The UK’s beleaguered public libraries have been let down by years of indecision and delays over how to spend millions of pounds in funding earmarked for a nationwide website.
This was among damning criticisms voiced on Saturday by campaigners who have lost patience with the government, the British Library and Arts Council England (ACE) over their longstanding failure to develop a nationwide scheme. The “Single Digital Presence” (SDP) – renamed LibraryOn – was meant to bring together public libraries in one website to enable the public to access collections across the country.
The problem has been that there are 150 library authorities in England alone, each with their own technology and management systems. Government funds have been allocated in various tranches to ACE and the British Library to make it happen.
Tim Coates, a libraries campaigner and former head of bookseller Waterstones, told the Observer: “We’re now 10 years later and – after several reviews and studies and about £6m – they have singularly failed even to decide what it is they ought to do.
“Their obsession with consultation with ‘the sector’ has meant they have failed to grasp what people want and will use – which, simply, is easy access to the extensive library collections across the country. It should be like the website for John Lewis – that, wherever you are, it doesn’t depend on their individual shops.”
The provision of a national digital resource for libraries was among clear recommendations in William Sieghart’s 2014 Independent Library Report for England, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
One eminent arts figure, who declined to be named, said: “It’s appalling. The government’s done nothing since that report. Libraries have been left behind in the 1970s. The digital revolution hasn’t really impacted on them. They are stuck behind their own local authority IT system. The point of the digital presence would be to empower them.”
Nick Poole, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, said that up to 15% of libraries had closed and another 15% had been handed to volunteers to run. “We look at the way other nations are investing in their children and their futures through libraries and wonder what the hell we’re doing.”
He added that the need for a digital presence within the library sector had been floating around for two decades, but that its delay was partly due to a fear that it would lead to further closures of library buildings: “We want to see really strong face-to-face libraries supported and extended by a really strong digital scheme.”
The British Library said that it was working towards unifying the digital offering of different library authorities. It said that LibraryOn had received about £3.8m funding since 2018, when the British Library took over management of the initiative.
