Struggle to ensure equal library rights for all;

A challenge to librarians

 

 

Shiraz Durrani[1]

 

Talk at the "fair library" seminar organised by BiS

Gothenberg Book and Library Fair, 23 - 26 Sept 2004

http://www.bok-bibliotek.se/

 

 

 

 

Contents

Introduction. 2

PART 1:  Public libraries and globalisation. 3

Librarians and their societies. 3

Globalisation and effects on libraries. 4

Democracy deficit in libraries. 8

Libraries and society in Britain. 9

Creating a people-orientated library service. 11

PART 2:  Public libraries in England. 12

PART 3:  The Merton Library approach. 15

Lavender Sure Start – Children’s Corners. 20

Lending Time project 20

Welcome to your library. 21

Commonside Open Learning Centre. 21

Youth projects. 21

Merton Sense leads the way. 22

Quality Leaders Project – Youth. 25

Services to older people. 27

Merton Library Drama Group. 27

Laptops@home. 28

Creative communities@ Pollards Hill & Mitcham Libraries. 29

Conclusion. 31

References. 32

 

 

Introduction

I have made a small, but important, change in the title of my talk.  The conference programme gives the title as “The struggle to ensure…”  The “small” change I have made is to remove the word “the”, thereby placing an enormous burden on all of you.  You are no longer expected just to sit and listen to what I’m saying:  you have to become active participants in the struggle to ensure equal library rights.  But I expect all of you are active anyway, as otherwise you would not be here today.

 

An important aspect of life in a rapidly globalizing world is to ensure people have the information that will enable them to understand the global reality and make informed decisions that affect their lives.  This right is under challenge and is being curtailed as part of USA and UK’s war on “terrorism”.  A very simple example of what is really happening to the information world is this:  USA has officially admitted that 1,000 US soldiers have died in Iraq as part of their meaningless search for weapons of mass destruction.  What we do not get is the figure of Iraqis killed by these forces of official global terrorists.  Independent estimates indicate that 10,000 – 12,000 Iraqi’s have been killed, with thousands injured and thousands other facing the prospect of future illnesses and death as the use of all sorts of dangerous and illegal weapons, such as depleted uranium (DU)  – not to mention death from economic disruption and looting of the country. Yet this information is hidden and few people know about it.  It is the job of librarians to dig out and disseminate such information, yet few do this in practice. 

 

I will be challenged by some librarians that it is not the job of librarians to get involved in politics. The answer is simple: it is the duty of library and information workers to make sure that the people we serve get information such as the above.  Otherwise we are part of the conspiracy that seeks to deny people the information they need.  It is not our job to decide what people should believe in or should do – our job is to ensure that information from all sides and aspects of a given situation is freely available to all.  If we do not accept this proposition, then perhaps we are in the wrong profession.

 

PART 1:  Public libraries and globalisation

Librarians and their societies

 

The first, obvious, question we should consider is “what are libraries and information all about?” In an attempt to seek this answer, I would like to take an experience from Kenya.  A library attendant lived in an area that produces coffee.  When he went home for holidays one year, he was asked by a number of peasants a simple question:  “You work in a University library; you have information from the whole world around you.  We want you to answer a simple question for us:  we work from dawn to dusk growing coffee, right from tending little shoots, to weeding, to harvesting, to drying coffee beans, day after day, month after month, year after year.  We hear that our coffee sells for thousands of pounds in London, yet we do not earn enough from our labour to buy our own coffee in local shops let alone feed and clothe our families.  You tell us why not, you who have all the information at your finger tips, you tell us what happens to our coffee money?” 

 

It was not as if the University library did not have information about coffee.  It had one of the best agricultural libraries in Eastern Africa.  The library’s collection on coffee and other cash crops was rated world class, with researchers from all over the world queuing to find employment at this well resourced Faculty.  Yet the library was not equipped to answer these simple economic-political questions from local peasants.

 

Now the questions asked by the peasants are fundamental to the work of librarians.  The local library did have adequate resources to meet the needs of its users.  It is just that its services were not aimed at peasants and workers.  More important, the information that was available was depoliticised.  It took the agricultural world around it as a reality that could not be challenged.  It failed to see the difference between the natural world in which the coffee was grown and the social world, which had created social relations, and which decided on who owned the land, how labour was remunerated and where the profits went.  Nor was it considered necessary to understand and explain that reality, to examine its history and, perhaps, to see the need to change that unjust reality – as the Kenyan peasants were demanding.

 

Another example, which seeks the answer to the question “what are libraries and information for,” is taken from Britain.  In 1972, librarians and staff at the Institute of Race Relations found themselves in a similar situation as that of the Kenyan library attendant.  The Institute of Race Relations (IRR), established in 1950s, was funded by the corporations that profited from the exploitation of Africa and Asia’s resources and aimed at “understanding how to preserve colonial economic relationships”[2].   Kundnani (2004) records its transformation:

 

Caught in the revolutionary politics in Britain and abroad, the IRR was transformed in 1972 into the first anti-racist and anti-imperialist ‘think tank’ in Britain, after a rebellion by the staff.  It  was a unique victory in the war of knowledge, capturing for the black and Third World liberation movements of the day the resources of a key institution of neo-colonialism, including the old house-journal Race, which two years later was renamed Race and Class.

 

A key part in this liberation of IRR was played by a librarian, A. Sivanandan a political activist, writer, founding editor of Race & Class [3] and the director of the Institute of Race Relations.  His contribution to British librarianship and radical politics in Britain has been vastly underplayed by the establishment – and the library “profession”.  His example needs to be taken up as a model of what librarians should be doing. This is particularly relevant at a time when the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) in Britain is planning to close down its library to the public. Those who have decided to close the CRE library need to learn the lessons that Sivanandan and his colleagues have taught. [4]

 

Kundnani (2004) poses important questions which librarians need to answer urgently:

 

Today, there is a new spirit of questioning and rebellion afoot in the world. Scholarship that is not only on the people but for the people is once more an urgent demand. And with academia drawn increasingly into the nexus of commerce and state-sponsored 'evaluation' of policy, the questions that Race & Class first asked thirty years ago remain valid today: 'What good is your knowledge to us? Do you in your analyses of our social realities tell us what we can do to transform them? Does your apprehension of our reality speak to our experience? Do you convey it in a language that we can understand? If you do none of these things, should we not only reject your "knowledge" but, in the interests of our own liberation, consider you a friend to our enemies and a danger to our people?'

 

Few librarians in Britain have answered these questions.

 

Globalisation and effects on libraries

The key issue then is to decide what the social role of librarians is.  Should they take the social, economic and political situation they find themselves in as “given” without understanding why and how we arrived at this situation?  Is it their role to dig deeper into “facts” that are given to them by their social environment?   Is it appropriate to see the role of librarians in the same light in which Marx saw the role of philosophers:  “The philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways.  What matters is changing it."[5]

 

But before we consider the question of librarians trying to change the world, we need to question whether they even interpret their worlds.  A large number of professional libraries remain unconnected to the social and political reality around them.  Their model of a “global library” is much like McDonald restaurant outlets which serve the same product in every part of the world.  While this approach may be a useful one in ensuring a standard level of service, and a useful model for maximising profits for the McDonald chain, it is disastrous for libraries if they want to root themselves in their local communities.

 

Librarians trained to run such global libraries take professional pride in being “neutral” in the social divide all around them.  They thus become increasingly isolated from the majority of people in their local communities.  Forces of corporate globalisation then push them even further from their communities by offering to save staff time and mental effort by supplying pre-packaged “best sellers”, guaranteed to meet the wants of the 30%[6] of the population – and to boost the profit margins of transnational publishers and booksellers.  The success of their libraries is then judged by the number of such best sellers they manage to loan out.  No critical questions are asked or answered here:  what is a library all about?  What is its social role?   Who has the power to make key decisions, and on whose behalf are decisions made?

 

The “global library” then is a standard library service that can be located in any geographical, any social or political situation, in any historical period and still expect to function normally as a “library”.  The global librarians who run these global libraries take pride in their non-political stand, in their “neutrality” in the social struggles going on all around them.  They claim to be outside social struggles taking place in their societies, somehow uplifted to a loftier position by their “professional” training.  Their class position in their societies isolates them from the struggles of working people whose basic needs for information is ignored by their libraries.

 

Corporate globalisation can be described as the “process enabling financial and investment markets to operate internationally, largely as a result of deregulation and improved communications” (Collins).  I do not intend here to go into details of what globalisation is and how it affects libraries, as this has been dealt with adequately in a number of sources. [7]  However, a few points need to be made:

 

The first point that needs to be made is that globalisation is an aspect of capitalism in its imperialist phase.  This is often forgotten or ignored because it is so obvious or because some find it in the interest hide it.  It does not lead to clarity of thought if we gloss over the fact of the context of capitalism running the shown in every aspect of our lives, whether it is waging war on Iraqi people, or handing over parts of utilities, railways and other social assets to private companies for profit.  The worst effects of corporate globalisation have to date been felt in the so-called developing world.  But the working people in the industrialised countries are increasing being affected as public institutions are being privatised, industries are rushing off to places where exploitation of cheaper labour boosts profit margins and new technologies are used, not to improve living and leisure standards of working people, but again to boost corporate profits. 

 

These changes have had an impact on libraries too.  Not only are new technologies making it possible to rationalise tasks and work practices, but it makes it necessary to change at a faster rate as technological progress is changing the world around them.  At the same time, many traditional library tasks are increasing being handed over to private companies, rather than being done in-house.  As the whole local authority sector is redefined to become facilitators of service rather than direct providers, significant changes are on the way.  Other areas of local authority work are also changing.  For example, household waste collection is no longer done by local staff; schools and education are being removed from local authority control.  It is inconceivable that libraries will continue existing as they now are for very long. 

 

I am not arguing that all changes associated with globalisation are necessarily bad.  But I would like to see more librarians in Britain adopting the 10 point plan, proposed by Mark Rosenzweig, supporting “democratic globalism” as opposed to corporate globalisation:

We  shall oppose corporate globalization which, despite its claims, reinforces existing social, economic, cultural inequalities, and insist on a democratic globalism and internationalism which respects and cultivates cultural plurality,  which recognizes the sovereignty of peoples, which acknowledges the obligations of society to the individual and communities, and  which prioritizes human values and needs over profits.[8]

Other important changes coming our way are the rules courtesy of the World Trade Organisation, especially in the context of TRIPS (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights).    IFLA has expressed its concerns over TRIPS in a number of areas such as “not for profit libraries”, intellectual property and cultural diversity.    Specific threats from these are mentioned by IFLA:

 

The GATS Agreement has the potential to open up all aspects of a national economy to foreign competition including public sector services such as libraries. Corporations can be set up in any Member State and compete against public services. In such instances, the foreign corporation can challenge government support for public sector service and could claim national treatment; i.e. the same level of subsidy received from the government by the public sector agency.[9]

 

Hunt (2001) shows the future of public libraries under WTO rules:

Public libraries are in the public domain, supported by public taxes. Imagine an information services company entering a market and demanding the same subsidies and tax support that public libraries get. It would be entitled to do so under national treatment rules, providing it can prove itself to be the same kind of operation. The government's most likely response would be to cut back on or eliminate public funding to libraries so as to avoid similar claims in the future. Libraries could find themselves forced to generate income to survive. The worst case scenario is that, without public funding, libraries could disappear altogether. The public would then be required to buy their information from information companies or from libraries, if libraries could stay afloat by charging for their services. Either way, the public would find itself paying for information that was once in the public domain.

 

Iverson (1998/99) explains how the politics of globalisation affects libraries and their local communities.  The political role of librarians is clear:

As our global society becomes increasingly based on the commodity of information, power becomes increasingly focused and managed by those with access to information. Those without such access remain marginalized. Librarians have been trained in the management of information. Therefore, I see their role as inherently political. Unfortunately, all too often librarians have rejected the political nature of the work they do. In these times of increased commodification of information librarians have sought to play leading roles in the new "information society." In order to do so, they have uncritically accepted the ideals of professionalization and have embraced the principles of objectivity and neutrality.

Librarians tend to see themselves as neutral service providers, rejecting any stated political stance, and certainly their training encourages this position. As Henry Blanke maintains: "librarianship's reluctance to define its values in political terms and to cultivate a sense of social responsibility may allow it to drift into an uncritical accommodation with society's dominant political and economic powers." (Blanke, p.39 [10])

While librarians are trained to maintain an objective or neutral stance they are also expected to make decisions regarding "good" and "bad" materials. Librarians are often seen as "experts" in determining the literature and other resources that their clientele needs. Unfortunately, they do not often recognize the inherent bias at work in making these decisions. Librarians generally regard the selection of materials as apolitical.

Faced with a situation where libraries are blind walking into extinction, it is important that those of us with conviction and commitment stand up for a new role of libraries in society – and actively practice this new role.  In the world ruled by corporate globalisation, it is too easy to drift along with the tide of “neutral” librarianship and do nothing to make libraries play a central role in liberating people, their cultures, and their economies from the privatised future that globalisation has planned for them.  A new approach in which real democracy and transparency flourishes is essential.

Democracy deficit in libraries

Thus the myth of a “neutral” librarian needs to be exploded.  There is no way that librarians are or can be neutral in the social struggles of their societies.  Every decision they make – how much to spend on books, which books to buy, what staff to appoint, how to manage the service – is a reflection of their class position and their world outlook, however much they deny this.  The power they have been given in running their libraries is supposed to be used to meet the needs of the majority of the local people.  But there is a basic lack of democracy in the world of libraries, which has created a type of library managers who cannot be directly challenged by the people whose needs the librarians are expected to serve.   

What librarians do – and don’t do - is not merely an academic question.  It affects our understanding of our natural and social environment, which, taken in its totality, affects our world outlook, affects what we think and what we do.  It influences the minds of the young generation and becomes the prevailing outlook of the adult world of tomorrow. 

 

Manipulation of information, whether conscious or unconscious, is an important matter, not only in local life, but in international relations as well.  Librarians can become tools in the hands of those seeking to manipulate whole populations to think along their lines – or stand firm to support the democratic rights of the people manipulated.  There is no third way here.

 

Let us take a few examples of how incorrect information affects our understanding of our societies and our lives, as this has a direct effect on the work of librarians.  Again, the first example comes from my “education” in Kenya.  I was taught in school that the route to India was “discovered” by a Portuguese adventurer called Vasco da Gama.  This was a “truth” recorded in print in history books and reinforced by respected teachers, so could not be challenged.  Moreover, quoting such “fact” got you top marks in exams, so it was THE truth.  But the reality, which I came to know much later, is that there had been trade between East Africa and India centuries before Vasco da Gama was even born.  In fact, it was a Mombasa-based Gujarati pilot called Canani who guided Vasco da Gama's ships from Mombasa to India. The colonial education gave me the incorrect information that it was Vasco da Gama who discovered the route, thus reinforcing the impression given me by my colonial education about the superiority of Europeans.  The local libraries I used – public, school, and the colonial British Council – all reinforced this incorrect information which, no doubt, contributed to creating an inferiority feeling in me and other Kenyans.  This obviously affects people’s self worth and ability to reach higher levels of achievement.

 

Another example of manipulation of information can be given. The C.I.A. consistently used information manipulation as a weapon of cold war.  Zuckerman (2000) shows how the ending of film versions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1948 were altered by the C.I.A. to discredit communism.  But the damage done by misinformation can be even more serious.  Moore (1997) says in his review of Walt’s book:[11]

 

Walt writes about how misperceptions and a lack of solid information can lead to overreaction, paranoia, and war when revolutionary states and outside states face one another across the Gulf of Ambiguity.

 

Recent events have shown how misinformation can be used to generate popular support for illegal and unjust wars, for example when USA and Britain invaded Iraq, killing thousands of people in the quest for non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” – in reality, seeking to gain easy access to cheap oil and in pursuit of other political and economic gains.

 

If librarians are involved in the business of information, then surely they have social responsibility to ensure that people get correct information.  It is a matter of ethics that they challenge misinformation, particularly when this is used by a small, powerful clique to wage wars and kill people on false pretexts.  But our “professional” librarians are too “neutral” – or too scared - to challenge the hand that feeds them.  At the very least, they need to make alternate views and opinions as freely available as they do the views of the ruling classes.  But this is not what the “globised librarian” is trained to do.

 

Two aspects of the job of a librarian can be seen to be to collect and then to disseminate information, in a relevant form and language, to all those who need the information.  This gives librarians tremendous power as it is they who decide what material to acquire and how and when to disseminate it.  The easy availability of information on the Internet is fast changing their monopolistic role as it democratises the flow of information. 

 

Libraries and society in Britain

There is usually a time gap between the emergence of a new social reality and that reality being accepted in people’s consciousness.  In the case of Britain, changes after the Second World War resulted in the loss of the economic power of Britain, a fact reflected in the loss of the British Empire.  However, at a larger social level, the British society has not fully absorbed this fundamental loss of economic and thus political power.  The fact that Britain officially honours its citizens with medals that hark back to days of colonial glory with awarding such anachronisms as “Order of the British Empire” and “Members of British Empire” indicates that over 50 years after the “loss” of the Empire such dreams of colonial might have not died.  Lessons and reality of history are shut out from social consciousness by denying the reality of a new world where Britain is no longer the superpower ruling the world, where China is flexing its muscles to become the most powerful nation in the world. Yet collections in most public libraries have very little material from China – a fact reflected in the lack of awareness about that part of the world in people as a whole.

 

In a society that has sought to shut out the reality of a new globalised world, it is not surprising that its libraries have shut themselves in a dream world of presumed superiority and “professional” might.  The fact that the library world has not come to grips with changes in British society is a reflection of the British society as a whole not coming to grips its new reality.  Jacques (2004) mentions how Britain has coped with the loss of the Empire: 

For well over 200 years, Britain was the centre of a huge empire, which at its peak covered a quarter of the world's land surface. Overseas expansion and the ability to command the seas, to conquer other peoples and then to run colonies require a sophisticated knowledge of the world, an officer class that is well-versed in the ways of the world, newspapers that can inform, universities that can train, a culture that can sustain.

The hub of an empire has to be a cosmopolitan place. But as the empire contracted, as Britain's role in the world diminished - at extraordinary speed, it must be said - the need for such knowledge and capacity declined. The great institutions of empire - Foreign Office, Navy, Indian civil service and the rest - either no longer exist or are a shadow of what they were. All we are left with is the memory, some of the hubris, the pomp without the circumstance.

Martin examines the effects of the loss of Empire on British consciousness and society – changes that are reflected in the library world too:

 

We still like to consider ourselves a global player, but in reality we are not: our pretensions are now more like pastiche, substance has been replaced by vacuity, grandeur has given way to self-absorption, historical destiny to an obsession with celebrity. Post-imperial Britain has become deeply parochial - yet we remain almost utterly oblivious of the fact (the liberal elite included).

 

The rise of globalisation has not been accompanied by a new cosmopolitanism. Britain is a more parochial and provincial place than it used to be. It would be reasonable to expect the opposite to be the case. How do we account for this?  One explanation is specifically British.

 

But the reasons for our provincialism are not only national. Perhaps the era of globalisation has itself engendered a more general kind of retreat from the world into the land of the familiar. The cold war was a world that we knew, that made sense - countries fitted into a pattern, we knew which side they were on, we were partisan about them, the historical narratives of left and right provided us with a sense of order and objective. The left, for its part, had a global mission: it was intimately interested in the world, it was cosmopolitan.

But the old order has been superseded by a world that is inchoate and chaotic, whose rules we no longer know, whose future seems complex and indeterminate. So we retreat into ourselves, we turn our backs on the unfamiliar, we become self-absorbed; parochialism dominates our psyche. Not only us but, one suspects, many other countries, not just in Europe - though, given its history, Europe especially. Parochialism, at least for now, is the flipside of globalisation.

Creating a people-orientated library service

There is an urgent need to develop a library service that helps to create a new consciousness among people about their real role in society and also about the position of their country in the context of the wider world.  Only on such wider awareness can a liberated library service be built.

 

If there is going to be a true liberated library service, it is necessary that there is a clear understanding of social forces within which a particular library service operates.  Librarians face a number of challenges today.  Let us look at some of them:

 

The first need is for all librarians to investigate our society and our communities.  Mao’s recommendation at a political level is equally valid in the information field: “no investigation, no right to speak”.  It is important to understand working people’s lives and struggles, be one of them, and then seek ways of creating a relevant library service.

 

In all societies with class divisions and class struggles, library services tend to be a service for elite by elite, providing a service to the dominating classes and their allies only.  In situations like these, the process of liberating the library service for those previously excluded is the key role of library workers and professionals. The challenge is to develop a service that is open to all irrespective of class, race, gender, ability, age, sexual orientation, political beliefs, etc.  The service needs to be an inclusive one which reaches out to all who are currently excluded.  Yet this task is not easy.  The very language of this struggle has been removed from the “mainstream” by Government action.  Thus class differences are not mentioned in Government reports and policies; racism is hidden under the bland term “social exclusion” thereby not only removing the reality of racism from public mention, but resistance to it is also disguised as criminal acts or as “terrorism”.  No society can be serious about addressing social oppression and economic exploitation when it chooses not to admit the very existence of such.

 

If librarians are to build truly liberated libraries, they will need to stop operating in isolation from the progressive forces that are already struggling for liberation.  It is thus important that we develop creative partnerships with progressive forces, such as trade unions, workers’ social, economic and political organisations, youth groups etc.  Alliances also need to be made with all those struggling against all forms of social oppression.

 

But before librarians reach that stage, they need to liberate their minds from the norms of a class-divided society, its social, cultural and political norms. Its information systems and education provides us with a one-sided view of life.  We will need to see the whole picture and not just the aspects we are shown.  In the library context, we will need to free ourselves from the commandments taught at traditional library schools.  We will need to learn not to be “neutral” but, instead, take sides on behalf of those previously excluded in everything we do in order to build an “equal” library service.

 

As is the case in all social revolutions, there are no specific guide books on how to create a liberated, “open” library service.  It is only the actual practice of learning from people that will provide a solution that is relevant to our particular social situation and will help us build libraries without walls. 

 

But just learning from people is not enough.  The next, and perhaps the most difficult, step is to turn our ideas into action.  This is best done by empowering the excluded so that is they who decide how our resources are to be used and how our energies are spent. People themselves will then be the best judges of our success or failure.  It is in putting these ideas into practice that a people-orientated, “open to all” service can be built.

 

PART 2:  Public libraries in England

It is not proposed to go over the developments in recent years in the British library world.  Some earlier developments were covered in Durrani (2002 and 2004).  It is proposed here to take an overall view of recent developments.

The Secretary of State, Tessa Jowell, poses a number of challenges to the profession:

 

This is a critical time for the future of public library services.  Although for over 150 years, libraries have given pleasure and provided opportunities to learn, it is now time to ensure that libraries are relevant and inviting to future generations… the challenge is to generate new users… it is important to learn lessons about why people do not use libraries – only one third do, so how do libraries attract the other two thirds? [12]

 

The Secretary of State made it clear that she wants change in public libraries.  She explained what needs to happen so that libraries “become, once again, central points in local communities”:

 

But they can only take back this role if they consult local people, and put them in the driving seat.  Not just once, but as a continuous dialogue.[13]

 

This challenge, however, is not reflected in the initiatives that the Department of Media, Culture and Sport has taken, primarily through the The Framework for Future, [14] (F4F) programme.   The key development since the publication of F4F has been a programme to put the key points of the Framework into practice, led by the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). MLA explains what the Framework is all about:

Framework for the Future, published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in February 2003, is the Government’s ten-year vision for public libraries – how libraries can best serve their communities in the 21st century. It aims to promote public libraries, give them improved visibility, and to set out why libraries matter.

Framework for the Future identified three key areas for development.

Books, Reading and Learning

Knowledge, skills and information are at the heart of economic and social life. Libraries can provide access to virtually all books ever published and much more. In an informal, supportive and stimulating environment, libraries can encourage reading and provide access to learning for everyone.

Digital Citizenship