Tag Archives: advocacy

The 10-Minute International Librarian #47: (Re)read the Sustainable Development Goals

It’s clear – sometimes high-level policy documents can seem a long way away from day-to-day work.

They deal in big ideas and big concepts, and can feel too much to do much about on your own.

At the same time, they can also offer an opportunity to think into the long term, as well as understand the ideas – and words – that preoccupy those in power.

As such, they can be a motivator for action, as well as a tool for advocacy.

There are few better examples than the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – 17 high level objectives, running over 15 years.

While the overall 2030 Agenda, set out in a UN Resolution from 2015, comes to over 30 pages, the goals themselves are easy to read and understand.

So for our 47th 10-Minute international Librarian exercise, (re)read the Sustainable Development Goals.

You may well already have gone through them once or twice, but it can be surprisingly useful to refresh your memory.

Sometimes you will spot possibilities or connections you did not see before. Sometimes it’s just useful to have the reminder of the global goals that all governments have committed to work to achieve.

By looking through all of them, you can also think about how wide the contribution of great libraries to societies, economies and culture can be.

Share your experiences of using the SDGs in your thinking and planning in the comments below.

Good luck!

 

This idea relates to the IFLA Strategy! 1.1 Show the power of libraries in delivering the Sustainable Development Goals.

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 below.

Highlighting the Role of Libraries in Protection and Promotion of Diverse Cultural Expressions

2021 is the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development, and IFLA has been helping libraries identify where they fit in – and how they can advocate for their role.

The UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions is an international framework in which Member States commit to promoting conditions that will allow creativity and the creative economy to thrive. You can learn more about this Convention with IFLA’s Get Into the 2005 Convention Guide.

We have examined some of the broader ways in which libraries open the door to cultural participation in a recent article. Key values upheld by libraries which allow cultural participation and protection include providing access to information, education, and lifelong learning opportunities, promoting digital, media and information literacy skills, and carrying out cultural heritage preservation.

Through our advocacy, which highlights how libraries connect their communities to all forms of cultural creation and participation, we can help build awareness of the important role of libraries in society. To do this effectively, there are four useful steps you can take:

  1. Set an advocacy goal
  2. Identify your audience
  3. Clarify your advocacy message and ask
  4. Provide examples that support your advocacy message

This article will walk you through these steps and suggest actions that you can take to advocate for the role of libraries role in cultural participation. You will be strongest working with your association if this exists, but of course contributions from individual libraries will add to this.

Step 1: Defining your Goal: Including Libraries in National Reporting

From the beginning, it is important to have an objective for your advocacy in mind. In this case, you will want to ensure that libraries and examples of relevant library programmes are included in your country’s next Period Report to the 2005 Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.

This document is a result of the fact that State Parties to the 2005 Convention are required to submit a report every four years. These reports detail the policies and measures they have put in place, as well as any challenges they have encountered.

These reports are an important way for civil society and other stakeholders to engage with government officials and demonstrate progress being made towards implementing the Convention. Find out more.

Periodic Reports in 2021 and 2022

The following countries will be preparing Period Reports in the next two years. Note that the 2021 deadline for State Parties to submit their report to UNESCO is 30 June.

2021: Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Comoros, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guyana, Iraq, Morocco, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Qatar, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Serbia, Turkey, Venezuela

2022: Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Czechia (Czech Republic), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Lesotho, Malawi, Republic of Korea, Trinidad and Tobago, Ukraine

Step 2: Identify your Target Audience: National Points of Contact

A next step in effective advocacy is to identity your audience – in particular who will take the critical decisions, and who might influence them.

In order to achieve the goal of including libraries in your country’s next periodic report, your main audience would be your country’s National Point of Contact for the 2005 Convention.

National Points of Contact

State Parties to the 2005 Convention have each designated a point of contact responsible for information-sharing with relevant Ministries and public agencies. These contact points gather information from both governmental and non-governmental sources and assist in the drafting of the quadrennial periodic reports.

Find your National Contact Point here.

You may also want to understand who can help you in convincing the national point of contact. These may be decision- and policymakers at the local or national level, institutions, civil society organisations, inter-governmental organisations, or other stakeholders. For example, are there specific libraries which could help, cultural associations which make strong use of libraries, or key journalists or thinkers?

 

Step 3: Clarify your Message and Ask: the Recognition of Libraries

With a clear goal and understanding of your target, you can then work out how to clearly state why your audience should consider libraries as important to their work (that is your message). This will be at the heart of your advocacy, in meetings, preparing blogs or articles, on social media and beyond.

You should also define clearly what you would like them to do, in order to make things simple for the decision-maker(s) (that is your ask).

You will want to define and draft these in a way (and a language) that is appropriate for your setting, but you can use the below as a starting point.

Message:

Libraries and their staff have a key role in preserving and providing the widest possible access to culture. They can foster an environment where diverse cultural expressions are encouraged, valued, shared, and protected – an environment in which a strong creative economy can thrive. Core values that the Convention upholds are also values that libraries champion and enable. These include freedom of information and expression, participatory democratic societies, linguistic diversity, the fundamental role of education, and recognition of the importance of the digital environment in education, creating and providing access to culture.

Ask:

That in preparation of the upcoming Periodic Report, the National Point of Contact considers including examples from your country’s libraries which demonstrate how libraries have had a role in implementing the 2005 Convention and addressing challenges.

 

Step 4: Provide Examples of Libraries Contributing to the Convention’s Goals

Backing up your message with a selection of examples from your experience and that of other libraries adds power to your advocacy.

In this case, it would be a good idea to align your library’s examples with the goals of the 2005 Convention. Finding examples that align with the four goals set out in the Convention can help make a strong case to your National Contact Point for their inclusion in the Report.  The reporting period is four years, so examples can come from within that time frame.

Goal 1: Support sustainable systems of governance for culture

This might include examples of programmes, initiatives, or services that:

  • Promote information and awareness-raising activities for the culture and creative sector
  • Build capacity and/or provide training for artists and cultural professionals
  • Give support to medium, small, or micro-enterprise creative industries, such as promoting local authors and publishers, making space for art marketplaces or hosting writers or artists in residence
  • Contribute to participatory decision-making regarding cultural policy, such as making spaces for dialogue with government authorities (i.e. meetings, working groups).
  • Support digital literacy and promotion of creativity and cultural content in the digital environmental (skills and competences, creative spaces, innovation, research and development, etc.)

Goal 2: Achieve a balanced flow of cultural goods and services and increase the mobility of artists and cultural professionals

This might include examples of programmes, initiatives, or services that:

  • Connect potential beneficiaries of mobility funds to related information resources or training services
  • Participate in writing and other arts residencies or cultural events like festivals that host travelling artists or cultural professionals – notably from developing countries
  • Celebrate potentially little-known works by a diverse range of writers and other creators

 

Goal 3: Integrate culture in sustainable development frameworks

This might include examples of programmes, initiatives, or services that:

  • Promote the inclusion of culture in sustainable development plans and strategies
  • Support or facilitate cultural programmes at the regional, urban and/or rural levels, especially community-based initiatives
  • Help to ensure the right to participation in cultural life and access to culture, especially addressing the needs of disadvantaged or vulnerable groups.

 

Goal 4: Promote human rights and fundamental freedoms

This might include examples of programmes, initiatives, or services that:

  • Raise awareness of the right to participate freely in cultural life
  • Support women’s full participation in cultural life
  • Collect and manage data related to gender equality in the cultural and creative sectors
  • Advocate for writers and other artists and take a stand against limits to artistic freedom of expression

Next Steps

When you are prepared with your advocacy message, ask, and examples – it is time to reach out to the contact person you have identified. You could use the below message as a template:

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am contacting you from [LIBRARY ASSOCIATION/LIBRARY], located in [CITY]. I have noted that our country is a State Party to the 2005 Convention for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, and that you are due to submit a periodic report in [YEAR].

In order to best demonstrate the work within [COUNTRY] to protect and promote diverse cultural expressions, it would be beneficial to include the work that libraries have done in this area over the past four years.

Libraries and their staff have a key role in preserving and providing the widest possible access to culture. They can foster an environment where diverse cultural expressions are encouraged, valued, shared, and protected – an environment in which a strong creative economy can thrive. Core values that the Convention upholds are also values that libraries champion and enable. These include freedom of information and expression, participatory democratic societies, linguistic diversity, the fundamental role of education, and recognition of the importance of the digital environment in education, creating and providing access to culture.

Some examples from our country that impact on the goals of the 2005 Convention include:

[Goal number: List examples, be brief but specific. Provide links to more information if possible]

On behalf of [LIBRARY ASSOCIATION/LIBRARY], I hope that you will consider including these examples, as they contribute to the implementation of the 2005 Convention and showcase the dedication of the nation’s libraries to this work. I remain available to answer questions or provide additional information.

We can help!

Do not hesitate to reach out to IFLA for support in your advocacy. If you have examples in mind but would like further input or require addition support in crafting your advocacy approach – be in touch. We are happy to help.

Start by emailing: Claire.mcguire@ifla.org

The costs of non-access (part 2): why it matters when uses of works are prevented or complicated

In a post last week, we looked at the importance of being able to explain why non-investment in libraries matters.

As highlighted, in difficult budgetary times, governments are faced with the challenge of how to make cuts while causing least pain.

Being able to explain the harm that reducing or freezing library spending can create is therefore an important part of advocacy.

But as set out in another blog, decisions about funding are often just one side of the same coin as decisions about what libraries can do with their funding, notably as regards copyright.

A generous budget with highly restrictive rules on how resources are used can lead to a library having the same impact as one with a much smaller budget, but one where there are much broader possibilities to use works.

So just as we need to be able to talk about the cost of not investing financially in libraries, we should also learn to set out the harm done when library users are not able to use works.

There is a particular need for such arguments when it comes to copyright, given that the argument will often be made that the sorts of exceptions and limitations that allow library users and libraries to carry out such activities come at the cost of sales, or at least licensing revenues.

Such arguments are even used in the case of books that are no longer on sale at all, on the premiss that they may at some time in the future come back into commerce.

Of course, the evidence of such library activities actually causing harm is limited. The European Commission’s impact assessment on the draft Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market made clear that allowing libraries to preserve works, or library users to carry out text and data mining would not cause any significant damage.

This does not mean that there is no cost to rightholders from such acts. It isn’t possible to prevent a reader from borrowing a book or copying a couple of pages just because she or he could also buy it – this would be to turn against the universalist mission of libraries.

Similarly, there will often be a collective management organisation ready to invent a licensing offer for a new type of use, and so claim that copyright exceptions cost revenue.

To convince decision-makers to legislate in favour of copyright exceptions and limitations, we therefore need to be show that the cost of denying or complicating access is higher. So what arguments can be used?

Lending: when libraries are not able to lend books, this effectively condemns those who are not able to buy them to exclusion from access to culture. It can also choke off a means for new authors to be discovered by readers. Preventing digital lending will tend to exclude readers who are not able to get to a library, for reasons of disability, health, distance, or – obviously enough – COVID-19 restrictions.

Research (TDM): allowing uses of works for text and data mining improves the quality of the results of mining activities, thereby advancing science. Preventing such uses will have the inverse effect. In particular in the case of machine learning, there is growing awareness that limiting the range of works that can be used for learning can lead to biases and problems.

Education: teachers and learners benefit from being able to use the best suited materials for the context and situation, in order to achieve the best results. When teachers are obliged to take time to find works they can use – or rely on a limited offer – then they are less able to do their jobs. Similarly, a lack of adequate exceptions can restrict the production of open educational resources.

Preservation: this is a core function of libraries, ensuring that the works of yesterday and today are available into the future, recognised in international law. Where it is made more difficult, fewer works can be preserved. Ironically, the imposition of restrictions on preservation copying, motivated by a desire to sustain revenues, can risk reducing the chances of the work itself surviving into the future.

Document Supply: while a traditional activity of libraries using physical works, not all copyright laws allow for digital document supply. This has an obvious impact on those whose research is facilitated by being able to access often unique books held far away. Without this, the scope of research is unnecessarily limited to the works that are available on site, defeating the object of research in the first place.

Access for People with Print Disabilities: the challenge tackled by the Marrakesh Treaty was the book famine – the tiny share of books worldwide which are available in accessible formats. A failure to allow exceptions left the choice (and responsibility) for making such copies available in the hands of rightholders, often themselves unable to make the switch. The failures caused by a lack of reform led to violation of the right of people with print disabilities to education, and to participation in scientific and cultural life.

 

As in our first blog on the costs of non-access, such arguments should be used relatively sparingly. It is important to be positive as well, focusing on how reforms could lead to better services to – and support for – communities. Yet being able to underline costs can be helpful in making it clear that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.

As part of your advocacy, you are therefore encouraged to gather stories of problems – of the costs of non-access.

Fostering creation of Open Educational Resources

From 1 to 5 March 2021, libraries take part in Open Education Week alongside educational stakeholders.

In November 2019, UNESCO adopted a recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). This recommendation, a result of a consensus among 193 Member States, recognises the importance of supporting the development, sharing and use of openly licenced educational materials to improve access to education for all.

Libraries, as a driving force in educational issues through their missions of access to information and education, have a role to play in fostering the development of OER and thus in advancing this work.

The UNESCO recommendation is divided into five areas of action:

Building the capacity of stakeholders to create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute OER;
Developing supportive policy for OER;
Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER;
Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER; and
Promoting and reinforcing international cooperation in OER.

These 5 areas of action make it possible to identify areas for action by all educational actors, including libraries. They include two levels of action, at the structural level and at the practical level. Libraries can engage in both.

At the structural, or policy level, libraries can work to influence the development of favourable open educational resource policies (many of which will be supportive of wider library missions). Crucially, the Recommendation represents an acknowledgement from countries that education is key and should be open to everyone without regard to their wealth, where they are born, the colour of their skins, their gender, their religion, age or abilities. Knowledge must be open and freely accessible. This is a powerful message.

At the practical level, libraries can also contribute to building a stronger Open Educational Resource chain. This chain involves the creation, access, re-use, adaptation and distribution of OERs, but also the development of institutional policies needed to structure these resources, including national and international platforms.

Here are some suggestions:

  • Identify the different actors that can play a role in the development of open educational resources, including the library team, the educational team, teachers, researchers.
  • Mobilise these actors through different actions: presentation of the objectives of the development of open educational resources, why it is important to tackle these issues of openness and the benefits this can bring to the library, the university and users in general.
  • Create opportunities to raise awareness of these issues or develop resources: webinars, meetings, design workshops,
  • Create opportunities to start creating OERs together: design templates, provide workshops to take the time to focus on the creation of OER but also how to re-use and distribute them.
  • Identify resources or professionals working on the same topic and contact them to exchange practices. Become part of a network or set up a discussion group to exchange good practices or existing structural elements that will enable you to move forward.
  • Identify internal or external platforms that could bring together your institution’s resources in order to facilitate their discovery by users.
  • Draw on the potential of open educational resources to fulfil the primary mission of libraries and knowledge dissemination centres: to build a sustainable means of providing quality open educational resources.
  • Bear in mind the reputational dividends: the constitution of quality open educational resources (materials or courses) by recognised organisations can give considerable visibility to the institution, especially if we consider the impact on the visibility of open access items.
  • Invite external professionals to raise awareness on this issue within your institution: working with an external contact person allows you to combine neutrality but also a national or international perspective.

Discover the document of SPARC Europe on Open Education in European Libraries of High Education.

 

A quick word about an exceptional exception (you should get to know or start to consider using)

As part of the fair use and fair dealing week, IFLA is delighted to welcome Eric Chin, from the General Counsel at the National Library Board of Singapore, to share his views on the importance of making the best use of the flexibilities provided by the fair use and fair dealing provisions.

 

  1. Your mission as a librarian is to enable teaching, learning and research.  How much you can achieve depends on the extent to which libraries can collect, preserve, give access, present and exhibit library materials.  This in turn depends a lot on copyright laws that govern how library materials can be used.

 

  1. For example,  one of the exclusive rights of a copyright owner is the right to make a copy.  This impacts your day to day work ranging from the request by a teacher to make a copy of a photograph for a lesson, to whether the much used book that is deteriorating and is out of print (but still in copyright) can be digitised to preserve the content from being totally lost, to whether a video in an obsolete format (but still in copyright) can be migrated to a new digital format;  and to whether the non-profit museum down the road can make a copy of part of a map for an exhibition.

 

  1. Before we go further, it must be said that there is nothing wrong about the principle that copyright owners have exclusive rights for a period of time as just reward for endeavours and ability and it is beneficial to society because, among other things, it does create incentives for the production of more library materials.  It is not often said but it is not unfair to say that copyright is partly the lifeblood of a librarian’s job!  The question is about how this is balanced against what rights or exceptions there are to also ensure that exclusive rights do not act as unintended and undue barriers to progress in science, in the preservation of heritage and culture and the dissemination of knowledge.

 

  1. So copyright laws typically include a set of provisions that act as exceptions that will  allow for your mission as a librarian.  I say “typically” because copyright law is territorial in nature and each country has its own set of copyright laws. This means the scope of exceptions can vary (very) widely from country to country.  To see where you stand in the wide spectrum of copyright laws, it is useful to look at this study covering 191 countries: https://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/copyright/en/sccr_35/sccr_35_6.pdf (the Study on Exceptions).

 

  1. Starting by knowing where you stand allows you to consider if you need to advocate for copyright exceptions that fellow librarians in other parts of the world can already use but you simply cannot.  What you cannot do will have a negative impact on the amount of teaching, learning and research that can be done in your own country. In an ideal world for librarians,  all countries will learn from one another and all will level up until all countries share the most useful exceptions in common. However,  it must sometimes start with ground up advocacy to the right powers that be in our countries, which is partly in our own hands.

 

  1. Looking at the range of exceptions in each country in the Study on Exceptions, you will see a fair few countries that do not list what is called “fair dealing” or “fair use” (collectively Fair Use) among the exceptions. Fair Use is a general exception that anyone can use and is not a specific exception available only to libraries but libraries can benefit greatly from it.  Each country will of course have an argument to make for its own copyright traditions and doctrine that their society may be comfortable with, but in my own view,  countries that do not have this exception may be missing out on an exceptional exception.

 

  1. Most library specific exceptions are generally prescriptive in nature with fixed criteria that must be met in an unchanging way in order to become applicable and this oftentimes can make it challenging for us especially in the fast changing digital era. On the other hand,  Fair Use is special because it is normally stated in a flexible way.  Certain broad factors (that are also usually not exhaustive) are set out as matters to be considered in a fair use analysis such as whether there is transformative use (i.e. use of the original library material or part of it in a beneficial way to society that is different from the intended use of the original) and whether the amount of the original library material used is appropriate in the circumstances including bearing in mind whether it would unfairly eat into or destroy the livelihood of the owner of the copyright.  Those who have had the benefit of using Fair Use will know that these broad factors for fair use analysis are such that the law in Fair Use can automatically adjust to new, evolving and challenging situations that you will face in your daily work.

 

  1. Around the world, in countries that have the Fair Use exception, it has been crucial in allowing for the use of library materials (including copying to an appropriate extent only) for research or study, criticism or review, reporting of news, to support teaching and learning,  to publicise library programmes, to create exhibitions, to preserve at risk items, to enabling use for those who are disabled and to making a record of ephemeral but culturally significant matters posted on the internet.

 

  1. This short piece cannot hope to set out all the details of what the best practices and exemplars are for Fair Use that gets the balance right between your mission and the rights of creators and publishers,  but urges you, as a librarian, to see where you stand in the spectrum of copyright laws that may be available across the world to support your mission.  As it is Fair Use Week,  and if you are one of those that does not have the benefit of Fair Use or actually do have the benefit of such an exception but have not used it,  go find out about it through the lawyer or other experts supporting your library and see how it can be fairly used.  If you then think it is useful, consider how you can advocate for it to be introduced or used as part of your workplan in the not too distant future.

 

  1. In the meantime,  it is Fair Use week and time to use those research skills to discover and read more about an exceptional exception that is not a fair weathered friend to librarians!

 

Eric Chin

General Counsel (and would be librarian and archivist)

National Library Board, Singapore

 

Note:  The views set out here are personal and do not represent the official view of any organisation I am associated with.

 

How HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) supports Libraries in pandemic times

By Sara R. Benson, Copyright Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Check out Sara’s podcast titled Copyright Chat at https://go.illinois.edu/copyrightchat

It’s Fair Use/Fair Dealing week and that means it is once again time to let folks know about exciting developments with the HathiTrust Digital Library. Last year on Fair Use Week I highlighted the ability of researchers to engage with copyright protected materials for text and data mining through the HathiTrust Research Data Capsule. This year, I would like to make readers aware of the HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service or ETAS.

What is the ETAS? It is a portal allowing affiliated libraries to permit their patrons to access in copyright works remotely. Why is the ETAS available? COVID 19 has caused many libraries, such as my own (the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Library) to temporarily limit physical access to library materials. Almost half of our collection, however, has been digitized and is available in the HathiTrust corpus. Normally, users can only perform searches for how many times a given term appears in copyright protected works in the HathiTrust corpus. However, due to COVID 19, the ETAS allows users to view (but not download) entire copyright protected works remotely. Libraries participating must have the physical book in their collection and agree not to lend out the physical book. Thus, the book is being lent remotely on a one-to-one ratio to the Library’s physical collection on the basis of fair use. This type of lending is made possible because it is non-commercial, educational in purpose and justified due to the emergency nature of the pandemic virus. As noted by April Hathcock in a public statement created by copyright specialists and available at https://tinyurl.com/tvnty3a, “fair use is made for just these kinds of contingencies.”

So, as you celebrate Fair Use/Fair Dealing week this year, note that the pandemic has brought with it many challenges, but Fair Use has enabled libraries to keep lending their works digitally so that researchers and the public can continue to create, thrive, and produce . . . even during a crisis.

(Pre)Conditions for Success: What Governments Need to Do to Fulfil Libraries’ Potential

Much library advocacy at the moment is focused on how libraries can contribute to the response to, and recovery from, the COVID-19 pandemic.

In previous blogs here, and from libraries and library organisations around the world, there has been a focus on what our institutions can do to build back better – through wider and more meaningful access to information, stronger connectivity, better competences, more rapid innovation, and making the most of culture and heritage.

We promote the importance of school and public libraries in building foundational literacy skills from a young age. Of public and community libraries in promoting inclusion, offering internet access and training, and providing a portal to new opportunities for those at risk of being left out or left behind. Of academic and research libraries in supporting more open science and scholarship, and helping the researchers of tomorrow. Of national and heritage libraries in ensuring that documentary heritage can both inform decision-making today and build identity and community cohesion.

In short, the library vision of the future is of more literate and better informed people, and fairer, more inclusive and more engaged societies.

As before, our staff, services and spaces will be at the heart of this.

Yet these are things that cannot be taken for granted. While libraries and library staff – with the support of organisations like IFLA and other library associations – work to deliver the best possible support in the circumstances, they also rely on the actions of governments and other decision-makers – policies, laws and funding – to fulfil their potential.

This blog sets out five ways in which governments and other decision-makers can support libraries:

1. Ensure that librarians working in frontline roles should benefit from the same vaccine priority as other frontline workers: there is a clear value in ensuring that if libraries are to re-open to provide in-person services, staff should be able to benefit from the protection that vaccination can offer. Of course, this also is a plus for users, who will be able to make use of better staffed institutions, although precautions seem likely to remain necessary until a much larger share of the population is vaccinated.

2. Ensure that libraries benefit from adequate internet connections and hardware: the pandemic has made clear the importance of connectivity in enabling at least some elements of life to continue despite lockdowns, accelerating an existing trend towards digital tools and services. With the need for continued care to limit infections, the ability of libraries to make full use of the internet will remain important for some time to come. Stronger connectivity also opens up possibilities for extending internet access out into communities, for example through TV Whitespace technologies or community networks, allowing users to make more use of library content and beyond, helping to combat digital exclusion.

3. Ensure that libraries are involved in planning: as governments and other decision-makers look to define plans for ongoing response and future recovery, we cannot take for granted that they will understand the specific nature of libraries and the services they offer. Outdated perceptions of our institutions can make things worse, often ignoring the rich programmes of activities and support offered by libraries of all types in the pursuit of their missions. The best solution to this is to make the case to be part of committees or groups which are planning ahead. This can help not just ensure that the rules applying to libraries are relevant, but also open up possibilities to engage in wider programmes and projects.

4. Ensure that libraries are funded and staffed to offer support: while the need for adequate funding to support the work of libraries is nothing new, it is likely to be necessary to make the case as strongly as ever now. This is both because of the pressure on funding that is likely to result from the economic consequences of the pandemic, but also because providing services in a pandemic may simply be more expensive. For example, digital resources can cost a multiple of the price of their physical equivalents, while implementing services under restrictions can prove more staff-intensive. In such situations, innovation and efficiencies alone are unlikely to be enough if a good level of service is to be maintained.

5. Ensure that libraries benefit from flexibilities to carry out their missions: connected to the question of resources is that of what libraries can do with them. It is essential that the public or institutional funding that goes into libraries is not made less effective because of laws and regulation. A key example is around copyright, which determines what uses libraries – and their patrons – can make of works they have acquired or accessed. But other restrictions may also limit what libraries can do, for example by preventing the extension of library card privileges to refugees or others in the community, or by preventing the formation of partnerships.

The subject of how libraries can realise their potential in the context of the response to, and recovery from, COVID-19 will be at the heart of a series of side-events organised at UN regional sustainable development fora in the coming months – watch our website for more, and share your own ideas below!