CLOSING OF BRANCHES AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Niels Ole Pors, LibraryLINK

Interesting things are happening at the moment in the Danish public library scene. This Spring a new Library Act passed Parliament, and the implementation process has started, at nearly the same time as the library statistics for 1999 have been published.

Danish library authorities have been extremely busy during the last couple of years. The implementation of the new Act was accompanied by extra funding to be distributed on a project basis. The library systems have to implement the extended library concept, which means that all public li-braries have to build up collections in music, CD-ROMs, videos, etc. All libraries have to provide Internet access for their users. Most of them have already done that, but stated in the new law it is a process that will mean rather huge investments in more workstations and access points.

How does this development influence books in the public library system? Several interesting developments can be seen. The most striking is probably that the public library system as a whole has a zero-growth collection, and this has been the case for the last 8-9 years. Relegation and weeding are bigger in numeric terms than acquisitions. The lending of books has gone down by few per cent through the 1990s - not much, but a little. Ten years ago the lending of books counted for more than 90 per cent of the lending activity in libraries, and it is now just under 80 per cent. This becomes more striking when one looks at the number of renewals in the public library system. The number of renewals accounts for an increasing percentage of lending figures, and it seems that this is increas-ing from year to year. This is undoubtedly connected with the ability to request and renew books di-rectly from the home computer.

During the last 9-10 years nearly 25 per cent of the public libraries branches in Denmark have been closed. This has not meant a reduction in the spending on public libraries, but rather centralisation and concentration, because the savings from closed branches have been transferred to other central libraries or bigger branches. It has meant an increase in the total number of opening hours. The closed branches are on the whole the ones with very small and dispersed user groups, with few opening hours and a rather inadequate provision of materials. There has not been any public outcry, and this must be taken as a sign of the public�s mobility in relation to public services.

The Act also encourages the public library to generate income. In principle all services are free, but libraries are allowed to charge a fee if a citizen wants a service that extends what is normally offered - for example an express ILL - or if the citizen wants a labour-intensive task to be done. It is also stated that libraries can offer fee-based teaching and consultancy work for both private and public enterprises. This includes services like establishing homepages, maintenance of homepages and evaluation of links and Internet resources. The library can also offer fee-based services in rela-tion to market screening.

Most of these services have been in a kind of grey area before, and the Act now gives public librar-ies the possibility to compete formally in the information market and use it both as competency development for staff and as a possibility to generate income. The National Library Authority has earmarked some funding to help smaller libraries get started with such services. These are just some of the new activities that are occurring as a result of the Act. It will help add new robustness and new incentives to what is already a comparatively good library system.

Niels Ole Pors
LibraryLINK

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