91AngloGerman

The social role of library and information services

Derek Law

Abstract

There are at least five types of social and cultural information:

• information as a marketing/publicity tool, such as timetables;

• information for social benefit, such as health information;

• information for education, such as the non-fiction stock of publicly funded libraries;

• information for persuasion, such as political pamphlets;

• information for leisure and culture, such as novels or plays.

There is not, and never has been, free information, but there are different methods of financing information, some of which give the illusion of lack of payment, and libraries have traditionally been much involved in these. Costs can be met centrally, by the producer, or by the consumer. There is no natural or correct balance in allocating these costs, but government policy can distort the ‘natural' balance which would otherwise exist. Consideration must be given as to whether information is simply a commodity with value, which may then be bought and sold, or whether there are some forms of social and cultural information which should be made freely available to the community at large, as part of the accepted norms of a cultured and liberal society.

German Abstract

Kurzfassung

Es gibt mindestens fünf Arten der sozialen und kulturellen lnformation:

• lnformation als Marketing/Werbungsmittel, wie z.B. Fahrpläne;

• information als Gemeinwohl, wie z.B. medizinische (Daten) Informationen;

• lnformation zur Weiterbildung, wie der Bestand an Sach- büchern in Öffentlichen Bibliotheken;

• lnformation zur Meinungsbildung, wie politische Broschüren;

• lnformation zur Freizeit und Kultur, wie Romane und Theaterstücke.

Es gibt und gab niemals kostenlose Informationen, nur verschiedene Methoden der Kostendeckung. Einige davon vermitteln den Eindruck, daß kein Geld im Spiel sei, also daß die lnformation kostenlos ist und Bibrotheken gehören schon seit jeher zu dieser Kategorie. Kosten können zentral getragen werden, vom Hersteller oder auch vom Konsumenten. Es gibt kein natürliches oder korrektes Gleichgewicht in der Zuteilung dieser Kosten, da die Regierungs- politik das natürliche Gleichgewicht verfälscht. Es muß darüber nachgedacht werden, ob es sich bei 'Information’ganz einfach um ein Produkt handelt, das ge- und verkauft werden kann, oder ob bestimmte Formen der sozialen und kulturellen lnformation der Allgemeinheit sozusagen als Teil der festgesetzten Normen einer kulturellen und liberalen Gesellschaft frei zugänglich gemacht werden sollten.

Paper

It is a curiosity of the conference organisation that, as the only Scot amongst your speakers, I am the only one who has not been asked to talk about money and economics. of course, given that this is the year in which Glasgow has been chosen as the European City of Culture, it is perhaps appropriate to have a Scot discuss culture and society. Libraries have a multiplicity of functions and roles, one of which is the transmission of social and cultural information. This is not, of course, a role unique to libraries. In trying to determine the social role of library and information services, a first step is to attempt to identify those categories of information which have some form of social role, and which are often provided without charge to the in-formation user. There are at least five such types of social and cultural information.

• Information as a marketing/publicity tool. Into this group fall such things as timetables, shopping catalogues, advertising leaflets, telephone directories and free local newspapers, supported by advertising. The common theme of this type of information is that the information is either necessary, if the service is to be used, or is a means of persuading the public to use the service.

• information for social benefit. This would include guides to government services, or guides on how to fill in tax returns, health information campaigns on topics such as AIDS, the work or publications of consumer advice bureaux, census data and guides explaining legislation. The common theme here is the freedom to inform citizens of how a complex modern society is organised, and to explain how they Should behave within it. For example, it is socially acceptable to sleep during a lecture, but it is not socially acceptable to snore.

• Information for education. This encompasses almost all knowledge which is commonly shared within a society. It is, in essence, all the information held in the non-fiction stock of a public library, In practice, it can be presented in other media than bool‹s, and may be made available say on television, but it is the information which we use to educate and inform the members of a society.

• Information for persuasion. This could describe advertising, but here it is narrowly intended to define a set of information used to persuade other members of society to adopt a particular viewpoint, often political or religious. Such selections of fact, and the interpretations put upon them, form a distinct group of social information, which is used in an attempt to change or modify society.

• Information for leisure and culture, such as novels or plays. Matthew Arnold defined culture as ’the best that has been known and said’. Society places a value on culture and intellect, in part, because these are the means of advancing society. A literate and cultured society is seen as a good thing. Information for leisure is an overlapping set of information. It can mean the pleasure of reading great literature, but it could also mean providing information on the rules and practices of football, so that that particular leisure activity can take place.

There may be another category which may loosely be called news. If local news, it is often passed orally, if regional, national or international, it is more usually transmitted by newspaper and television, but it can be argued that it permeates all the other categories.

Unlike the information which most of the speakers have been talking about during the seminar, the categories of information I have been outlining need to be distributed comprehensively, if society is to function in any meaningful way. The library system has always been a particularly effective means of reaching large parts of society, and is therefore often used as a means of transmitting such information. Most libraries recognise this role in some way. An excellent example of this is the ’Help for Health’ programme, based in one of our Health Regions. An enterprising librarian has assembled a database of information on all the societies and support groups which exist to support the victims and their relatives of all diseases and illnesses. The role of the library is as a central storehouse of information, which can put those in trouble or at risk in contact with others. Families with children suffering from cystic fibrosis, or parents suffering from Parkinson's Disease, are under stress. It is an important and helpful role to put such families into contact with other sufferers. Such a service provides great benefit to individual members of a society at a time of need. Some university medical libraries in Britain offer outreach services to family doctors and to general practitioners in their region; examples of this kind could be multiplied to show how the library can perform a service aimed at helping society.

At the lowest level, library involvement may mean displaying in-formation notices while, at the other extreme, some libraries have adopted aggressive outreach policies, perhaps even using new technology to reach into the home. Radio and, more recently, television reach an even wider audience, and many television and radio systems, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation, were set up with the quite specific mission of public service broadcasting. Most commercial radio and television also recognises that it has social and cultural responsibilities, but these are usually seen as a sort of luxury.

There are two extreme views of the role of social and cultural information. At one extreme lies the utilitarian view that all information is a commodity which has a value and therefore a price. Only those who can afford the information can have it and make use of it. In particular, culture, and information relating to it, is seen as a commodity. At the other extreme lies the long tradition, particularly in the British public library service, of free access to information as a means of educating and informing the great mass of the population. In particular, the free public library has been seen as a way of allowing individuals to improve their lot in society. Most librarians, at least in the public sector, tend to see themselves as guardians of this tradition, and react angrily to suggestions for change. A recent government proposal to raise charges for certain library services excited enormous hostility from the profession. The idea of the public good is important. We should never underestimate the depths to which the commercial sector can sink. When it became possible for computers to print out works in Braille for the blind, the first product was not the works of Goethe or Robert Burns, but Playboy.

It may seem unusual to cite Ronald Reagan in a paper given to a professional audience, but in a recent speech to the English Speaking Union¹ he commented on two things. Firstly, he pointed out that the United States now has the technology to put the entire information of the Library of Congress into a space the size of a telephone booth. He also pointed out that it was the free flow of information which had made events in Tiananmen Square such a disaster for the Chinese government and people, and which would lead to dramatic changes in Eastern Europe, although I doubt that he foresaw quite how quickly things would change. In short, he declared that a free flow of information to a well-informed populace was the best defence of a free society.

This implies that the library should have two roles in the social process, in addition to any recreational function which it might be agreed to have. Firstly, it should be one of the agencies which is contributing to the free flow of information and the well-informed society and secondly, the library should have a role in educating the population, whether through the support of formal programmes of instruction, or through the provision of up-to-date information about society itself.

If the library is to have that role, we have to decide in what way it is to be funded to perform it. There is not, and never has been, free information, but there are different methods of financing information, some of which give the illusion of lack of payment, and libraries have traditionally been much involved in these. In many cases, the cost of library provision is met by central or local government, so that those who contribute to the cost of government through taxation fund a service which is then universally available without charge. in some casesthe cost of free information is met by its producer; telephone directories would be an example of this. In their case, the free nature of the service is also illusory, in that the cost is at some point added as an overhead element in determining the rate of charge for the telephone service. Finally, costs can be met directly by the consumer, paying for the acquisition of information as it is required. In practice, whatever they claim their philosophy to be, libraries have operated a mixed economy of funding.

Libraries have charged users for many services for years. This list is far from complete, but shows some of the areas in which charges are levied by libraries which would claim to provide free services. It should be noted that many of these are traditional services, and not the sunrise services of the new technologies and media, which are the ones where libraries most often feel unable to avoid levying charges as the only way to provide the funding which will allow the service to be introduced at all. They are also a mixture, some providing information and some providing services:

• reservation postal costs;

• photocopying;

• borrowing by outside readers;

• evening/weekend opening;

• interlibrary loans;

• hiring equipment e.g., typewriters;

• hiring space e.g., study carrels;

• online searching;

• CD-ROM printing.

Charges are not simply designed to raise revenue and make services self-financing; they may also, of course, be a means of depressing levels of use.² Most librarians would tend to be unhappy with such charges for two reasons. Firstly, as the above list shows, we tend to raise revenue from services which we can most readily isolate and cost, rather than from those which, in some sense, are additional or supplementary services. Secondly, there tends to be a hidden but substantial administrative cost in recovering charges, and libraries may finish up with a marginal net gain in revenue and a hidden but substantial loss of opportunity costs. However, there is another side to the debate.³ The striking of postures, however, is not really helpful and, in practice, there should be no real villains in the argument. No library is free; they are simply paid for in different ways, and most libraries do raise money in some way, if only because copyright legis­lation requires publicly funded libraries to charge for photocopies. In truth, the only valid debate is on how library services are to be paid for, not whether the Green Paper⁴ on public library funding, a consultative paper published in 1988 by the British government, op­ened up an illuminating debate on the notion of core and value-added services for which charges would be levied. This has also spread to the British Library, where the latest five-year plan, called Gateway to Knowledge,⁵ looks at the notion of charging for non-core services. Its approach is particularly interesting, for rather than just settle for levying charges on areas where costs are readily attribut­able, it attempts to define core and value-added areas, then goes on to propose charges for the latter even where, as with reference in­quiries, charging mechanisms may be very hard to devise. Now, it should not be thought that the raising of revenue is a substitute for adequate core funding, but it does allow a redefinition of the boun­daries. Libraries have tended to charge for new services, such as online, because they are easily definable, and because it may be the only way to fund their introduction. Many libraries have also tended to impose charges for activities such as genealogical searches, be­cause they are considered to lie beyond the scope of our normal services and are disproportionately time-consuming, making them a distraction from our 'real' duties. Libraries apply a sort of inverse charging when they refuse to compile a bibliography from the printed sources for researchers, who, it is felt should undertake their own research; this preserves staff time for other, more central, activities. Thus, from our fairly deeply held convictions, we have managed to develop a very confused set of practices. It would make much more sense to look at the issues from first principles, and decide which services are basic - and online might be basic in some organisations - and which are value-added, and reference work might be so defined in other cases. Having done that, we can then look at effective charging mechanisms for those areas which we do not consider fundamental.

There is no natural or correct balance in allocating these costs, but government policy can distort the 'natural' balance which would otherwise exist. Most large libraries are publicly funded, and the government can therefore exercise the option to intervene and direct and moderate library policy, or leave it to the libraries and their customers to achieve a balance. A view has to be taken of the role of social and cultural information and whether it is in the interests of society to have it widely and freely disseminated, or whether it is simply required by a minority who should pay for it

Consideration must be given as to whether information is simply a commodity with value, which may then be bought and sold, or whether there are some forms of social and cultural information which should be made freely available to the community at large, as part of the accepted norms of a cultured and liberal society. One potential solution to this dilemma is to draw a distinction between information and the services which attach to it. It would be possible to imagine a society in which it is seen as a good thing to make information available free of charge, but in which charges are levied for services provided by the library to make the information more accessible.

References

1. Reagan, Ronald, The Churchill Lecture to the English Speaking Union, London, 13 July, 1989.

2. Winship, Ian R., 'The use of online information services in UK higher education Iibraries', British Journal of Academic Librarian­ship, Vol. 1, pp. 191-206, 1986.

3. De Gennaro, Richard, Pay libraries and user charges in libraries, technology and the information marketplace, G.K.Hall, Boston, 1987.

4. Financing our public library service: four subjects for debate. A consultative paper (Cmd 324), HMSO, London, 1988.

5. Gateway to knowledge: the British Library strategic plan 1989­-1994, British Library Board, London, 1989.