In March this year LibraryOn launched its £1.09m grants programme. Supported by Arts Council England and facilitated by the British Library, the fund enables library services to boost their digital presences and enhance their discoverability for new and existing users. In consultation with the library sector, we created a grants programme which was easy to access and designed with the digital needs of libraries in mind. Library services and consortia could apply for between £10k and £70k for capital expenditure.  

We received 68 applications representing 69% of all English library services. From an Expressions of Interest stage, we invited 43 applicants to submit a full application. The first stage panel included an Arts Council England representative and the digital lead for Libraries Connected. Types of projects included upgrading existing websites or creating new ones, digital marketing activity and purchasing new software. The total value of applications came to £1.6m.  

We invited a full panel of sector experts to decide which of the final projects would receive funding. Individuals from CILIP and Good Things Foundation, as well as previous library Heads of Service, took part in a robust decision-making process.  All applications were considered and discussed in detail; we were very keen to ensure a good geographical spread of projects as well as a range of activity was supported.   

The panel awarded funding to 27 projects with a total value of £1,080,846. To give a flavour of the successful applications:  

• In the North, eleven projects were funded including a new website for Sunderland libraries to revitalise customer experience; a digital advertising campaign in Sefton; an animation and VR project working with young people in North Lincolnshire; a new library app in Kirklees and upgraded events booking for Gateshead.  

• The Midlands received funding for two applications, including a website refresh, virtual floor plan, photography and library app for Stoke-on-Trent; and a library app for Leicester Libraries.

• London had five successful applications. They included a collaboration between the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) and Camden libraries; an online discoverable catalogue in Lambeth; and an interactive website project for Newham.  

• The South East received funding for five. They included creation of online assets such as photography, film and animation for West Sussex; virtual tours and photography in Surrey; and Suffolk reimagining its website’s user experience.  

• In the South West four projects were supported, including online space booking for Libraries Unlimited; a new website in Gloucestershire; and an online history and archive project for Southampton.     

Awards were also given to three consortiums, meaning 20 services from around the country will benefit from activity including ASK for a Book; a website providing personalised book recommendations from libraries, a film and photography project (reflecting findings from user research, where people said they would be more likely to visit a library if they could see what the spaces and events looked like) and upgrades to websites so we can increase our understanding of how local and national library sites work together for users.      

We’re inviting participating projects to take part in a community of practice to support skills development and share ongoing learning. We hope the process will be a useful experience which will have sector-wide benefits and enable services to learn from one another and exchange knowledge.          

Liz White, Head of Public Libraries and Community Engagement at the British Library said: “We’re excited to see this grant award for library services in areas across England, balancing investment in core offers with a wide variety of opportunities for digital innovation, user research and shared learning about ways of working. This reflects our north star goal to increase the number of people using public libraries and raise awareness about their enduring value and importance.” 

Luke Burton, Director of Libraries at Arts Council England said: “We are delighted to see such an exciting range of digital projects and improvements being funded through the LibraryOn grant scheme which is supported by the Arts Council’s overall £3.4m award to the British Library. The team has been progressing the development of the LibraryOn platform at pace over recent months and allowing digital improvements and potential future integrations are critical to the next steps of demonstrating the value and uses of a single digital presence for public libraries in England. I look forward to seeing all of these projects progressing.” 

Head to the LibraryOn website to find out more about the awards in detail. 

If you work in the public library sector and have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected]. You can also email us to subscribe to our sector newsletter for regular updates.  

Jill Brown 

Digital Grants Manager, LibraryOn 

 

Meet Jamal Mohamed, the British Library’s Community Project Coordinator.

‘We had show and tells related to indigenous African knowledge of medicinal plants’

I'm a member of the Community Engagement team, who try to be a bridge between the library and the community surrounding the building. We focus our efforts on four political wards: Somers Town, King's Cross, Bloomsbury and Regent's Park.

I started a taster session programme where we take items from the collection and build mini exhibitions around them for communities that might not see themselves represented in the wider exhibitions. In the last batch I ran we had show-and-tells related to women in the East European collection, indigenous African knowledge of medicinal plants, and Punjabi folk tales.

I ran a session for Ramadan about Islamic collections that we have here at the Library, and people loved the fact that different collection areas were represented. We had items from India, the Middle East and Africa. For each session we include 10 to 15 items.

If a local group comes to us and they want to tour the building, we'll help arrange it. If a group wants to see an exhibition, we'll sort out tickets for them. If a group wants to come and use a space to host their own project, we'll try to accommodate that and find space.

 

‘I’ve been volunteering since I was 12’

I’ve been volunteering on and off, since I was 12, for the Somali Youth Development Resource Centre (I’m half Somali). They were created to tackle inequalities in terms of education and crime in the Somali community in Camden. When I graduated, in 2020, I worked with them part-time on the mentoring scheme. We started online, on Zoom, but before I left we managed to get it back into two schools in Camden and I was delivering sessions every week.

I studied public relations and that’s all about building and maintaining relationships. I went on a work placement in the summer of my second year at a commercial PR agency but it didn’t feel like the work I wanted to do. So I continued at the SYDRC and through that I found out about the job here at the Library.

 

‘Without the conservators, items would just crumble away’

People have made me feel very welcome here. Especially colleagues who aren’t responsible for directly engaging with people, but who share their time and expertise to help my team on our projects. Without the help of the curators and the reference specialists, we wouldn’t be able to run the taster session programme.

The reading room staff, the reference specialists, the front-of-house teams; they're all amazing. And the conservators: without them, items would just crumble away and be damaged.

 

‘I really appreciate the level of respect this item’s been given’

My favourite items in the Library’s collection are slabs of wood, about a metre in length. These wooden slabs were used in rural Somali villages to teach Arabic or the Quran – the teacher would write on them and hold them up for the class to see. One of them had a verse from the Quran on it. The way it was handled made me feel proud and pleased because it was treated with so much care. It was in a really nice box. I was told to be careful with it, in terms of not allowing any food or drink near it, and not allowing people to touch it, because it’s a very delicate and important piece.

That really struck me because first, I was like, how’s it ended up here? And second, I was like, well, I really appreciate the level of respect it’s been given. I asked, but it wasn’t on the system how it had got there. A lot of these things are basically taken as part of colonial history, or it was donated by someone.

 

‘We know a local storyteller who wants to run children’s storytelling mornings’

If you live locally, one thing to keep an eye out for is the Last Word community space, which will be coming to the piazza, hopefully, this summer. That will be an opportunity for us to increase co-curation and co-development projects with community groups, to programme that space and make sure that local people feel welcome and represented at the library.

We want to encourage community groups to lead on their own projects. We provide a space and some resources. We’ve had conversations with loads of people locally who want to run sessions. We know a local storyteller who wants to run children's storytelling mornings. We have a local creative group that want to run a sharing space. Hopefully we'll launch sometime in the summer.

Today we publish Knowledge Matters, the British Library’s strategy for the next seven years. It outlines the ways in which we as the UK national library want to do more for new and existing audiences, while adapting to the monumental changes that are already impacting both the knowledge industry and the wider world.

It comes as we celebrate our 50th anniversary – the Library began operations on 1 July 1973 – and reflect on five decades in which we have grown into one of the world’s great research libraries. The story of how we develop over our next fifty years begins with this document.

Looking back, looking forward

It’s easy to overlook that we are, in fact, a comparatively young organisation – roughly contemporary with several of the big software giants, rather than our longer-established peers in the heritage sector. As a research library, the growth and take-off of the knowledge economy over the past half-century has presented the most extraordinary opportunities for us to serve current and future generations of users, while also requiring us constantly to learn and respond – and periodically to refresh our strategic objectives and the goals we set ourselves.

Knowledge Matters builds on and shares many continuities with its predecessor strategy – Living Knowledge – which spanned the period from 2015 to now, and which saw us develop and extend our reach through both the Living Knowledge Network (LKN) of national and public libraries, and through the Business & IP Centre National Network, which now extends to 21 libraries across the UK. We successfully grew our digital collection from 0.49 petabytes in 2013 to 2.95 petabytes by the start of 2023, working in partnership with the national libraries of Wales and Scotland, and the other UK and Irish Legal Deposit Libraries.

We also initiated a number of major capital programmes, including the renewal of our Boston Spa site in Yorkshire and – in the longer-term – the establishment of a permanent British Library site in the centre of nearby Leeds.  We also plan to expand our iconic London campus at St Pancras – an ambitious vision for which we now have planning permission. Each of these programmes has a long and complex journey to implementation, but building on the solid foundations laid down so far, we look forward to further advancing these transformative plans over the coming years.

Adapting to a changing world

Along with the continuities, our new strategy also addresses a range of major trends in and around the sectors we work in; collectively these amount to a renewed commitment to serving as broad a public as possible – becoming genuinely ‘for everyone’ in the scope and accessibility of what we offer.

These include the acceleration of technological change, and especially the widespread application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), necessitating a further step-change in digital transformation to modernise our services and systems, and keep pace with the expectations of our digital users. In parallel, there’s a more urgent need that ever before for libraries to play an active role in fostering information literacy – helping people of all ages and backgrounds to evaluate critically the superabundant (and too often distorted) range of information sources now available online and via social media.

Living Knowledge recognised the value of high-quality physical spaces, events and collaboration, alongside the ever more interactive digital realm. Through the work we have done with local partners in communities both in St Pancras and Leeds, and also with Living Knowledge Network partners across the UK, we now have a greater understanding of the importance of place-making – investing in the real places where people live and work, and which are often sources of deep personal meaning and pride. This insight informs both our plans to further develop and sustain the national collaborative networks mentioned above, and also the major capital programmes, which have inclusive, welcoming spaces at their heart.

In a number of ways, the world is a more unstable and unpredictable place than it was when we published Living Knowledge, with economic turmoil, international conflict and the pandemic all posing sudden and extreme challenges to our society and our world. Great national libraries have a responsibility to act as beacons – to their users and their peers alike – and Knowledge Matters recommits us to international engagement, and the maintenance, wherever possible, of cultural dialogue, exchange and collaboration.

All of these changes are of course taking place against the backdrop of the global climate emergency and it’s right, therefore, that we’re prioritising sustainability in its broadest senses over the coming seven years and into the future. Not only does this apply to our own buildings, processes and carbon footprint, but also to the role that libraries can play in offering a trustworthy and accessible source of verified information – which will of course be essential in addressing this huge societal challenge.

Major themes to guide us to 2030

Our overarching mission remains the same: to make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone, for research, inspiration and enjoyment. Having studied the above trends over the past 18 months, we have identified a set of key priorities that will apply across all of our purposes – whether these relate to Custodianship, Research, Business, Culture, Learning or International. Together they will shape what we deliver and how we will work in the future.

• Access, engagement and inclusion – ensuring that the services we offer, and the collections we hold, are truly ‘for everyone’.
• Modernising our library services - Investing in skills, processes, systems and capabilities to deliver the quality of library services our users deserve.
• Deepening our partnerships – collaborating with libraries and memory institutions of all kinds across the UK and around the world, to achieve more than we ever could by ourselves.
• Sustainability and resilience: - reducing our carbon impact and collaborating with partners to create a more sustainable future.
• New spaces, North and South – in Yorkshire and in London, delivering new, world-class physical spaces designed to welcome future generations of visitors and users.

Our Knowledge Matters strategy (PDF) contains more detail across all of these themes, and how they specifically apply to our services, our sites, our staff and our users. We are delighted to be able to share with you the next chapter of our journey as the national library, and look forward to discussing it further as we roll it out over the coming months.

If the past five decades of the Library’s development have taught us anything, it is the enduring value of having a vision – combined with planning, expertise, creativity and collaboration. Although the challenges may be considerable, if we can stay true to those principles and build on the work of our predecessors, we can face the next fifty years with confidence and optimism.

Roly Keating

Chief Executive, British Library