Balancing the books

He’s still delighted to have landed the head of library policy role he has occupied since January. "I’m very proud of having got a new job at my age," he says, although at 56 he’s hardly ancient.
Dolan was appointed from Birmingham Council, where, among other things, he headed Birmingham Central Library--visited by 5,000 people a day--40 branch libraries and a mobile service. Now his role is to help figure out how libraries in England--both public and private--should develop, and to help the MLA improve on its "advocacy" to both the government and the wider world. "My job is to deliver the journalists’ dreaded thing: positive news," he says. "I want to create a ’national story’ and generate some national ownership."
Dolan makes a casual frontman, but many in the libraries sector identify him as a potential force for dynamism within the often prickly and slow-moving MLA hulk.
But for all his sparkle, Dolan will not necessarily please the Tim Coates camp that says libraries need more money to be spent on books. In the late ’90s, he led the development of a national strategy to equip every UK library with free access to computers and the internet--a project which Dolan later christened the People’s Network and which has been the MLA’s crowning glory ever since.
Today he continues to focus on equipping libraries with multimedia resources: "We have to move on from the period of books versus computers. It’s a banal concern in the present day. It reflects little understanding of the social, educational and technological drivers in the world around us," he says.
His three key words are range, relevance and currency. "It’s about providing the right mix of media, combined with access to global resources," he says. By way of example, the MLA signed a landmark deal with Oxford University Press in February to provide free online access to a raft of prestigious resources including the Oxford English Dictionary. Users can log in at the library or from home using their library card number, Dolan explains animatedly, "so the library starts to step into the virtual era".
A way to maintain "relevant" stocks is by weighting titles towards the interests of particular ethnic or social groups. "They are often not reflected in the mainstream publishing cannon," Dolan says. However, ensuring such relevance means some classics will be pushed off the shelves. "Just like bookshops, most libraries have got to take something out to put something in. A library has a social and cultural purpose in the community that a bookshop does not have to fulfil. That dimension is often overlooked." Accordingly, he argues, they should be modelled "as animated spaces, not as warehouses".
Dolan’s views may be informed by his early memories of Manchester Central Library as a social hub of the city. More recently at Birmingham he was responsible for early years, childcare, youth, and adult education services--"all of which have important strategic connections within the modern library".
Yes, but the core function must be books, the MLA’s detractors would cry. Dolan dismisses their criticism: "The people who use libraries know more about them than the people who pontificate about them."
Similarly, he vehemently rejects calls for libraries to model their managerial and physical set-up more closely on book chains. "A library is not a bookshop." Any argument to the contrary "is based on the erroneous notion that a library’s main purpose is to house and stamp out books". No pun intended, one presumes.