There is a suffragette song which goes:

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses."

As we go marching marching, we battle too for men
For they are women's children and we mother them again
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes
Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses.

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread that we fight for, But we fight for roses, too.

As we come marching, marching, we are standing proud and tall -
The rising of the women means the rising of us all.
No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories,
Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses. [1]

Change

Fundamentalism, whether of religion, science or management, is a way of avoiding change. Cost-accountancy, rather than facilitate change, stifles it for cost accountancy concentrates on the price of the bread at the expense of the fragrance of the roses.

Margaret Cousins, a New Zealand local government politician, suggests that the user pays philosophy is an indicator of this.

Politicians and senior local government managers are clearly being influenced by people in business who have a cost accountant's perspective of local government functions, and who in general are not comfortable with nor used to the provision of good library services. They have in fact an old fashioned view and offer, therefore, old fashioned advice on libraries. As well they tend to focus on those aspects of our operations that can be quantified, and there is an inherent danger here of the lack of valuing of those things that cannot be quantified easily in economic terms, i.e. the benefits of an educated citizenry. [3]

The excuse librarians are given is always "time's are tough", but man does not live by bread alone, as the old Persian saying reminds us:

When of thy worldly goods thy find thyself bereft And from the goodly store two loaves alone are left Sell one, and with the dole Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

Bad times differ from good times not merely in being more interesting, but also because they challenge us to rethink our relationship to reality, to those 'external influences' whose shifts affect the 'mythological pattern' with which we are familiar. A time of change often appears like a maelstrom of destruction to those caught in it. Even though what is being destroyed is not everything, but simply our own particular myths, it is frightening. Through the gaps in the pattern we suddenly perceive the terrifying world of the way things "really work", a world that seems mysterious, disjointed, unpredictable and therefore infinitely menacing. How can we understand it with the framework of meaning gone, gone with all the old patterns we knew? How can we hope to control it if we do not understand it?

Psychologists, in studying those who are resilient in the face of change, have concluded that there is a distinct advantage in learning to view the world from multiple perspectives. Libraries and their contents make multiple perspectives available to all.

Today we must plan for library services that anticipate changes rather than react to them. We must be ready as communities evolve through changing demographics, increasing cultural diversity, nontraditional family structures, shifting economic conditions, deteriorating infrastructures, the application of new technologies, and a work force in need of retraining. We must position our libraries as the central, free, cultural, educational and information resource for all the people in the communities we serve. [4]

There are two ways in which a creature can seek to survive in a jungle environment. One way, known as wedging, is to compete fiercely and successfully for an existing niche with other creatures that are trying to occupy it. The other way is to find a wholly unoccupied niche. [5] The free provision of quality public library services, including information services, is a niche that is not in dispute, a niche that local government has no competition for. Unesco is currently updating its policy on public libraries. An early redraft, which was recently sent to me for comment, maintains the commitment of the 1976 one to free public library services.

Roles

The idea that a library should choose a limited number of service roles and then direct its resources and efforts to fulfilling them became a major theme in the 1980s. On the surface, choosing a limited number of roles seems to be a reasonable idea - put resources into achieving a few important goals instead of trying to be all things to every user.

Most users don't know that libraries choose roles and don't care what role a library chooses. Users assign to libraries the roles they want them to play in their own lives. As users pass through their own life stages they expect different things from the library and each creates his or her own notion of what the library is, based on what that user wants it to be.

The methodologies of product marketing, which have been adopted so readily by local government in the assumption they translate readily into services marketing, which they don't, bring with them problems of accuracy. Though most people do not deliberately lie when being surveyed, because they simply wish to cooperate with the interviewer as best they can, a significant proportion believe this means answering "yes" as often as possible. [6]

Libraries are particularly disadvantaged, and councils duped, when very expensive consultants with the perspective of accountants and little or no real knowledge or appreciation of libraries and their potential or of human behaviour and needs, take the responses of a limited number of people to be an accurate representation of the whole, or pay excessive attention to gross counts without reference to the significance of library roles to library users. Alternatively, relying on the collective judgment of the influential group, such as local government elected representatives, may lock you into a group representative of a very small segment of the population. An analysis of the demographics of your councillors - age, education, socioeconomic profile and gender - should be enough to convince you that your library consumer demographics would be vastly different.

Either methodology results in potential for striking incongruence between what is supported by council and what is most valued by users. If public libraries were, at all times, to stress lifelong learning, which, by its nature, precludes none of the other roles, both the public sense of institutional relevance and public willingness to provide support will increase.

Whether or not we believe that libraries should or can play many roles simultaneously, or whether or not councils impose on libraries a constriction to relatively few roles, users will continue to impose on libraries their own notion of what the library is. For many years Brisbane City Council decided that the sole role of its library service would be recreational. Council enforced that view to the point of outright interference in book purchasing. But the users continued to persist in using the library as if it were a reference library, a library supporting curriculum-based learning, a life-long independent learning centre, a literary experience, an entrypoint to literacy for both preschoolers and others, and a source for information on current affairs, as well as a source of light reading.

It is currently fashionable to stress the informational role of the library. But the world does not contain any information. It is as it is. Information about it is created in the organism through its interaction with the world. To speak about the storage of information outside the human body is to fall into a semantic trap. Books or computers are part of the world. They can yield information when they are used. They are vehicles for potential information not information itself. [7]

Information is the process of becoming informed. It is the process of adding to the store of your experience more or less consciously by using the experience of others - real, or filtered through their imaginations, and stored in print, film, maps, pictures, videodiscs, fiction, 'non-fiction'; biography and in people. Information informs us. It is not facts. [8]

Life, libraries and labor are far more potent teachers than educational institutions. The most important learning can, is, and should be personal, voluntary and concomitant with living. This is free learning - unconstrained by time, space, privilege, or legal coercion. [9]

IT strategy

It is ironic that it was the capacity of Information Technology to provide cost per use information which triggered the user-pay debate in libraries yet local government authorities generally have failed to develop a long-term strategy for IT in their library and information services. To date, its introduction has been simply to reduce routine or to speed up certain processes. Properly applied, a long-term strategy ensures that the redistribution of resources is directed towards the active development of client-centred rather than function-centred, services, providing visible and effective access to vehicles for potential information and improving the library's awareness of users' needs.

Virtual reality has captured the attention of the media and the man in the street. Virtual reality is said to be just like life, only much more fun and nobody gets hurt. The same effect is gained by skilful readers each time they engage the printed word. Traditional ideas that view the text as having intrinsic meaning have been challenged by the view that meaning is deferred until imposed by the reader. Because readers are individually and culturally different and change over time, every text is a shifting reality recreated each time it is read - something to be borne in mind the next time a library user gets his/her knickers in a knot about the content of a particular book. New technologies do not replace old. They co- exist and sustain each other.

A social worker once commented to me that Mills and Boon novels had saved more working-class marriages than all the social workers available all together. Why? Precisely because of the virtual reality aspect of reading. The reader, usually a harried wife and mother, living in straitened circumstances with little to commend them in terms of quality of life, is able to create some personal space around her while immersed in the story. They provide the kind of respite not available in any other way - all the leisure programs any Council can afford are, if the truth be told, of little use to the majority of residents.

Service orientation

Service is about placing customers in control of the situation, making them feel confident about being there and making the transaction, putting them in charge. Libraries combine the ambience of the boutique with the self-service nature of the supermarket. In a supermarket customers feel confident and in control because they have total freedom. In a boutique customers feel comfortable because there is someone there to serve them. A library combines the freedom to browse with the comfort that knowledgeable and authoritative support is available when needed. It is crucial that library users be treated as though the relationship is personal. Success lies in creating an environment in which the user feels absolutely central, welcome, stimulated, encouraged, supported and ultimately served. These aspects of human behaviour need to be central to all decision-making and service-design.

Leadership in a public library has many dimensions. One obvious source of leadership is internal. It comes from the chief librarian, the library's top management team, and the staff. A less obvious but sometimes even more critical source is external. Elected representatives, Friends groups, and management staff all provide leadership. There are concentric circles of community and library leadership, each providing ideas, inspiration, and direction that interlock the library and the community it serves. When it lacks that interconnecting leadership, the public library can hardly be anything but a victim of financial battering and organisational stagnation. Only motivated, creative, and committed leadership will ensure a strong future for your public library [10] and enable it to be an active cultural, economic, educational, and social catalyst in civic life. Effective libraries contribute to livability, to economic vitality and development, to the "quality of life" of the community.

The Public Library Association, Partners for Livable Places in Washington D.C., and Project for Public Spaces in New York City are working together on a national project, "The Public Library: In Partnership with Communities." The project is based on two premises:

• communities should take much more advantage of their public libraries as active catalysts for change and revitalisation; and
• the public and private sectors in cities must reach a greater understanding of the place and role of public libraries in meeting the community's economic and social challenges. [11]

Libraries help to create work. Because they boost prosperity they help indirectly to create more jobs. Libraries are not a luxury, not a cultural trimming, not a welfare service - all kinds of libraries are an economic necessity because they not only underpin economic development but provide for its maintenance. [12]

The Industrial Revolution came to an end in January 1992, when the total stock-market value of the then $US 2 billion- revenue Microsoft outpaced that of $US125 billion General Motors Corporation. The Nomura Research Institute, Japan's leading think tank, says the information age is likewise just about behind us. We're headed for a new era of "creation intensification", or the age of brainware. Throughout the world economy value-added is coming from the application of the mind.

You cannot manage the human imagination. You can only create an environment in which it can flourish, which means that it needs nourishment as well as freedom to grow. What skills will councils and communities need tomorrow? No one knows. The important thing is to have as many people in your community as possible continually acquiring new skills. Life- long learning is imperative - and the only way in which councils can contribute to this is through well-resourced libraries whose role has not been deformed to meet some ephemeral current fad.

Return on investment

The present economic and political climate favours value for money assessments of public library and other local authority services. What surprises me, particularly since it has so readily espoused other private sector methodologies, is that Return on Investment is not an aspect of libraries that local government is incorporating into its deliberations.

Yet if we consider ROI it becomes immediately apparent that libraries are not a cost-centre but a rational investment which provides a greater return on investment than any other local government expenditure.

A large proportion of the money spent on providing a library service goes in staff salaries - and most of those salaries are recycled into the community or returned to the community in tax- funded expenditure.

Libraries, because they allow many users to share library resources, reduce the community's expenditure on books, magazines, newspapers and other library materials. This has two results.

The first is that cost of waste disposal is reduced - you return your magazine to the library or leave the newspaper in the library rather than throw it out.

The second is that use of the library's shared resources frees up personal discretionary income to be spent in other ways in the community. The truth is that very little of what is spent on books, magazines and newspapers remains within the boundaries of your authority. The wholesalers of books and magazines are concentrated in very few areas, largely located in Sydney and Melbourne. And most books have a large foreign exchange component within their price, being either wholly or partially produced overseas whether or not they are published in Australia. So if by providing a library service, every man, woman and child resident within your boundaries, saves, as a result of council's provision of a library, a mere $100 per annum which can be spent on something else within the community (and it is my contention that libraries actually free up more than $100) you will be running at something between a 5:1 and a 10:1 return on investment, without taking into account the waste-disposal savings, the savings realised by distributing council information through libraries, and the benefits which accrue to a community which has access to life-long learning opportunities.

User pays

Nobel laureate economist James Tobin concluded his 1984 Hirsch lecture

I confess to an uneasy ... suspicion ... that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services ... I fear that ... the advantages of the liquidity and negotiability of financial instruments come at the cost of facilitating nth-degree speculation which is short-sighted and inefficient.

Obviously, Councils are not in the business of speculation, however, they should examine very carefully how their view of appropriate financial management, particularly in relation to user pays, has been coloured and affected by the speculation all around them.

There is little evidence that user-pays schemes for some library services have paid even the full costs, let alone whether any have actually made money. We know nothing about the impact of these fee-based services on "basic" services in libraries. The evidence available now says nothing about how any library determines which services are so "specialised" that they justify fees, or which are "basic" and thus worthy of budget support. There is little real evidence of their economic viability. And no one seems to be questioning whether the same people who have rights to free access to current core or basic services have rights to those services when they are provided electronically.

An engineer with the Queensland Department of Transport recently told me that the huge deficit in running passenger services on Queensland's railways would be radically reduced if those ser vices were provided free. This is the one question we don't seem to ask routinely - will it be cheaper to provide the service free than to charge for it?

Although it is frequently hard to understand the rationale behind the funding decisions that are made, there really is not enough money to do everything, so councils need to move away from the simplistic binary approach to funding (i.e. funding by council or by user pays) to achieving an integrated portfolio of funding sources with the goal of the library becoming largely or wholly self-supporting. To achieve such a portfolio it is necessary to incorporate business ventures which can support delivery of free services to direct users. Current philosophy is tending to cause libraries to drift towards charging for services while maintaining that their community service obligation requires their councils to fund basic services. The inherent philosophical problem with this approach lies in the limitations it places on the capacity to contribute to the overall funding of the full range of library services.

Funding sources might include:

• Realisation of cost-recovery for facilities and equipment by entering into for-profit resource sharing agreements with commercial and other organisations for the periods when the equipment and facilities are not normally in use. Why not have the library's word-processing capacity, for example, used overnight by a commercial secretarial service? That way you'll recoup your capital cost much quicker and have a free security service to boot.
• Development of small business opportunities as wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Library. Of course, that has to be handled very carefully. Not all the success-stories we hear from the library sector are accurate.
• Realisation of the commercial value of the Library's resources - e.g. facsimile publishing of print and pictorial material owned by the library; licensing agreements to use images and information owned by the library; repackaging and sale of images, text and information; sale of professional expertise and skill; lease agreements for use of interior and exterior of buildings for film and television sets; hiring of rooms, and so on.
• Targeting the philanthropic sector. Where the organisation has historical significance research into its history can reveal opportunities to tap previously unidentified sources of funds. When, for example, Ely Cathedral was seeking restoration funds, research revealed that, in the absence of radar, many RAF pilots used the Cathedral's distinctive silhouette as a direction finder when returning from raids over Europe, and Luftwaffe pilots used it as a point of reference on bombing raids over Coventry. Approaches to surviving pilots on both sides resulted in generous donations.

In addition to developing business plans for specific ventures, the Library must also be organised to be opportunistic, that is a continuous planning process should be undertaken in order t o ensure the library is positioned to seize opportunities whenever they open.

Membership barriers

We are all familiar with the differing faces of user pays, but how many of us have really thought about the barriers that membership policies create.

When I first went to Brisbane I discovered that the membership policies were informal, and erratic. Individual branches had differing policies, based on where they were geographically situated in the city. It took me four years to get it through the bureaucracy to Civic Cabinet, but eventually it was signed and sealed and we had a policy which even included a category for temporary membership for visitors - two years after EXPO!

In common with most membership policies proof of residence is required, which effectively excludes the homeless or the itinerant. The next step (which had been allowed for in the policy) was to negotiate reciprocal borrowing agreements with all the contiguous shires. I understand that statewide reciprocal borrowing is already in place in Western Australia, so you will appreciate that once reciprocal agreements are in place it is no longer necessary for people to prove that they live in your area, and once that that's no longer necessary it becomes abundantly clear that the only reason you need an address is so that you can send an overdue notice.

Homeless people are not faceless and unknown. They receive social security payments, they are known to various agencies. The next step in my plan to remove all discrimination from the Brisbane City Council Library Service Membership policies was to send direct to the Lord Mayor, a proposal that he should contact appropriate agencies and suggest to them that Council could make full membership of the Library available to people who could not provide any proof of residence, if the agencies were prepared to agree to accept mail for the people they know, and just hold it until they next came in (making it quite clear that they were not being asked to accept any responsibility for either the person or for library materials).

There was no response and no action has ever been taken. In trying to understand the reason I phoned the Commonwealth Electoral Office and discovered that the homeless do not have a vote. The Information Officer to whom I spoke explained that the reason for this is that if an election is close the candidates require that every vote can be verified. When I told him why I was asking the question he became quite excited. If full library member ship for homeless people were to become commonly available, then that membership could be utilised to re-enfranchise the homeless. I challenge you to take this final step, to add an extra dimension to the State of Excitement.

Conclusion

As a child I read a tale about a beautiful young Christian wife of a pagan Lord, way back in the Dark Ages. He forbade her to feed the poor on pain of death and she defied him. One day he followed her into the village, and, sword at the ready, demanded to look into her apron, in which she had hidden the bread she was distributing. When she opened her apron a miracle had taken place - her lap was filled only with roses.

In local government libraries the choice is being limited the other way round. Bread and roses, not bread or roses, is what our communities need.

But what is often being promoted is the application of the techniques of bonsai to public libraries. Bonsai is the art of dwarfing trees. The dwarfing is brought about by a combination of root confinement and starvation. But it is a genuine art. The plants must be starved without killing them. Bread and roses, or bonsai. The choice, and the responsibility, is yours.

References