Monthly Archives: October 2020

Towards Safe Housing in Supportive Communities: The Contribution of Libraries

Today marks World Habitat Day, created in 1985 in order to draw attention to the importance of safe and adequate housing, located in a place that enables residents to access public green and open spaces, employment opportunities, health-care services, schools, childcare centres and other social facilities.

This is a key issue. Those who do not have access to safe housing too often struggle to obtain formal work or much needed social benefits, and find it difficult to enjoy other rights, such as to health (a point made painfully clear during the COVID-19 pandemic).

Critically, it is also too often a hidden problem, with those experiencing homelessness or inadequate housing confined to parts of cities and towns which are rarely visited by others, or actively trying to hide their status out of embarrassment.

We are a long way from solving this problem too, not only in countries which still have high levels of informal housing, but even in richer ones where high housing prices and difficult rules around accessing benefits may risk excluding many.

As institutions strongly embedded in communities, and with a mission to respond to their needs, libraries both experience, and are active in looking to respond to this situation.

In order to mark World Habitat Day 2020, we highlight three ways in which they are helping:

 

A Refuge from the Street: clearly any long-term solution to poor quality or insufficient housing is investment in building or renovation. This is outside of the mandate of libraries.

However, as IFLA’s Guidelines on Library Services to Persons Experiencing Homelessness underline, a home is not just somewhere to go at night, but also to go during the day. Indeed, it may be possible to be less conspicuous in a library than on the street, providing a moment of privacy.

Realising this potential is not necessarily a given, and libraries themselves are likely to need to make an effort in order to ensure that they provide the space and support users experiencing homelessness (including temporary or unstable housing) may need.

Rules, practices and behaviours (and even design) can risk inadvertently leaving users feeling unwelcomed, in particular when users experiencing homeless also have other characteristics that leave them at risk of marginalisation. The Guidelines provide excellent tools for addressing this.

 

A Stepping-Stone to Support: libraries in many countries have a well-established role not just as a provider of information and services, but also as a portal to those offered by others. Indeed, people may feel less stigma coming to a library to apply for social payments or join support schemes than walking through the door of a benefits office or job centre.

Many libraries are already providing access to such possibilities even without making a special effort. Yet there are also examples of more intense collaborations, where libraries partner with other organisations addressing homelessness to realise this potential most effectively, or alternatively hire social workers or invite representatives of other organisations to come into the library.

Clearly, library services can also be specifically focused on communities experiencing insecure housing, with the public library in Kibera, one of the biggest informal settlements in Africa playing a key role in supporting education, while libraries in shelters in Indonesia and Malaysia to provide skills support and training.

 

From a District to a Community – Libraries as Hub: as set out at the beginning of this blog, quality housing is not just about the rooves, walls, plumbing and cables, but also access to local services. As set out in the Declaration of this year’s World Urban Forum, libraries are one of the core cultural services to which communities should have access.

This sense of library as part of the social infrastructure of any community (an idea most recently associated with the work of Eric Klinenberg), or as a third place or community living room is a well-established one. As set out in a recent World Bank report, libraries can indeed be at the heart of inclusive regeneration policies.

 

Many of the examples given here of course date from before the COVID-19 pandemic. The obligation to stop in-person services has certainly seriously restricted possibilities to support. Nonetheless, there are strong examples of libraries helping by distributing computer equipment to shelters, providing sanitisers or hygiene facilities, or supporting food banks, alongside more general efforts to leave the WiFi to help people get online.

While it remains unclear when a full return to physical service provision will be possible, it is likely that the crisis we are currently facing will leave many more people facing challenges associated with poor or insecure housing. Libraries can be part of the response.

A Vital Job at a Difficult Time: Libraries Supporting Teachers During COVID-19

The closure of schools as part of the response to COVID-19 has had major consequences that have not only been felt in the short-term, but that may continue to be felt well into the future.

Teachers have been obliged to change their way of working dramatically at short notice, going from in-person teaching to online. This has forced a rapid learning process which, however successful, has still left the frustration of not being able to interact with and support students in person.

In turn, while many are still able to continue to work from home, teachers have again been among the first to return to their jobs.

Of course, librarians in all library types involved in promoting education and learning, will share these feelings. Stories of shifting activities online, adapting and innovating using digital technologies, and overcoming challenges are common to both professions.

But the shared experiences are not just limited, in abstract terms, to the type of work being done. Collaborative working is also happening in reality, on the ground, with librarians working hard to support and complement the work of teachers, even in difficult times.

To mark World Teachers Day 2020, this blog highlights just some of the examples we have seen of support being given:

 

From Physical to Digital Materials: clearly one key form of support provided by librarians to teachers was access to materials both to support lessons, and to encourage wider reading (itself a key driver of literacy skills).

Even with libraries physically closed, this role has continued, for example at the Marisa Escola Social Santa Monica in Brazil, where the library engaged closely with teachers in their lesson planning to identify and provide access to appropriate materials. With so many materials available on the internet, help in finding the right ones has been strongly appreciated.

Similarly, the Portuguese School Libraries Network created consultation hours where teachers could approach school librarians in order to identify available materials for lessons. Meanwhile in Massachusetts, United States, school librarians joined teacher Zoom meetings in order to understand needs, as well as proactively reaching out to set out how they could help.

Other libraries have stepped up, with the National Library of Spain for example expanding and promoting its offer of curated materials to support education.

 

Continued Support for Literacy: another key way in which libraries support teachers is by helping develop the wider literacy skills that ensure that students can engage more effectively with other subjects on the curriculum. School and public libraries in Malaysia, for example, have used social media and other tools to advance the country’s wider programme for reading promotion, eNILAM.

School libraries have worked to make the most both of physical and digital collections, even under pandemic conditions. For example, Roosevelt Elementary School in Lakewood, OH, United States set up a ‘book-grab’ service based on a virtual school library, looking to give children as strong a sense of continuity as possible, alongside activities such as ‘battles of the books’.

Children have also, of course, benefitted from work in public libraries to maximise access to collections, develop online storytimes, and in particular, to deliver digital library cards thanks to agreements between schools and libraries.

 

Wider Skills Provision: libraries have also been working hard to realise their potential in providing after-school or other extra-curricular learning opportunities that complement what children learn in school. For example, in Portugal, libraries have coordinated with schools in order to run programmes that start soon after school hours, in order to keep children engaged and learning.

Arlington libraries, VA, USA have encouraged children to create ’quaranzines’ in order to express their creativity and share their experiences, while the National Library of Jamaica has developed programming focused on helping students towards their exams.

While activities such as summer reading challenges (in the northern hemisphere) have often not been possible in person, this has not stopped libraries running programmes online, with the National Library of France running events every week in coordination with the Ministries of Culture and Education. Meanwhile, in the US, libraries are finding new ways to run maker-spaces, teach STEM skills or promote information literacy and critical thinking.

 

These examples of course only scratch the surface. As such, they give just a tiny view of all that libraries can do – and are doing – to help teachers during extraordinary times. Across these, the value of close cooperation between teachers and librarians appears clear, both in order to ensure that teachers understand what libraries can offer, and librarians understand what teachers need.

As the world looks to imagine a future post-COVID, we can hope that a key part of this will be enhanced cooperation with libraries. As we have seen, when cooperation succeeds, students stand to benefit, reducing the risk of long-term negative impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 10-Minute International Librarian #20: Recruit a Friend

The strength of the library field – locally, nationally and globally – is directly connected to the engagement of the people making it up.

The more library and information professionals there are sharing their ideas and experience, the better we can innovate and spread new practices.

The more professionals there are who are ready to speak up and engage in advocacy, the louder our voice is.

Library associations and other groupings are a great means of doing this at every level, providing a space for cooperation, coordination and joint action.

New members do not just gain themselves from involvement, but also bring benefits to the group as a whole.

So for our 20th 10-Minute International Librarian exercise, recruit a friend!

Explain what you gain from working with other members of the profession, at the local, national and international levels.

Explain also why it is so important to work together to ensure that the library field continues to be able to fulfil its missions.

In doing so, you help strengthen our field!

Let us know in the comments below which arguments have worked best for you in convincing others to get involved with the national or global library field.

Good luck!

 

This idea relates to the IFLA Strategy! 3.3 Empower the field at the national and regional levels

As we publish more ideas, you will be able to view these using the #10MinuteInternationalLibrarian tag on this blog, and of course on IFLA’s Ideas Store! Do also share your ideas in the comments box.

Library Stat of the Week #38: 15 year-olds with access to a library tend to be a year ahead in reading skills than those without

Today marks the beginning of School Library Month, and so it’s a great moment to be looking at available data about the connections between libraries and school performance at the global level.

In last week’s Library Stat of the Week, we used Library Map of the World data concerning numbers of school libraries and compared it with data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (OECD PISA).

This week we look further into the PISA data, in particular that from the 2009 assessment which included a number of questions focused on libraries. While this data was the subject of brief analysis in reports published at the time, little else appears to have been written about this.

PISA as a whole is based not only on practical tests of students’ ability in reading, maths and science, but also includes a lot of contextual questions about issues such as students’ background, habits, and the resources available to them.

As such, the results make it possible to look directly for links between reading performance and the presence and use of libraries in schools, based on results from the same students.

This week, therefore, we start by looking at the overall connections between whether students report having access to libraries, and average literacy scores.

Graph 1 displays this for all countries providing data. The length of the bars indicates the difference in points on the PISA reading scale between 15-year-olds reporting that they do, and do not, have access to a library.

A longer red bar to the right indicates a larger gap in favour of 15-year-olds with access to a library, whereas a blue bar to the right indicates a gap in favour of 15-year-olds without access to a library.

Graph 1: Difference in Literacy Scores Between 15-Year-Olds With and Without Library Access

 

The key lesson from here is that across all of the countries surveyed, there is, on average, a 30 point gap in favour of 15-year-olds with access to a library. This represents roughly a year’s worth of education.

At the top end, Hungary and France both indicate score differences of over 90 points (around 3 years of learning), and a further seven countries have score differences over 60 points (around 2 years). Only seven countries see students reporting no access to libraries as scoring higher than those who do.

Graph 2: Library Access Gaps and Literacy Scores

Graph 2 looks further, comparing the figures shown in Graph 1 (on the horizontal (x) axis) with the overall average reading score for each country (on the vertical (y) axis).

Interestingly, this indicates that there is very little connection between the two, implying that at almost every level of overall literacy performance, the positive advantage in favour of students with access to libraries is the same.

Graph 3 digs into the different aspects of the OECD’s measure of reading. In effect, PISA breaks down literacy into three key aspects: access and retrieve information (i.e. find key information within texts), integrate and interpret (understand the meaning of what is said), and reflect and evaluate (cross what is read within texts with existing knowledge).

It also includes scores for both continuous texts (such as articles or books) and non-continuous text (such as often found on websites).

Graph 3: Differences in Scores on Aspects of Reading Skills (Students With minus Students Without Library Access

Once again looking at the gap between the performance of 15-year-olds who do and do not report having access to a library, the Graph shows relatively little variation across the different skills. The strongest connection between access to libraries and skills is on ‘access and retrieve’, which may well make sense in connection with the sort of extensive region that libraries can offer.

 

Overall, the figures here are clearly welcome in terms of supporting arguments about the value of access to libraries. Clearly, correlation is not the same thing as causality, and it is likely that schools and communities that offer libraries may well also invest in offering other forms of support.

 

Find out more on the Library Map of the World, where you can download key library data in order to carry out your own analysis! See our other Library Stats of the Week! We are happy to share the data that supported this analysis on request.