In 2001, a strategic plan for Leicester City Libraries was developed, called ‘Achieving Inclusion’. Its aim was to focus particularly on groups that were under-using libraries and identify barriers to library use. This strategic plan was the basis for significant workforce reform and service development activities and helped to inform the difficult decisions that had to be made about the closure of four libraries in 2004.
The strategy developed in 2001 involved a number of changes to service, including: removing charges and overdue fines for specific groups; the appointment of a participation manager; reforming the workforce; replacing three community libraries which were unable to deliver the new participation agenda with one, larger library which served the needs of four communities.
In 2007 the 'Welcome to your Library' project attracted a national 'Libraries Change Lives' award and the City Council achieved ‘Beacon’ status for cultural services for hard to reach groups in 2006/7 and the work of the library service was identified as contributing to this.
Support and consultancy
The fact that the library service had a clear strategy and rationale behind the changes made it much easier to communicate controversial changes and keep staff and elected members on board. The new Hamilton Library and Learning Centre has been a great success, attracting double the number of visitors to the other three libraries combined and offering a much wider range of services and saving £62,000.
In order to ease the transition from three small community libraries to one large library, the service offered support and consultancy services to community groups in each community area. These include, IT training so that the community groups are able to offer some basic training and providing a small amount of book stock for community centres. This has been very successful and has actually strengthened the partnerships between the library service and community groups.
Better Libraries, Better Lives is a five-year strategic plan, developed in 2008 because managers felt that they had achieved the aims of the 2001 strategy and now needed to look for new areas for service development, in the spirit of continual improvement.
This plan was developed with the participation of staff, elected members and a face-to-face survey of 1100 people living in Leicester, as well as the services of an independent consultant. A Council Member’s group oversaw the library service’s work and conducted its own review of library services, which fed into the final strategy.
Community engagement
A number of different methods of community engagement have been developed in the new strategy:
• Short-term engagement methods, such as consulting people on service requirements before opening a new library
• Long-term engagement methods: for example working with different members of the community to promote engagement around a library service that is co-located with other Council services
• The library service is developing a community engagement manager post to co-ordinate community engagement activities and help staff to develop skills to conduct their own community engagement
It is important to keep elected members involved in the process from the beginning to the end in order to ensure the strategy is aligned with Local Authority priorities however, it is challenging incorporating the views of a wide range of stakeholders and this is one of the most time-consuming parts of the process.
Adrian Wills, Head of Libraries and Information Services said: “In Leicester, staff are used to change. The speed of our organisational development has just got faster and faster. The more you change and are able to show that the change is effective, the more relaxed people become about change. Incremental change is actually more stable than going from one fixed situation to another fixed situation.”
For more detailed information on Leicester City Library Service visit the case study section on the MLA research website
September 2009