So what about the library post-Covid?

As we head through 2022 have you noticed that you are starting to think and talk about your life and daily activities in terms of before-Covid, during-Covid and after-Covid? Of course, it isn’t strictly accurate to say “post-Covid”, because it hasn’t gone away and may not completely for many years to come, if ever, but the Covid-19 pandemic has become a defining moment in our recent world history that has already started to become a reference point for our daily activities and customs. I guess it is in some ways similar to how people in the late 1940s, 50s and 60s talked about “Before the war”, “During the war”. . .

Focusing on the positive side of this, given that we can at last begin to plan and return to doing many of the things that just weren’t possible even a matter of months ago, what does this mean for how people are using libraries ‘post-Covid’?

And more specifically, what do we actually know about how people are using libraries ‘post-Covid’? As you might expect, lots of anecdotal ‘evidence’ is being bandied about, rather less hard evidence. It is generally recognised that during the darker days of the pandemic when libraries were closed, library staff refocused, often with great agility, on online activities. There is hard statistical evidence (see the Guardian article below) that the use of e-books grew exponentially and the report commissioned by Libraries Connected Libraries in Lockdown also bears this out.

At the same time, loans of physical books inevitably dropped drastically, giving some hawkish local government managers an ‘excuse’ to say that nobody was using the libraries anyway, so they might as well not reopen some of them. But I am also aware of library managers who report that, even before the majority of restrictions were lifted in the UK, numbers of physical loans had already returned to around 70% of pre-pandemic numbers.

But I venture to suggest that part of the problem in knowing how libraries are being used ‘post-Covid’ is a reflection of what we did and didn’t know anyway about library use. CIPFA’s annual statistics had already become a flimsy tool, appearing too long after the event (and after most authorities already had reduced inputs, if not also outputs) to be really useful to local authority managers. The Guardian in February picked up on this in Library use plummeted in 2021, but e-visits showed 18% rise during lockdown and CILIP and Libraries Connected attempted to address some of the issues.

Putting the pandemic to one side for a moment, I have written before about the problem public library managers face in terms of measuring and demonstrating accurately the variety of ways public libraries are used, and even greater difficulty showing their very real impact on communities and people’s daily lives. In my June 2021 blog I explored “a new tool, the Impact Compass, which can be used to investigate and communicate the impact of individual public libraries to people, as well as to develop and evaluate activities at libraries”. So, unsurprisingly, when we move on to asking about visitor numbers; use of public PCs; browsing and socialising in the library; participation in activities, events, courses; finding out information or perhaps job-seeking; hard evidence becomes even scarcer.

One library service manager has observed that even though visitor numbers were returning to pre-Covid levels, use of their public PCs has not. Could this be because more people were for the first time enabled to access IT hardware and the internet at home during the pandemic? If so, has laptop or tablet ownership increased? Has digital poverty actually reduced? And/or are more people coming into the library to use the free wifi? Or is it that some people continue to be nervous about coming to sit in the library and use shared equipment? Who knows?

Are volunteer numbers still down ‘post-Covid’, perhaps reflecting the fact that volunteers are often from older age groups who may still be more nervous about mixing? Who knows?

What is the longer-term impact on the use of home library services? Is there now a group of users who may not find it physically difficult to visit their local library, but are too nervous to do so because they are in a higher risk Covid group? Have services and budgets been adjusted to address this, and if not, should they? Who knows?

And all this without mentioning the thorny subject of library income. An article in LocalGov Survey warns of bleak fiscal reality for libraries reacted to those same CIPFA statistics by highlighting the impact of Covid induced closures on library income: “Library income fell by nearly £20m over the last financial year, an annual survey has revealed”. I know of one library service that identified a very significant gap in their previous two years’ budgets because of this, but what happens if the levels of use we’ve just talked about don’t now bounce back to pre-Covid levels? Presumably an ongoing budget gap that may lead to yet more service reductions?

Where am I going with all this, you may ask? 

What I think does clearly emerge from an otherwise quite confusing picture, is the need for a focused, funded, quality piece of research to establish some hard evidence about the whole variety of public library use before- during- and post-Covid. 

Only when that is available will local government financial and library service managers be able to make intelligent decisions about the future planning of library services in a relatively post-Covid world. This is, if you like, my challenge to government and the various sector bodies working with public libraries across the whole of the UK. And it needs to be done now, not in another year’s time!

Staying with the Covid theme, but perhaps ending on something a little more upbeat, IFLA (the International Federation of Library Associations) has published Public Libraries: Responding in Times of Crisis which demonstrates once again, on a worldwide basis, the vast breadth of libraries’ contribution during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

On a related topic, Creating resilient and revitalised high streets in the ‘new normal’, published recently by the LGA, highlights the impact of the pandemic on our high streets, although despite referring to the effect of Covid on the digital divide it manages to do so without seeing libraries as part of the solution. Dare I suggest that someone at the LGA read my September 2021 blog After Covid: what next for the library and the High Street?

Back to blog home page