Laura Swaffield, Chair of The Library campaign, reports,
“Arts Council England (ACE) has at last started phase 3 of its research on “the purpose and value of public libraries”, asking the general public (NOT asking library users as such, unfortunately). Even worse, a major chunk of it is online.
Please contribute – and please point out that people who are NOT online are a key group who depend on public libraries & will depend even more so in future, e.g. as benefits (insanely) become online-only. The Library Campaign tried to persuade ACE not to restrict this survey to online when many millions of library users do not have access to the internet at home.”
The website is open until Sunday 21 October 2012.
Go to: http://librariesofthefuture.dialoguebydesign.net to access the survey.
Laura adds,
“The address above works – the Arts Council website currently does not!
Library campaigner Shirley Burnham reported the difficulty accessing the survey to campaigners. See for yourselves – go to the ACE website home page and attempt to find it.”
The blog post ACE in a hole by Rubymalvolio might also be of interest. The Arts Council has failed to contact library authorities when doing a national survey on libraries.
