INTERNATIONAL COMMENTARY

Philip Calvert

Almost all librarians know of the close relationship between libraries and shops. It can be shown by quantitative means such as cluster analysis that proximity to shops gives the public library a greater turnover, as compared with less useful proximity to the town hall, schools, or any other municipal buildings. Even if this is not something learned at library school, it becomes readily apparent to any reasonably observant library manager that libraries placed closed to shops have more foot traffic than those placed further away.

It seems that the relationship between libraries and shops has not escaped the notice of someone in the British government, or at least that is what can be deduced from the recent announcement that public libraries and rural post offices will share the same building from now on. The logic is simple. Maintaining rural post offices has become too expensive to justify on strictly economic grounds, yet the government is concerned by a political backlash from the countryside lobbies that protest regularly about the collapse of infrastructure. There is scarcely a village left in the English shires with a bank, a post office and a public library. Quite a few villages have none of them. At best, rural areas can now only expect a visit from the mobile library for an hour or so per week. So the proposed solution has a pleasant simplicity to it; if you cannot afford to keep the post office open, and the public library service is inadequate, combine the fixed costs of the building and try to provide both from one location. Sharing the cleaning, heating and lighting bills is itself going to save quite a lot of money. More than that, customers of one are much more likely to use the other while they are there, thus increasing the turnover of both institutions.

This is not a completely new idea, as many librarians will testify, but the present initiative has come from central government, which is a nice change. Mores the pity that librarians do not always seek out and pursue such partnerships when the opportunities present themselves. In New Zealand it is all too common to see public libraries occupying one building, while a �visitor information centre� run by the same local authority occupies another. Surely the public library is an information centre, so why does the local authority pay twice over? Apparently, some public librarians had the chance to run the local visitor information centres, but turned down the chance because they felt the resources on offer were inadequate. A shame. Similarly, there are business information centres in many New Zealand towns, financed by the central government. Admittedly, combining functions that are funded by different government authorities is likely to be fraught with problems, but it is an opportunity gone to waste. In addition, the problems of having large amounts of cash on the premises are all too easily overlooked - though not by the staff who have to cope with the increased security risks. This, though, is something to deal with at the planning stage, and for retailers it is nothing new.

Librarians might say that working with other government authorities is hard enough, why should we try to forge partnerships with retail firms, which has a totally different ethic from the library service? The immediate answer to the question is that libraries need to seek out all the help they can get, whether it be from the public or the private sector, in order to survive in tough times. Starting partnerships with private enterprise seems to be one way to cope with inadequate funding. Even the premise is questionable, for librarians who have worked with the private sector (indeed, some successful librarians come from the private sector) will know that it is not so difficult to work with the retail trade. Retailers know that they need to protect the bottom line, and in order to do so they do not become confused by philosophical arguments about public versus private good and so on. Many people in the private sector understand better than library managers how the �image� of the public library is still attractive, despite all the knocks it has taken, and they want to be associated with the �warm fuzzies� the library generates.

Having said that librarians should try to find a location close to shops, it is not surprising to note that retailers are also happy to have a public library close to their stores. This is a symbiotic relationship, to launch into a biological analogy, though to be precise the two do not depend upon each other, even though there are many shared benefits to be had. The retailers know that public libraries attract many people, especially families. And, to offer a point that librarians do not actually like to hear but one that almost everybody else will know, public libraries mostly serve middle-income families, and that is good news for the storeowners. Once that is understood, it is easy enough to see why property developers specialising in large mall projects have started to offer space within the mall to the local public library. No large rent is demanded, just bring in those families!

The best example of a public library-retail mall relationship in my experience is the Orchard Road library in Singapore. This is targeted at young adults and teenagers, who, as many of us know to our (literal) cost, love to shop, shop, and then shop some more. By locating the new library inside a very popular mall in Orchard Road, the shopping centre of a country enamoured of shopping, the National Library Board pulled off a tremendous coup. Young people, the very ones some librarians despair of ever seeing in a library, will enter the library and use it almost like a retail outlet. "Well, there�s a great dress I must buy, I�ve got to purchase a present for Foong Meng, and I�ll borrow a couple of thrillers from the library." Not only that, librarians have witnessed how the close proximity of a bookshop and a music store actually increase the turnover for them all. Some customers like to check out a title in the bookstore, then go to the library and borrow it, while others appear to borrow the book first, then buy a copy if they like it.

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets has decided to build seven new buildings called Idea Stores in local shopping areas. The Idea Stores (which are public libraries by another name) will, in addition to lots of books, videos, computer games and so on, feature regular cultural performances and offer a place to chat with friends over a coffee. This is just the sort of thing that fits in well with a trip to the shops. Interestingly, the first site has been purchased in partnership with Sainsbury�s Supermarkets Ltd., a leading British supermarket chain. At the other end of the spectrum, East Sussex must provide a public library service to a scattered rural population. They have chosen to take the library service to non-traditional locations, and so far have established a variety of services in a church, a video rental store, a pub, and there are plans to put computer workstations in a bank. It works all ways. The local authority has maintained a library service with low expenditure on the physical site; customers find it convenient to check out books while attending a church service or having a few drinks (that seems to cover a fair proportion of the population) or borrowing a video. The organisations offering space to the library presumably benefit by increased turnover for themselves.

So, if locating public libraries in or next to shops is so obvious to some public library managers, the question that needs to be asked is why aren�t more of us doing it?

Further reading
Garcia, June, Trevor Knight & Sue Sutherland. 2001. Learning From Others. Gutersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation, 2001. pp. 8-13.

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