Funding and responsibility: a brief address to librarians in WA
In my capacity as Chairman of the Library Board of Western Australia, I spoke last night at the ceremony to award the 2009 Sharr Medal – a presentation to recognise “an individual who has just completed their final year of a library and information degree or diploma – or is in their first year of employment – and who exhibits the most potential to have a positive impact on the LIS profession” (ALIAWest). Here is what I said:
Address on the occasion of the award of the 2009 FA Sharr Medal
Matthew Allen, Chairman of the Library Board of Western Australia
It is an honour to be here tonight to give a brief oration as part of the 2009 FA Sharr Medal presentation. I speak both as Chairman of the Library Board of Western Australia and as one of the countless people whose everyday lives are enriched by the presence in our society of ‘the library’, be that a building, a service, or perhaps more importantly, a deeply held cultural idea of improvement through knowledge.
My brief this evening is to speak about an important contemporary issue relating to the delivery of library and information services. Given recent events, there is nothing more important within Western Australia for libraries at the moment than the matter of money. Funding: or, more precisely, the provision, by the government, of sufficient funds that an effective, engaging and expanding library service can be provided to the people of Western Australia, both at a local level and more generally for the state.
Funding for libraries, as I have commented elsewhere, can be a challenging business for state and local governments. Libraries are successful community services, much loved and valued, thanks mainly to the hard-working professionals who run them and work in them. Libraries, on the whole, involve a modest investment from the public purse, when compared to the rich returns they generate for the common wealth of social inclusion, learning, and community development. So they often do not attract the kind of attention that we see devoted to health, education and so on: these areas of public administration often seem beset by crises and are more high profile in their demands for improved funding. Libraries I think are the quiet achievers: sometimes being quietly successful can be its own challenge.
It is also the case that all public expenditure in WA in recent years has been tightly constrained: measured and trimmed as Manning Clark might have said. Our public expenditure is necessarily at the whim of market forces, in these days of hypercapitalism: if the banks sneeze, and the world catches pneumonia, then libraries too will find that sneeze to be an ill-wind. As everyone in the public service knows, over the past two years several cutbacks and efficiency measures have made life difficult but have – I hope – improved the prognosis for the patient.
As I am sure many of you know now, the budget for 2010-2011 and beyond has been delivered in Western Australia. This year has been rather more productive financially for libraries in this state than previous years: the valuable information services libraries provide have been recognised and supported. The Minister of Culture and the Arts has been a successful advocate on our behalf – aided by excellent media coverage in the West Australian, no doubt. Funding for local library materials, administered by the State Library, has increased; there has been a modest increase for the State Library directly; and we have secured long-term and enhanced funding for the tremendous work of the Better Beginnings early literacy program.
Some of these budget improvements have not quite been as much as we might have liked but, on the whole, I think we can be well satisfied with them. They certainly address critical challenges that we face in public and state library services in Western Australia. If they are maintained and, more importantly, increased in coming years to meet the needs of WA’s growing population, then I think 2010 can be set down as a year to remember in the provision of public funds for libraries. For this, we need to recognise the efforts of everyone involved – the State Librarian Margaret Allen and her colleagues; the Department of Culture and the Arts, led by Allanah Lucas; the Minister John Day and his staff; and of course all those who, in one way or another, raised their voices of concern to ensure library funding was seen as a front-page issue.
However, we cannot now sit back and think the job is done; or simply congratulate ourselves on this financial support. Increased funding brings with it responsibilities and challenges, and there are two that I want to highlight this evening. The first responsibility for the public library system in Western Australia is to continue with the progress made so far on structural reform, a process commenced in 2008 with the release of the Implementation Plan for the Structural Reform of Public Library Services in Western Australia. It is important that we collectively and individually think about how we deliver library and information services, what those services might be, for whom, in what places and by what means; and we need to think about how the effectiveness of services assessed and action taken to improve based on assessment. In response to increased funds, and to ensure funding is maintained and increased, we must continue to demonstrate the value of libraries and what they do. But the library system is what generates this value – we are in charge or and make that value, our return to the community on the investment of its funds: we must do it as well as we can, and by making changes.
To be clear: the world of the contemporary library, especially at the local level, is not the same as it was in the 1950s when the legislation that governs our operations was first established. The financial questions have, to some extent, been resolved, but the changes in the way libraries are arranged, managed and best serve their communities will continue. Librarians’ professional duty involves finding the best way forward, based on the work already done, to create new opportunities: to embrace new ways of serving communities, providing access to information and accepting that while the ideals of the library, the goals it seeks to achieve, may not change, the methods of doing so may and probably should change. I congratulate everyone in local government, local libraries and the State Library who have been working on this matter for more than two years and wish them every success in future: the moment of change is now very much upon us.
The second responsibility is something that bears more closely on tonight’s occasion, the awarding the Sharr medal. This responsibility concerns education, professional development and building links between the profession of librarianship and the professional education of librarians and all information workers. Along with increased funding and the challenge of reform, there comes the responsibility to educate new members of the profession and provide opportunities for development within the profession. Libraries are undoubtedly changing. We see evidence for this in programs like Better Beginnings; we see evidence for it in the regular reports that tell us libraries are seen by their communities as innovative, educative spaces for community activity and not just repositories of knowledge (for example, in NSW, the report on Enriching Communities ).
If therefore we are entering a period of structural reform of the public library sector in Western Australia, I would commend to everyone in the profession the need for deeper, richer and more productive interactions between members of the profession working in them, and members of the profession educating for them. These interactions are an essential part of the development of the real repositories of knowledge in this field: the professionals who work in it. Money does not bring change; plans themselves to create new opportunities: people – professionally trained, and yet always active in their development as professionals – are the real basis of the value of the libraries in our changing world.
It is not just the case that educators turn out graduates – such as the winners of the Sharr Medal – who then work in the profession. The links must go in both directions. The education of information professionals needs to keep pace with the changing nature of librarianship: I think it must also anticipate further change, not just for the interior world of librarianship and information service provision, but so graduates are knowledgeable about the community and educational contexts in which they work. Equally, the profession must remain conscious of its duty to support and extend the relationship. Professional development of librarians, after they have graduated, will go hand in hand with greater involvement of professionals in education of the new generation of librarians. ALIA represents the very best, then, of a profession: a commitment to ideas, exploration, education and practice – a meeting point between being and becoming a skilled professional information worker.
And, on that point, may I announce that it is the firm intention of the State Librarian of Western Australia to resume the program of graduate recruitment that was initiated a few years ago and which was one of the casualties of global financial crisis. As the Library frames the budget for next year, for presentation to the Board, we hope to offer at least one and perhaps more places to recruit to the State Library graduates who will then continue to learn, even as they enter the profession.
In conclusion, may I say that we are only now appreciating just how much libraries have changed in the past 25 years. What this change has shown is how adaptable the profession has been on the whole. If we reflect on the changes in other areas of public life and service, I think we can say that libraries do at least as good a job now as they did mid-way through the last century, despite the rather negative attitudes now prevalent about the expenditure of public funds, and despite the very dramatic changes in social informatics brought about by new technologies. I am sure that, by responding to the greater certainty provided by the recent budget decisions with a renewed sense of purpose in managing and staying ahead of the challenges which continual change will bring, librarians in Western Australia will, on future occasions, remark on the professional excellence with which all information and library workers conducted themselves in the eventful early years of the 21st century in Western Australia.