Managing Library Services for Children and Young People: A Practical Handbook

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (1999), "Managing Library Services for Children and Young People: A Practical Handbook", Library Review, Vol. 48 No. 2, pp. 95-111. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1999.48.2.95.3

It is good to read a book on this subject which looks at it from a policy‐making and strategic perspective. The processes are there, nonetheless, but not just that. It is about time a book like this appeared in a field where, for far too long, writing has been strong on technical and literary knowledge and on idealism but weak on hard‐nosed strategic planning. Conceptually, too, the book is interesting, with in effect three sections, one opening up the management techniques needed for survival and growth in times of rapid change, another outlining strategies worth using with key areas of service for children and young people (like under‐fives, teenagers, special needs users), and the third showing how a strategic approach has an effect on services, stock, and education. It is a refreshing book, too, because it reminds the reader just what has been happening on the wider policy stage – above all the Department of National Heritage report Investing in Children: The Future of Library Services for Children and Young People (HMSO, 1996) and the Comedia Report by Greenhalgh and Worpole, Libraries in a World of Cultural Change (UCL Press, 1995), ironic in a time of perceived gloom about cuts.

Blanshard draws on her experience as Head of Leeds Library and Information Services (and before that in community information in Hertfordshire), her work on Children and Young People: Library Association Guidelines for Public Library Services and with ASCEL (the Association of Senior Children’s and Education Librarians) to provide credible and coherent applications and examples of the strategic and managerial ideas – she works out a SWOT for a children’s service, provides examples of measurable objectives, discusses decision making based on market research data, describes how children became active participants in the Leeds consultation exercise in 1996, and provides practicable ideas for quality monitoring. This is a book for policy‐makers as well as for professionals who run children’s libraries, and, in aiming successfully at both groups, Blanshard does a really good job. Really useful is part two where, following a common structural form throughout, she applies strategy to different areas of service by user group (such as special needs) and by task (for example IT and budget and staffing), stressing the importance at the end of an integrated strategy.

Some theory wanders in (time management, management style, leadership, force‐field analysis) but it’s all applied, simple, clear, and credible. Up‐to‐date, too, with useful stuff on the opportunities and challenges of Internet access, the public library role in relation to information skills and the curriculum, selecting CD‐ROMs and graphic novels, and providing tangible support (such as homework clubs) for children in the community. The book deals with the here and now, not some artificial utopia where children look like Ardizzone lookalikes, and says plainly that public libraries have got a real job and a real opportunity in today’s and tomorrow’s world, and that they deserve the best strategic minds behind their work. It’s a long time since I’ve heard that in a professional field where most of the rhetorical energy is applied to libraries in schools. Cinderella has come of age.