sanction indeed. Underneath it all there is a pearl beyond price – that public libraries are no mere lifestyle accessory and that social capital vanishes when individuals bowl alone.
Probably the greatest weakness of the book lies in its failure to address or examine the concept of equity itself in any rounded sense. The author merely assumes that equity exists in and for public libraries and in and for their relationship with civic society and culture. Intellectually and professionally, this concept can be taken in various directions and applied in various ways. One is to pick up on the ethical dimension – the one that, through a discussion of social inclusion and of professionalism (though only applied to service delivery and, disproportionately, to quality stock), is the one least only implied here. But no sustained examination is provided of the implications, ethically, of equity in the public library service except that it aims to provide services for minority groups. There is even an implication that the library steps in where there is a digital divide: if they are the cavalry coming over the hill, why are they marginalized, under‐staffed, and in search of effective leaders?
Other aspects of equity insist on being heard and are not here: one is the dialectic between the utilitarian/use‐culture and value‐systems of commercial pragmatism (although, to be fair, this again gets a peep) and the service ideals of public library (and, let's not be parochial, museums, and art galleries as well). The tension there is noted although Usherwood falls short of developing it into a coherent intellectual argument. Yet another twist to the concept of equity is that of brand equity, that fascinating and topical marketing factor that asks managers to consider how customers and the marketplace perceive and then take up your product and service, and as a result to what extent this feeds through to bottom‐line efficiency. The service ideal still sits awkwardly with marketing.
Beyond that, by implication, lies financial equity itself, where strategic and operational decision‐making feeds from and through to financial strategy and where contribution includes intangibles and externalities (such as the very value Usherwood attributes to public libraries) for the wider community. Again the book hints at this but does not develop it: we go a little way with the balancing act between priorities – to quote Usherwood between elitism and populism, between stock to support learning and stock to support leisure. But there are few explicit signs here – and all too few in the professional literature – that the technical aspects of public library work get connected up to financial strategy, yet in real practice these two are inseparable. The moral of the story, if like La Rochefoucauld we are looking for one, is that, if you give a book a title, make sure you measure up to the expectations it creates. Perhaps the polemic took over and it is one that needs more facts, from the survey perhaps?