Editorial 2
by Rob Davies

The PULMAN Policy Conference. 4
by Margo de Groot

The PULMAN Conference: the programme   6

The PULMAN Conference Manifesto. 8

Trends and forecasts 10
By Rob Davies

Public Libraries in Europe: 14
by David Fuegi & Martin Jennings

 

Editorial

PULMAN: an overview

 

 

The PULMAN Thematic Network is being funded under the European Commission’s IST FP5 programme from May 2001 to May 2003. It has undertaken a variety of activities intended to help strengthen the performance and achieve the potential of public libraries in new economic, social and cultural roles. Its main goals have been to promote a Europe-wide exchange of knowledge, experience and good practice within and between the policymaking and professional communities responsible for public libraries in 26 member states and candidate countries and - through the PULMAN-XT extension project – a further 10 neighbouring countries. In the process, we hope to have achieved wide-ranging and high-impact promotion of digital services and best practice centres throughout the continent.

 

PULMAN started from a public library perspective. But from this position, the development of cross-domain and cross-sectoral agendas for local services have been among the foremost issues we have tried to address. In particular, the way in which public libraries interact and co-operate with their sibling local cultural institutions, archives and museums have been at the heart of a number of PULMAN activities, in particular the national workshops.

 

Our agenda has been guided strongly by the priorities for e-Europe 2005, including the drive for modern public services in areas such as e-government, e-learning and e-health, the need for greater interactivity in services for the citizen, the need to exploit broadband infrastructure and the growing range of potential platforms (e.g. mobile, Digital TV) for service delivery. Above all by the need to ensure e-inclusion - ‘an Information Society for All’ – by attending to the needs of all citizens for digital skills and lifelong learning, including those with special needs and those living in Europe’s more remote areas.

 

Public libraries are already developing a formidable track record as the leading Public Internet Access Point (PIAP) in many countries.  The next stage is to build on this by developing more local digital content -and applications- and by integrating them into a growing range of well-designed services which meet real user needs.

 

The main activities of PULMAN have included:

 

The compilation of Guidelines on digital services and their translation into over 20 languages.  The Guidelines are in three broad categories: social policy, management and technical and are further subdivided into individual topics. Such was the interest created by the PULMAN Guidelines that we have now produced a Second Edition with updated information, many more links illustrating good practice and modifications which take into account the many comments received. The Introduction and Summaries to the Second Edition can be found in the last section of this brochure. The full text in English, with all the new links, is now available on PULMANWeb.

 

A National Workshop has been organized in every country in order to launch the original Guidelines, to discuss strategies for public libraries and to develop consensus on co-operation between libraries, museums and archives at local level. These workshops have been attended by over 2500 leading professionals and policy makers including many from the archives and museums communities. In many cases the conclusions reached and actions planned are proving to be an important catalyst for new developments. Some of these are described in Section 7 – Country Highlights. The main findings of the workshops are summarised within Section 6 below. Other consensus-building work between the libraries, museums and archives communities has included a European-level workshop held in The Hague during June 2002, involving many of the leading European representative associations from these domains.

 

A Country Report on public libraries, covering issues such as organisational structure, strategic development, use of technology and standards has been compiled for every country as an aid to benchmarking. We are very pleased to note that the majority of these have been updated recently by integrating the unique data obtained through the NAPLE survey on The Public Library in the Electronic World (see Section 6). PULMANWeb also gives access to details of key contacts and links to other important documents and information in each country.

 

There have been many other PULMAN initiatives: more than 70 managers from public libraries in the South and East of Europe have attended specially customised training attachments in some of the best public libraries in Europe in Denmark, Finland, Greece and Slovenia. A registry of distance professional learning materials has been made available through PULMANWeb.

 

All the news, information and services produced by PULMAN have been made available via PULMANWeb our content-rich website www.pulmanweb.org and through our e-Newsletter PULMANEXpress, both operated by our Greek partner.

 

It would be impossible to complete this brief overview of PULMAN without paying tribute to the work of the network of Country Co-ordinators. They have been responsible for the high output achieved from the project through a wide range of responsibilities, including bringing together ‘support groups’, organising translations of the Guidelines and national workshops, supplying country information and generally promoting the work of PULMAN. Whatever has been achieved in each country is a testimony to their work.

 

The key PULMAN event is undoubtedly this Conference to which have been invited senior policy makers and practitioners from every country in the PULMAN Network. The planned outcome of the conference is a Manifesto which we hope will act as a beacon in the development of strategies for local services provided by public libraries, museums and archives over the next few years

By Rob Davies

MDR Partners

PULMAN Project Manager

Email: rob.davies@mdrpartners.com

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The PULMAN Policy Conference

 

 

Introduction

The PULMAN policy conference: Public libraries, museums and archives learning from each other in e-Europe was held at Tagus Park, Oeiras, Portugal, on 13-14 March 2003. The conference hosted nearly 200 guests from 41 countries, including China, Armenia, Iceland, Cyprus, Russia and Turkey. The conference was the culmination point of the PULMAN project.

 

Judging by the comments, the conference was a true success. “A thoroughly inspiring conference," was one reaction, and "a landmark conference in the development of public libraries." Moreover the conference proved to be especially important in establishing links between EU participants and the great number of representatives from the accession and other countries. Erkki Liikanen, European Commissioner for the Information Society, saw the PULMAN policy conference as a key event for public libraries in Europe, setting the scene for exciting developments in the years to come.

 

The PULMAN policy conference

Chaired by PULMAN project coordinator and director of Antwerp public libraries Mr. Jan van Vaerenbergh, the conference was officially opened by His Excellency the Portuguese Minister for Culture, Mr. Pedro Roseta. Dr. Kyriaki Manesi as official representative of His Excellency the Greek Minister for Culture welcomed the participants and briefly outlined the situation of public libraries in Greece, the country that held the presidency of the European Commission at the time of the conference. Mrs. Zambujo, the Major of Oeiras welcomed the guests on behalf of the Municipality. Mr. Erkki Liikanen, European Commissioner for Enterprise and the Information Society, per video message impressed the vital role of public libraries and their local counterparts upon the participants.

 

The current state of digital service development in the cultural heritage sector and specifically in libraries across Europe was introduced by Jens Thorhauge and Tiiu Valm. Both speakers pointed out that the development of digital policies and practices is very uneven from country to country as is the case with traditional library services. The PULMAN project has from this perspective been a successful platform for exchanging knowledge and valuable experience on how to provide information to users with access to extended sources of information on business, education, leisure etc. However, there is an articulated need for concerted European and national efforts to pave the way for networking the libraries of Europe. Rob Davies, PULMAN project manager, outlined how many people the PULMAN project has reached and came to a total of well over 170.000!

 

The four workshops with the themes e-government, social and economic development, lifelong learning and cultural diversity formed the cornerstone of the conference. In each workshop three inspiring casestudies were presented. The casestudies represented an equal mix of geographical spreading, small and large budgets etc. The one common denominator was that all projects, be it Seamless UK or Learning Exchange from Slovenia, have made a substantial contribution to the realization of the information society and the role of public libraries in this society.

Across all workshops valuable lessons were learnt about the role of public libraries and their partners in the information society:


Public libraries are well placed to bridge the digital divide and to contribute to mutual learning;

 

Also public libraries are in a central position to work well with other parties at the local level to help create and provide access to cultural resources;

 

 

Or, as one of the assessors encouraged the audience:

 

The introduction from the European Commission on the road ahead for public libraries and memory institutions allowed the participants to start thinking about the opportunities that the 6th framework programme offers for further research and development.

 

The highlight of the conference was the issuing of the Oeiras Manifesto: The PULMAN agenda for e-Europe. The Manifesto was introduced by Chris Batt, Director of the Libraries and Information Society Team of Resource: the Council for Public Libraries, Museums and Archives. He summarized the conference by saying that public libraries should aim to be “a cocktail of the traditional and the new, a bag that contains the whole new world to which everyone has access, a forum for anyone to talk to anyone and an engine of democracy.”

 

Oeiras Manifesto

The PULMAN policy conference on behalf of all participants issued the Oeiras Manifesto: the PULMAN agenda for e-Europe. This Manifesto underlines the vital role of public libraries in meeting the objectives of the e-Europe action plan by accelerating their development as centers of access to digital resources and by developing services to meet the needs of all citizens in the information society. In short: the Oeiras Manifesto outlines to road to an e-Europe for all. The Manifesto states that the participants in the PULMAN conference agree that citizens will benefit substantially through coherent support for public library, archive and museum services at local, national and European level in four specific areas, that are the cornerstones of the information society: Democracy and Citizenship (e-government), Lifelong Learning, Economic and Social Development and Cultural Diversity. The Oeiras Manifesto will be disseminated widely through the PULMAN network of country coordinators and conference participants.

 

Or, in PULMAN terms: we call on the human network of librarians, museologists, archivists, information professionals and politicians to:

 

Judging by the many congratulations that the organizing team received, it can be concluded that the PULMAN conference and the project can feature in years to come as an inspiring story of success in the field of political achievements, cross cultural cooperation, cross domain innovation and human networks.

By Margo de Groot

EBLIDA, Netherlands

Email: pulman@nblc.nl  

http://www.eblida.org
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The PULMAN Conference: the programme

 

 

13 March 2003

13.00 – 14.00                  Registration with coffee and tea

 

14.00 – 14.05                  Welcome by PULMAN project team

Speaker: Jan van Vaerenbergh, PULMAN co-ordinator and conference chair, Director of Antwerp Public Libraries

 

14.05 – 14.15          Welcome by His Excellency the Portuguese Minister of Culture, Pedro Roseta

 

14.15 – 14.25          Developments in Greek public libraries, museums and archives by Dr Dafni Kiriaki Manesi, Special Secretary of Libraries, Arhives and Educational Television, representing His Excellency the Greek Minister of Education and Religious Affairs

 

14.25 – 14.30          Welcome by Her Excellency the Major of Oeiras Municipality Teresa Pais Zambujo

 

14.30 – 14.40          Delivering e-Europe at the local level by Erkki. Liikanen, European Commissioner for the Information Society (video presentation)

 

 

14.40 – 15.00          Library policies for the digital era

Jens Thorhauge, Director General of the Danish National Library Authority

 

15.00 – 15.20          Through the PULMAN glass: looking back at the future of public libraries, museums and archives

Tiiu Valm, Director General, National Library of Estonia

                   

15.20 – 15.30          PULMAN: the project results

Rob Davies, PULMAN project manager, partner in MDR Partners               

 

15.30 – 16.00          Break and going to the workshops

 

16.00 – 18.00                  Workshops

 

Workshop 1 Democracy and citizenship (e-government)

 

Chair:       Ana Maria Runkel, Director of Libraries and Archives Department, Lisbon Municipality, Portugal

Assessor: Deirdre Ellis King, Director Dublin City Library, Ireland

 

Case studies:

Seamless UK – Mary Rowlatt, Strategic Information Manager, Essex County Libraries, United Kingdom

Growing up in a library: team work leading to personal autonomy – Verena Tibljas, Manager, Rijeka City Library, Croatia

Information Gas Station – Jouni Juntumaa, project manager Helsinki City Library, Finland

 

Workshop 2 Economic and social development

 

Chair:Rolf Hapel, Director, Aarhus Public Libraries, Denmark

Assessor: Andreas Mittrowan, project manager, Bertelsmann Stiftung, Germany

 

Case studies:

Finfo – Lotte Duwe Nielsen, project manager, Aarhus Public Libraries, Denmark

BEASTS – Ellen Rhys, Director, Wales Digital College, UK

Informar – María Auxiliadora González Sánchez, project manager, Fundación German Sánchez Ruipérez, Spain

 

Workshop 3 Lifelong learning

 

Chair: Barbara Lison, Director Bremen Public Library, Germany

Assessor: Audrone Glosiene, Director of the Institute of library and Information Science at Vilnius University, Lithuania

 

Case studies:

Learning exchange Slovenia – Marijan Spoljar, Ljubljana Public Library, Slovenia

ABSIDE and EQUAL – Pier Giacomo Sola, President of AMITIE, Italy and Mr. David Fuegi, partner, MDR Partners

ECDL – Paulo Leităo, Director of the Municipal Library of Almada, Portugal

 

Workshop 4  Cultural diversity

 

Chair: Jasmina Ninkov, Director, Municipal Public Library M. Bojic, Serbia

Assessor: Costis Dallas, Chairman and Senior Researcher of Critical Publics SA, Greece

 

Case studies:

Digital Heritage The Netherlands – Janneke van Kersen, projectmanager Digital Heritage The Netherlands, The Netherlands

COINE – Nuria Ferran, Open Univeristy of Catalonia, Spain/United Kingdom

ACTIVATE – Norma McDermott, Director, The Library Council, Ireland

 

18.00 – 18.15          Group picture on the stairs outside Tagus Park

 

18.15 – 18.30          Transport with buses to the hotels

 

20.00                                Buses leave hotels for dinner

 

20.30 – 23.30          Dinner and launch of the PULMAN cultural cocktail designed by prime cocktail designer and flair tender Mr. Fernando Castellon from BarExpertise in France!

 

14 March 2003

9.00  – 10.00           Welcome with coffee and tea

 

10.00 – 11.30          Lessons learned

                                Assessors from the workshops

 

11.30 – 12.00          The road map for e-Europe: how to proceed form here

                Bernard Smith, Head Preservation and Enhancement of Cultural Heritage Unit, European Commission Research opportunities for local libraries, museums and archives Ian Pigott, principal administrator, Preservation and Enhancement of Cultural Heritage Unit, European Commission

 

12.00 – 12.30          Coffee and tea break

 

12.30 – 13.00          The Oeiras Manifesto: the PULMAN agenda for eEurope

Chris Batt, Director, Libraries & Information Society Team

Resource, The British Council for Public Libraries Museums and Archives

 

13.00 – 13.15          Closing remarks

Jan van Vaerenbergh, PULMAN co-ordinator and Director of Antwerp Public Libraries

 

13.15 – 14.30          Conference lunch

 

 

The PULMAN Conference Manifesto:

 

 

The Oeiras Manifesto

 

The PULMAN Agenda for e-Europe

Ministers, high-level policy makers and practitioners from 36 European countries (1), agreed the following priorities at the PULMAN policy conference in Oeiras, Portugal, 13-14 March 2003.

 

Sufficient funding and support at national and local level is required:

 

 

 

To achieve these goals, they must:

 

·         offer innovative quality services, harnessing digital technologies, that empower citizens to achieve their personal goals in a changing world and which contribute to a cohesive society and a successful knowledge-based economy in Europe.

 

 

The PULMAN conference agrees that citizens will benefit substantially through coherent support for public library, archive and museum services at local, national and European level in four specific areas.

 

Public libraries, working with archives and museums, should:

 

Democracy and citizenship

§         Foster a civil, democratic society by serving the needs of the whole community, provide open access to all cultures and knowledge and combat exclusion by offering people attractive and enjoyable spaces. The needs of special groups such as people with disabilities, teenagers, the elderly, the unemployed, and those living in rural areas should be targeted.

§         Support the take-up of services for e-government, e-health, e-commerce and e-learning by providing seamless, objective and user-friendly access, as well as training in the use of electronic resources.

 

Lifelong learning

 

 

Economic and social development

 

 

Cultural diversity

 

Reference documents (click on link):

 

·         Museums, Intangible Heritage and Globalisation. Shanghai Charter, ICOM (2002)

·         IFLA Glasgow Declaration on Libraries, Information Services and Intellectual Freedom (2002)

·         IFLA Internet Manifesto (2002)

·         NAPLE Statement on European Public Libraries in Development (2002)

·         EBLIDA statement on the role of libraries in lifelong learning (2001)

·         Lund Principles: e-Europe, creating cooperation for digitisation, DG Information Society (2001)

·         Council of Europe/EBLIDA Guidelines on Library Legislation and Policy in Europe (2000)

·         Council of Europe Recommendation on a European policy on access to archives (2000)

·         Copenhagen Declaration (1999)

·         Leuven Communiqué (1998)

·         Report on the Role of Libraries in the Modern World of the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education and the Media of the European Parliament (1998)

·         Museums and Cultural Diversity: Policy Statement, ICOM (1997)

IFLA/UNESCO Public Library Manifesto (1994)

 

 

 

Footnotes:

 

(1) The PULMAN network includes the EU member states, candidate states and neighbouring countries: Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia-Montenegro, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, UK.

 

 

 

 

(2) http://europa.eu.int/information_society/eeurope/index_en.htm

(3) http://www.pulmanweb.org/DGMs/DGMs.htm

(4) http://www.libecon.org

 

THE OEIRAS ACTION PLAN

 

The PULMAN conference calls upon Ministers, policy makers and practitioners at national and local level, within a specified timeframe to:

 

1.        Establish strategies, which utilise and develop the skills and infrastructure of Europe’s comprehensive physical network of public libraries, archives and museums in order to develop their full social, cultural and economic potential.

 

2.        Identify national and local funding priorities in support of key activities such as providing access to electronic resources and the Internet, digitisation, piloting new services, ensuring an adequate technical infrastructure, including broadband connectivity where feasible and the adoption of common standards.

 

3.        Consider the establishment of cross-domain agencies and inter-ministerial co-operation for co-ordinated policy making within the cultural heritage sector (public libraries, museums and archives).

 

4.        Develop effective partnerships between the local cultural heritage sector and other key economic and social sectors (e.g. education, employment, tourism, community organisations, etc) to facilitate re-engineering of local services, as well as cost-effective provision and management.

 

5.        Provide interactive access to content through state-of-the-art, multimedia digital resources documenting local history, literature, art, music and community interests, packaged where appropriate as learning resources.

 

6.        Support the development of centres of excellence to stimulate take-up of good practice, where necessary as a starting point for wider implementation of innovative services.

 

7.        Implement staff recruitment and training policies, including adequate salary and conditions, to provide the capacity and skills to deal effectively with user needs e.g. learning support and the use of Information Society Technologies.

 

8.        Monitor the changing needs of users as a part of evidence-based policy development and investment planning.

 

9.       Measure and evaluate services on a regular basis, especially those involving new technologies, and establish benchmark criteria to assess the impact and outcome of investment.

 

10.   Propose research and take-up activities at national or European level based, where appropriate, on partnerships with support organisations and private sector companies including those skilled in information access, content building and digitization.

 

Trends and forecasts

 

 

PULMAN: what we are finding

 

Public libraries have a number of advantages gained through delivering their core services including a detailed knowledge of user requirements, an unrivalled physical focus through the network of over 40,000 service points in Europe and their enormous existing usage amounting to some 190 million registered users in the 36 countries of the PULMAN Network.

 

The staff of these local institutions have demonstrated in many parts of Europe that the appropriate skills for the digital era can evolve and be developed from traditional ways of supporting access to information content. There is good progress to report from many European countries on the introduction of digital services, development of an educational role and learning support and allowing citizens to have hands-on access to IT.

 

But the picture gained through the work of PULMAN remains uneven. Continuing disparities exist in standards of service between countries. Both the institution and its services need faster change and re-engineering in response to changing user needs. Among the key areas to which this applies are: 

 

§         Development of national and local strategies, programmes and funding;

§         Cross domain policy making and partnerships;

§         Extent of digitisation of local content;

§         The ease and relative cost of technology integration.

 

The future agenda for local services will require attention to be paid to broader local services partnerships to deliver e-Europe involving public libraries working closely with

§         libraries, museums and archives at local/regional level;

§         schools, children, parents and carers;

§         the voluntary sector/NGOs/ community information and advice;

§         local businesses and economic agencies

(e.g. for cultural tourism).

 

The usability of ICT-based services also needs to be addressed if they are to become genuinely popular. This involves attention not only to methods of service delivery and user interfaces but also to the development and take-up of much simpler methods to help individuals and organisations to create digital content.

 

Among the vital contributions which can be made to the life of individual people by effective public libraries and local cultural institutions in contemporary Europe are a sense of localisation and personal engagement in an increasingly ‘globalised’ environment and an enhancement of the ability to link up the present and the past.

 

The agenda for digital public libraries emerging through PULMAN also seems to require attention being paid to the following:

 

§         How can we measure the impact of investment in local cultural services, for example by co-ordinating benchmarking, performance measurement and statistics?

§         How can we create a level playing field on which public libraries, museums and archives can meet and co-operate comfortably?

§         How can technologies be delivered to local institutions at an affordable cost and so that they are easy to ‘plug-in’, for example as web services? There is a need for a closer engagement with industry to ensure this happens.

 

On the last point, the technologies most needed by local institutions (viewed from early 2003) appear to include those which support:

§         highly-automated content creation and digitisation; 

§         personalisation of content creation and access;

§         multimedia content creation and delivery;

§         broadband exploitation;

§         seamless interactive access to a wide variety of local resources;

§         wider cross-sectoral interoperability of digital information at local plus national level.

 

Feedback from the PULMAN National Workshops

 

The 36 PULMAN national workshops held mainly in the Autumn of 2002 were attended by over 2500 people. In some cases, the event was organized independently but in others part of a larger national conference or similar meeting. Participation varied but usually included senor policy makers from ministries and agencies responsible for public libraries and senior professionals from local libraries, museums and archives services. Reports on all the national workshops are available on PULMANWeb.

The content and format of the workshops was somewhat flexible in response to national conditions, but consisted of a basic three-point agenda for discussion:

§         the PULMAN Guidelines

§         strategies for public libraries

§         strategies for co-operation between local Libraries, Museums and Archives

 

There was significant variation in the starting point for discussion. In a few countries, this was the first time there had been a well-attended debate on public libraries. In several more it was the first national discussion of co-operation between public libraries, museums and archives. In others, the event built upon existing perceptions and action plans. One or two looked forward to joint actions in fields such as cultural tourism.

 

A full and detailed analysis of the workshops will be produced by Eblida, but among the initial conclusions identified are:   

 

The Guidelines

§         The PULMAN Guidelines were widely praised for their applicability and usefulness. Some countries, mainly those currently outside the EU, found that the technical guidelines were future-oriented and provided a checklist for longer-term consideration, with funding the key problem to be overcome in their implementation. A current lack – in varying degrees - of trained staff, Internet connectivity and other technology are also important barriers to overcome.

§         The instances of good practice linked from the Guidelines were of especially wide interest and seen by some as essential resource and a ‘control list’ for the development of services in their country. There has been widespread interest in adding links to good practice from participants’ own countries following the workshops: this is visible in the Second Edition of the Guidelines.

§         A wide dissemination of the First Edition of the Guidelines was reported. Not only Web but also print and CD-Rom versions of the Guidelines have been produced and distributed in a majority of the 20+ languages into which they have been translated. National and regional media interest was evident at several of the workshops.  In various countries, special action was taken to ensure that the Guidelines and the resolutions of the workshops reached the appropriate decision makers and legislators.

§         The impact of the Guidelines has been relatively strong.  At least one country has decided to prepare a strategy for public libraries as a direct result of the stimulus provided by the Guidelines and the Workshop. Elsewhere, new projects are being devised as a result. One workshop participant described the DGMs as “The bible of contemporary librarianship”. Others have established working groups, discussion lists or set up special training sessions based on individual guideline topics. Elsewhere, the Guidelines are being incorporated into formal education programmes. In several cases, the workshops led to a decision to organize further cross-domain meetings to define models and action plans for co-operative services.

§         One example, illustrating the immediate effect of the Guidelines could be seen in the success story of one city library in the Baltic States.  Two days after the workshop, the library manager called the country co-ordinator to say that she had presented the Guidelines to local politicians immediately after the workshop and - as it coincided with the negotiations for the budgeting libraries’ activities - a very favourable decision was made to support the library’s acquisitions additionally this year.

 

Public library strategies

Public libraries have an important role in developing new and accessible networks after the dissolution of old style networks in the ‘transition’ countries’ but there is need for continued recognition of disparities in the ability to keep up with IT change. The Guidelines will be instrumental in shaping new services and improving existing services. But  basic problems, such as staffing, buildings and tecnical equipment  still need to be solved.

§         It is vital to create government programmes, ensuring government funds for wide introduction of ICT in public libraries and making efforts to provide libraries with cheaper access to the Internet.

§         Definition and knowledge-sharing are needed on projects that address lifelong learning. involving municipal educational departments.

§         Better knowledge of existing social exclusion policies may be needed among the professional community in some countries.

§         Public libraries should be at the centre of the e-government process. To accomplish this, they should raise awareness among government officials and the public. More knowledge of European experience in involvement with e-government programmes is needed.

§         There is a key role for public libraries to play involving schools, families and children.

§         For partnerships in support of economic and business sectors, public libraries need skilled and well-trained personnel and technological equipment and infrastructure.

§         User needs are paramount.

§         Realistic peformance evaluation is needed in this context.

§         Recruitment and retention of the right personnel, including those with ICT skills, to public libraries is critical and requires adjustment of their existing financial and social status in many countries.

 

Co-operation between Public Libraries, Museums and Archives

 

§         Integration of these services into electronic society still needs much more work in many countries.

§         There is wide agreement on the need for national digitisation strategies which have a strong local dimension.

§         There is a need to consider setting up local, regional and national policies in order to incentivise cooperation and co-ordinate development of local library, museum and archives services, starting at national level and taking account of emerging examples in some EU countries (e.g. Norway, UK).

§         There is a need for more knowledge on what constitutes good practice in local cooperation of this kind. The production of education packages may be a fruitful environment in which to start working on co-operation.

§         Training for co-operation is needed.

§         Much local library, museums and archive co-operation, where it exists, takes a ‘traditional’ form. There is a need to initiate joint projects using ICT e.g. by creating a national cross-domain forum or portal.

§         Local archives and museums are in many countries less well-equipped than public libraries.

 

The NAPLE report

 

The report on the Public Library in the Electronic World: a survey initiated by NAPLE  (National Authorities of Public Libraries in Europe) http://www.bs.dk/naple/survey.pdf and published by the Danish National Library Authority in 2002, has gathered a wealth of interesting information on the current situation of public libraries in Europe based on returned questionnaires from 21 countries.

 

The Public Libraries in the Information Society (PLIS) study from 1996 analysed the stage of IT-development in different countries, and found the picture very uneven with UK and the Nordic countries in the forefront of the development and southern Europe lagging behind.

 

Since then, tremendous changes have occurred in the public library sector with information technology remaining the driving force. People are being exposed to a range of new technological challenges and opportunities in the digital age, which are changing industrial production, service provision, markets, organisational structures, and professional roles in a fundamental way.

 

Among its findings the NAPLE study indicates that:

 

§         Compared to a few years ago, the development of the public library scene in Europe overall has been very positive. 

§         The public library and its possible contribution to society are recognized increasingly.

§         The last 10 years have been characterised by legislative action in many of the countries, especially in countries from the former ‘Soviet bloc’.

§         The public library system is – on the whole – a municipality-based system in terms of responsibility and funding.

§         A regional support structure can be part of the legislation and regulations in the individual country but it can also exist without formal legislation and regulation based on traditional and voluntary co-operation.

§         Many countries have a national public library authority as part of a Ministry or a more or less independent body referring to a ministry or acting on its behalf.

§         The involvement of central government in providing strategic leadership and vision varies greatly.

 

 

 

§         National digitisation policies and strategies are a necessary precondition for a full- scale integration of the public library system into the electronic world but many countries have not yet started this work.

§         The implementation of Internet access in public libraries is growing very fast.

 

§         A more important question is whether the users have free access, and which services the library system provides through the Internet, for example: catalogue access, requisition access, net guides and question and answering services.

§         The range and number of national Internet services such as portals, quality-assessed guides, homepages directed towards specific target groups etc. is an indicator of the national emphasis on public libraries, national support and co-operation.

 

 

§         The need for competency development and upgrading of librarians’ knowledge in the field of information technology in its widest sense cannot be overstressed,

 

Current data from the respondents to The Public Library in the Electronic World survey

 

The figures with an * indicate that the number consists of persons employed. The calculation is not based on full time equivalents. In both Iceland and Austria, there are many volunteers.

 

The NAPLE report makes a number of trend predictions for the coming 10 years:

§         From collection orientation to orientation towards access to electronic sources.

§         Reductions in budgets and staff.

§         Accountability will become a vital issue.

§         Focus on alternative forms of financing and income generation.

§         Focus shifting from collection to user.

§         From visitors to distance access to the library.

§         Electronic selection of materials.

§         From the OPAC to virtual catalogues and meta-catalogues and resource information retrieval systems.

§         From service to users to education of users.

 

By Rob Davies

MDR Partners

PULMAN Project Manager

Email: rob.davies@mdrpartners.com

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Public Libraries in Europe:

 

 

A statistical view

This brief overview is produced for the Pulman Policy Conference. Fuller information can be found on the LIBECON we b site www.Libecon.org or on the CDRom produced for the Conference.

 

The LIBECON project collects library statistics and makes them available via the web to policy makers, practitioners and researchers free of charge in a standardised format based on ISO2789 [the international standard for library statistics. Like PULMAN, LIBECON is funded by DGINFOS under FP5. Its users have access to standardised statistical data to make comparisons between countries or groups of countries for advocacy or for management purposes, including international benchmarking. LIBECON does not undertake primary surveys but takes national data, using the ISO2789 standard, checks the data for feasibility and follows up queries. If the data is incomplete, LIBECON seeks to agree a basis for grossing up the data so that it is complete for that country. If data is missing, LIBECON interpolates from known years. If a country has no data at all for a sector, an average derived from a group of comparable countries is interpolated. This interpolation process allows the big political numbers to be estimated, for example, total number of library employees in Europe [374,000 in 2000] or total registered readers [139 million]. This process ensures that the data is authoritative and internationally comparable. Policy makers and other stakeholders are working to reduce the limitations imposed by the current state of the art. Increasingly, we want impact measures [which would answer the question what difference did public libraries make to people’s lives] and we want to measure the extent of the new services, especially the electronic services which form an increasingly significant part of public libraries’ services and demonstrate their significance to the e-Europe, e-Learning and social inclusion agendas. In both these areas research and development is under way in Europe and elsewhere but t h e re are few data which are statistically safe for international comparison.

 

In the space available we can give some meaningful facts.

 

Importance of public libraries

Ta b le 1. [Data is for Europe – EU, Central and Eastern Euro p e and EFTA] shows that nearly half of all spending on libraries is on public libraries and that they employ nearly half the to ta l staff employed in libraries.

 

 

Actual spending on public libraries in 2000 was ¤ 6.486

billions and about 171,000 full time equivalent staff were

employed.

 

Expenditure per head of population looks like this:

The figures are cash. This data is also available on a countryby- country basis and with other regional summaries. For example, the latest available figure [1998] for the USA was € 21 and for Japan [1999] € 9.26.

 

 

How are public libraries organised and managed?

Public libraries are normally run by local government units, which we call library authorities. The size of library authorities in Europe is small. On average, each library authority serves a population of less than 9,000, employs just 3 public library staff and is responsible for 1.269 libraries. These numbers raise important policy issues. How are economies of scale to be achieved? How can public library staff receive continuing training and update their skills? What support mechanisms are appropriate for smallauthorities? What is the role of central or regional government bodies? How are high standards to be achieved? How is an agenda of modernisation best implemented? The following chart shows significant regional variations. The range is from 2,031 in the Slovak Republic to more than 286,000 in the UK.

 

What do public libraries achieve with the money?

 

We have referred to the difficulty in measuring outcomes, but there is no shortage of data on outputs. For a start, there were about 73,900 public library buildings in Europe in 2000, one building for each 6,700 population. These service points act as community focal points and at tract users. In 2000 there we re about 119 million registered users [more than 24% of the entire population] who borrowed 2.3 billion [thousand million] items [more than 4.6 items/head] and made 2.05 billion physical visits to libraries [more than 4 per head]. As ever, there are large variations between countries and regions and those who have time should look at the data in more depth. Public libraries continue to adopt ICT as rapidly as their circumstances allow. By 2000, there were 132,000 workstations for public use in public libraries in Europe of which 68,000 were connected to the internet. Both numbers are increasing very rapidly, as the chart shows. Regional disparities were very large up to the year 2000, and will probably remain large. Estimates of percentages of catalogue records automated remain low and the numbers are increasing only slowly.

 

 

What are the major trends?

 

At pan-European level, the percentage of registered users is stable. Numbers of loans and visits are declining slightly, perhaps mirroring increasing investment in ICT, which allows remote use of services. Regrettably there are no reliable figures at European level reflecting “virtual” use of public libraries, though such use is known to be increasing rapidly.

 

 

Should we invest more in public libraries?


As ever, it is important always to take into account local [national] circumstances when deciding whether to invest and what to invest in. Common sense would suppose that if you spend more money on public libraries, you get more and better outputs [and outcomes, if we could measure them]. The LIBECON data seems to support this view. Given the very marked differences in levels of spending between countries and regions, there is a strong case for more spending in many countries. The statistical case can be summarised briefly. We were looking for a statistical relationship between spending and outputs. We regard the figures we have for visits, loan transactions and registered members as good and the activities or outputs described as significant and important in the co n text of public libra r i e s’ objectives and we correlated these to spending. On spending we took the LIBECON data for spending per head and expressed this as a percentage of the World Bank’s gross national income figure for each country. We then looked to find a correlation by calculating the correlation coefficients. 3 A selection of the results are shown on the next page. These results are taken from submissions from a finite number of countries. They are influenced by a number of external factors and are reliant on the quality of data provided. Therefore conclusions can only be drawn on the general trends that emerge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conclusion

Statistics cannot answer every question and they are never

as up to date as we would like. But LIBECON does begin to allow us to ask and answer certain questions and to begin to benchmark public libraries inte r n a t i o n a l ly. If the right questions are asked by the right people and the lessons are learned, LIBECON provides a strong contribution to the case for developing and improving Europe’s libraries. factors and are reliant on the quality of data provided. Therefore conclusions can only be drawn on the general trends that emerge.

 

David Fuegi, MDR Partners
david.fuegi@mdrpartners.com
Martin Jennings, Institute for Public Finance
martin.jennings@ipf.co.uk

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For any questions concerning the
PULMAN project, please contact:

 

PULMAN Network Coordinator

Jan van Vaerenbergh, Antwerp City Library

jan.vanvaerenbergh@cs.antwerpen.be

 

PULMAN Network Project Manager
Rob Davies
rob.davies@mdrpartners.com

 

PULMAN Network Administrator
Mary Gianoli 
mary.gianoli@mdrpartners.com

 

PULMAN Express Newsletter Editor

Veria Central Public Library, Greece

dimproto@libver.gr

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