Elena Boretti

What is to be done to promote a positive image and the value of Italian libraries?

@ your library is an international campaign aimed at promoting a positive image of library services and increasing awareness of their true value worldwide. Conceived in 2001 by the ALA, (the America Library Association), the idea was subsequently adopted by the IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (http://www.ifla.org/@yourlibrary/).
The campaign, to which many librarians' organisations worldwide have already adhered, including the AIB (https://www.aib.it/aib/cen/atyourlib.htm), has adopted a logo and using slogans and initiatives, aims at putting across the following messages to the public: libraries are dynamic places, libraries offer opportunities and libraries unite the world.
Development in technology and constant changes are two aspects which, in an age forced to cope meanwhile with general cut-backs in investment in public funding, have fused dangerously with a lack of visibility of the public library service, a fact which has clearly emerged in the course of various surveys across the board.
The library is an institution stemming from and exercising democracy, a generator of development which guarantees the aware participation and the expression of the rights of citizenship. It is a study and research tool, but also a tool for keeping oneself informed and up to date, for promoting literacy, knowledge and cultural identity. For this reason the IFLA/UNESCO guidelines (The public library service: IFLA/UNESCO guidelines for development, drawn up by the workgroup chaired by Philip Gill for the IFLA Section of Public Libraries; Italian edition edited by the AIB Public Libraries National Commission. Rome: AIB, 2002) place particular emphasis on the aspect of a widespread and well distributed service rather than that of the library itself as a place and physical entity: it is by no means chance that the very title given to the guidelines concerns the “public library service” itself, rather than the actual “library”.

In developing communities this service should offer tools of information and knowledge which can contribute to the fulfilment of the basic needs of man and the resolving of problems connected to survival itself, such as education, protecting oneself from AIDS and other diseases, learning how to set up a business.
The context in which the library service was born and developed can be easily observed in highly developed countries, where there is a well developed offer of public services. In these countries the close link existing between a high level of cultural fruition and the presence within the country of an active policy concerning information, research and infrastructures, including the library service, would appear to be quite evident. It is to be noted that in those countries where there is a strong library service, the data concerning the extent of reading are more positive and moreover the publishing industry is more prosperous. It would seem correct to claim that a positive interplay exists within the ambit of the use of cultural services, which comes into force when there is a generally high level of attention, planning and offer: at that point the various sectors which rotate around the book, the media, show business, and historical-cultural heritage all join forces in a single chain.
Recognition of the fact that use of cultural services is a single system, starting off in schools, would mean admitting that it includes not only libraries, archives and museums but also the publishing industry, newspapers, multimedia, show business, television, websites and internet services. Essentially it would be mean understanding that no single one of these sectors can be healthy if the overall health is poor. An informed society will develop only if good quality access to knowledge is possible. If this hypothesis could be demonstrated, or at least if it were shared, publishing companies and the media would surely have a greater interest in a better public library service and therefore invest more in promoting reading. The dynamics involved in the fruition of cultural use and consumption, however, have not yet been sufficiently well understood and are still waiting to be decoded with many blanks yet to be filled: the relationship linking information and culture are not sufficiently clear, for example. The same can be said for the relationships existing between knowledge and social-economic development, between the expenditure on cultural consumption and the fruition of historical and artistic heritage, and between the extent of the domination of the present and the appropriation of historical and cultural identity.

If today we were able to take better control of the relations existing within the “cultural system” there would be no need to talk about “advocacy” for libraries. Advocacy is a word which has no exact translation in Italian. It means “defence” but at the same time “vouching for credibility”, “recognising full value”. Libraries feel the need to conduct campaigns, such as @your library, with this aim, because never more than at the present moment have librarians understood that libraries can contribute to dialogue, which has now become a “global” requirement. On the other hand, never before have those threats, which in the name of varied and opposing interests and visions, doubt the very possibility of attaining such a dialogue, been so powerful.
The papers presented by our overseas guests, who spoke before this introduction, have allowed us insight into the efforts which are being put into supporting and developing library services in other countries. It may well be the case that we have to recognise that here in Italy we have a few extra problems, or at least a specific situation of our own. Instead of assuming a general standpoint on widespread issues concerning information and culture, there is still a deeply rooted conception in Italy which considers as separate cultures, the two cultures of practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge, or intellectual knowledge as Tullio de Mauro calls it (Tullio De Mauro, La cultura degli italiani, edited by Francesco Erbani, Laterza, 2004). In this way the purpose of reading is understood as a kind of follow-up or continuation of official studies or, alternatively, it is identified with a kind of literature which aims at providing pleasure or edification; historical heritage may be related to protection or marketability, but it does not exploit the relationship with life long learning or the regeneration of creative capability: show business and to a large extent also the media, multimedia and internet are given over to the entertainment industry and, as such, belong to a separate field, distinct from that of learning in order to produce. Fragmentation, therefore, in the approach to different aspects instead of looking towards reunification in a role of skilled vision and general comprehensive planning. Different statistical surveys of the same type often deal with the various sectors separately, and the terminology used differs accordingly. Editorial marketing surveys on reading use subdivisions and compartments and adopt methods which are completely different from and in no way comparable to those used when surveying the reading of the public in a library. The very data on editorial production itself are only partially usable by the libraries. In this way, each sector thus remains closed off and isolated, without it being possible to obtain wider syntheses and the reciprocal exchange of useful information.

With the declared aim of advocacy and lobby, the IFLA recently published a draft of world library statistics (IFLA, Global Library Statistics 1990-2000, http://www.ifla.org/III/wsis/wsis-stats4pub_v.pdf). Last year AIB and ISTAT published the first national statistics on Italian public libraries, and in doing so, provoked a great deal of discussion. Unfortunately, there was also a lot of scandalmongering involved, starting with the headlines, not the contents of the articles – which appeared in the newspaper Sole 24 ore (“Sole 24 ore”, 30 June 2003).
This year, libraries are involved in a campaign against copyright fees on library loans, a practice which has provoked a lot of talk about royalties and the expediency of a library having the onus of such deductions from its funds, in a country where the reading system is already weak and is rather more in need of a positive boost or “marketing” campaign.
It is clear that libraries can gain more visibility and credibility by organising themselves into a national network, a system capable of adding digital services to its offer. It is also true that to succeed fully in these aims, libraries need people who believe in them and who want to invest in them. This is one of the reasons for the advocacy activity undertaken in many parts of the world.

What do the guests at this round table think of all this? What do they think could be done in the specific reality of Italy to sustain the development of services offering access to information and knowledge such as, amongst others, libraries? What responsibilities do librarians hold? What contribution could come from other professions? Why is it that services and facilities can attract attention only if there is some possibility of involving them in some scandal or other? And to gain positive media attention, is the only space available to them really restricted to announcements of initiatives and events?