Reaching People: Library Strategy 2020-2025
National Librarian's introduction
In 2015, the National Library of Scotland launched 'The Way Forward: Library Strategy, 2015-2020' as the first of two five-year strategies to take the Library to its centenary in 2025. 'Reaching People: Library Strategy, 2020-2025' is the second strategy, concluding in the year the Library celebrates its 100th anniversary.
There are strong elements of continuity between the two. This is clearest in our continued focus on safeguarding collections and improving access to them. These two areas were strongly supported in our public consultations and link directly to our statutory function as Scotland’s legal deposit library.
However, there are important differences between the strategies. 'Reaching People: Library Strategy, 2020-2025' will emphasise connecting with multiple audiences and enriching lives with our content and services.
The first five years of our 10-year journey to our centenary focussed on building infrastructure, capacity and resilience, while growing partnerships, reputation and income. The second period concentrates on sharing information, knowledge and experiences with a diverse audience in Scotland and around the globe.
In developing this strategy, we have listened carefully to the results of audience surveys and to user feedback. These have told us clearly about the need to enhance the facilities in the George IV Bridge building in Edinburgh and the desire for greater access to collections in digital formats.
To achieve this, we will launch a series of programmes and projects to deliver important aspects of our plans for the next five years. Work has begun on the potential redevelopment of the main Library building in Edinburgh. A programme of preservation and digitisation of moving image and sound will save some of the most fragile formats in the country from disintegration. A project will be developed to preserve, digitise and make available to the nation Scotland’s newspaper heritage.
We will also continue to explore opportunities to reach people outside Scotland's central belt. We have partially addressed this by significantly expanding our digital services over the last five years. The new strategy aims to intensify this work. The events of 2020 have demonstrated how important this is. In a similar vein, we will bring to the foreground our web-archiving activity and electronic legal deposit of published content as a growing source for Scotland's online memory. In the first wave of initiatives, a large-scale digitisation project with an international partner will be pursued.
The Library will address the silences, including historical biases, in our collections. We will analyse our inventory to identify and recognise under-represented communities to allow us to create a more representative national collection into the future.
A powerful backdrop to our deliberations has been a strong sense of Scotland’s historical and cultural past. Few countries have more fully embraced the ability of literacy, education and civic discourse to improve their people and develop their economy. The Library will continue to be a place where ideas, debate and discussion take place.
We have seen in the year we commence this new strategy how important it is that we are prepared for rapid change which will require flexible working and creative thinking. Our response to the COVID pandemic demonstrated an agility that will frame our thinking for the next decade.
Of equal importance has been the recent publication of 'A Culture Strategy for Scotland' by the Scottish Government (February, 2020) which will provide important national guidance for our work.
The Library strategy has been produced in collaboration with the Library Board, its staff, our partners, groups and individuals. The feedback and ideas are reflected in the final document. I am extremely grateful for all the ideas, enthusiasm and support we have received throughout this conversation about the future shape and direction of the National Library.
Working together, I am confident that' Reaching People: Library Strategy 2020-2025' will make the Library a truly national library fit for the 21st century when we celebrate our 100th birthday.
John Scally
National Librarian
The operating environment
Participation in cultural activities is at a historical high and the overall use of the Library's content is buoyant. However, the way the Library is used is changing. Though the number of reading room visits is steady, we have seen greater numbers visit to view the exhibitions, attend talks and take part in other educational activities.
The way people access culture using digital technology also continues to evolve, so we must keep innovating to meet demand and stay relevant. In the coming years, it will be necessary to deliver our services through multiple channels for those who may not have access to our buildings.
Most of the Library's income is from the Scottish Government. The Library has vast physical collections, requiring more than 150 miles of shelving across four different sites. Our expanding digital collections are held in two datacentres in Edinburgh and Glasgow and, increasingly, in the Cloud.
All of this needs to be regularly refreshed and upgraded to preserve the national collection from threats such as fire, water, bit-rot (deterioration of data) and cyber-attacks. Nevertheless, we know that there are many competing demands and that pressure on public funding is likely to continue. Over the past five years, there has been more reliance on external grants and donations. The diversity of the Library's income will continue to grow.
Although the Library has always been a strong advocate of open access, we know there are socio-economic and geographical variances in how people engage with the Library. Accordingly, themes of equality, diversity and inclusion underpin the new strategy and we know this is an area where we must strive to make our collections and services more representative of the whole nation.
Partnerships will continue to be of critical importance. Our relationship with the Faculty of Advocates goes back more than 300 years and our work with the other five legal deposit libraries is fundamental in collecting, preserving and making available digital and physical content. We continue to learn by working with other organisations and these partnerships help us identify where we can become stronger. Over the past five years, Memoranda of Understanding have been signed with the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, BBC Scotland. The Library has also gone on the road with its touring exhibitions. More of these partnerships and collaborations will help us develop services for the people of Scotland and extend our user base.
Much has been achieved over the past five years. There has been more experimentation and some well-judged risk-taking. We have developed our own voice on social media – a mix of humour and candid views on the role of libraries in an era of misinformation.
What the Library will look like in 2025
The National Library will be a familiar and valued institution across Scotland, recognised for its outstanding collections and services. It will be known as a Library with responsive and accessible services, simple to find and easy to use at the click of a button, the tap of a screen, or by simply walking into one of our buildings.
As Scotland's premier research library, we will be a place where researchers and scholars are valued and supported as our original core audience. We are continually evolving our services and growing our collections to meet their varying needs.
Many of our visitors will be regulars, taking the opportunity to enhance their knowledge of family, community, hobbies or current issues such as climate change. Those studying towards qualifications, pursuing continuous professional development or researching a business idea, will find a mixture of tailored resources to satisfy their information needs. Young people and families will increasingly find the Library a welcoming place, with a growing programme of events designed for them.
The Library's collections will be more comprehensive and more representative of the whole nation. Our physical and digital collecting will be guided by our role as the guardian of the published and recorded memory of Scotland. Our web-archiving and digital collecting activities across the nation will be deeper, wider and more representative. We will address the silences in our collections to ensure that a richer variety of voices, views and experiences are collected, described and curated.
The Library's digital scholarship services will be amongst the best in Europe, delivered through the Data Foundry, a dynamic destination where our data can be downloaded, reused and replayed.
By 2025, we will be a Library that offers a personalised experience to every citizen in Scotland.
Mission, vision and how we work
Mission
To enhance Scotland's international reputation by making a significant and lasting contribution to global knowledge and the memory of the world.
Vision
To create opportunities for people to participate in Scotland's rich cultural life as one of the leading national libraries in Europe.
How we work
The National Library of Scotland is a place for inspiration, exploration, and enjoyment. Everyone is treated with dignity and respect.
These are our guiding principles:
Open: We commit to openness and transparency in all areas of our work. We aim to make our collections and our related work free, open and reusable wherever possible.
Trusted: We provide accurate and reliable information to support debate and discussion.
Inclusive: We are responsive and inclusive as we build and interpret collections for current and future generations. We will challenge ourselves, our assumptions and our policies in order to create a more inclusive collection and a more diverse audience.
Connected: We work collaboratively to improve our services and extend the benefits they offer.
Inspiring: We believe in the power of the collections to change lives through learning, research, discovery and improved wellbeing. We actively support participation in culture and heritage for everyone.
Responsible: We commit to minimising our environmental impact, and to create a more sustainable, resilient and healthy environment for future generations.
Our strategic priorities
Priority 1: Safeguarding collections
Priority 2: Improving access
Priority 3: Engaging audiences
Priority 4: Supporting learning, research and discovery
Priority 5: Developing the organisation
Priority 1: Safeguarding collections
Priority 1: Safeguarding collections
1. We are the guardian of the published and recorded memory of Scotland for current and future generations.
1.1 We will collect, preserve and make available diverse materials that represent the lives and memories of Scotland's people, and which contribute to world knowledge.
1.2 We will work with partners to secure the nation's fragile moving image, sound and newspaper collections.
1.3 We will preserve and make available the online memory of Scotland through our web-archiving activities, placing the nation at the forefront of open content archiving.
1.4 We will work to address the silences in the collections to ensure a richer and more representative variety of voices, views and experiences of 21st century Scotland are collected and curated.
Priority in focus: Preserving the most fragile formats
The challenges of the preservation of moving image and sound heritage are many and varied: nitrate prone to spontaneous combustion, mould spores feeding on the gelatine binder of tapes, obsolete technology, file corruption destroying born-digital material.
We recognise the importance of the task and we have identified the preservation of moving image and sound as a strategic priority to 2025. Preservation through digitisation work on at-risk moving image and sound tape collections continued while we were working from home during lockdown.
We switched our focus from the capture stage to other important stages of the full digitisation process: ingest of previously captured digital files into preservation systems, rights clearance research, cataloguing, remote programmatic generation of access copies and upload to our public website.
When our specialist sound and moving image digitisation facilities at Kelvin Hall re-opened for staff at the end of July, digital capture was the priority with the Audio Preservation Engineer capturing 100 tapes in the first four weeks back in the sound studio, and moving image colleagues working at a similar pace.
This preservation of collections on magnetic tape formats is urgent. We are acting now to save these collections from the mid-1950s to late 2000s. Without mass digitisation the content will be lost because it will be trapped in formats which are effectively obsolete, unsupported, and will become unplayable in the near future.
Priority 2: Improving access
2. We make it easier for people to access the collections.
2.1 We will deliver outstanding digital engagement, helping people to use the collections in the most creative ways possible.
2.2 Joining and using the Library will be simple and seamless, opening up a personalised world of knowledge, learning and entertainment.
2.3 People will have access to more than 10 million of the Library's items in digital format as we complete our 'One Third Digital' initiative.
2.4 It will be easier to discover the Library's special and hidden collections through our programme of online listing, cataloguing and discovery work.
2.5 We will provide a safe and trusted environment for informal learning and activity that promotes wellbeing.
Priority in focus: Bringing the content to you
Since lockdown, the Library has experienced a 40 per cent jump in visits to our websites – this includes record-breaking visits to our world-renowned maps website, and a huge jump in visits to our Moving Image Archive online and digital gallery.
But we knew we could do more to help keep people informed and entertained during this time, so we developed an online programme of events, workshops, family activities and an increased focus on our educational material for children and young people.
Highlights include moving our planned summer exhibition for George IV Bridge, 'Her Century: Scottish Women on Film', online. Curated by our own Dr Emily Munro in partnership with Film Hub Scotland, 'Her Century' is an archival film documenting the role of women in Scottish society spanning Edwardian era to the Thatcher years.
Despite the cancellation of the physical exhibition, we launched the online exhibition on Monday 20 July with the Library's first-ever You Tube premiere. The live premiere was watched by 160 people, and more than 5,000 people viewed the film over the two-month period.
We also commenced an online programme of events to replace the twice-weekly offers at our George IV Bridge building in Edinburgh, and we were delighted to reach more people both in Scotland but also around the world – people tuned in from more than 50 countries. We enjoyed a 466 per cent increase in attendance in comparison to the same time last year, and 38 per cent of attendees had never been to a Library event before.
Personalisation for all
Our collections are huge and diverse, containing something for everyone. We are committed to making it easier for people to access, use, connect and enjoy our collections.
We will develop services that offer every resident in Scotland a personalised and welcoming introduction to the Library and its collections, whether they visit us digitally or in our buildings.
As people join the Library, we will offer them an engaging overview of our collections and services, and the option to receive a selection of items from our collection, that are tailored and relevant to them.
Our personalised service may share a historic map of the town they live in, a video from our Moving Image Archive on a topic that interests them, a page from a 100-year-old newspaper in the month of their birth or a page from a book whose author shares their name.
We will work in collaboration with our existing and new users to learn their needs, ambitions, and goals, so that the services we develop are useful and relevant to them. Where we collect personal data to support these services, we will do this responsibly and with permission.
Priority 3: Engaging audiences
3. We put audiences at the heart of everything we do and offer a rich variety of ways for people to participate and engage with their heritage.
3.1 We will take an audience-led approach to the development and delivery of all the Library's services and cultural experiences.
3.2 We will employ the latest technologies and expert staff to transform our public spaces into inspiring and welcoming destinations for research, discovery, lifelong learning and entertainment
3.3 We will engage communities throughout Scotland with the collections – through touring exhibitions, targeted learning and outreach activities, and innovative online content.
3.4 We will create new programmes and services to reach wider and more diverse audiences and to help support communities around Scotland to thrive.
Priority in focus: New exhibitions and content
We're delighted to announce some new offerings that are scheduled to take place in the coming months.
We will launch 'Struggles for Liberty: African American Revolutionaries in the Atlantic World' – a new online learning resource including materials for teachers, which tells stories of the individual and collective fight for social justice by Frederick Douglass and other enslaved and free Black women, children, and men living in the Atlantic world in the 19th century.
Douglass, who lived in slavery for the first two decades of his life, became one of the most renowned social justice campaigners, authors, activists, and philosophers in world history. The 'History of Black Abolition', section of the resource also looks at the activism of inspirational freedom-fighters, Nathaniel Turner, David Walker, and Maria W Stewart.
Here, stories from slavery are told through books, letters, photographs, and documents held in the National Library, the Walter O and Linda Evans Foundation Frederick Douglass Collection, and across international library holdings.
We are working on two new exhibitions at our George IV Bridge building in Edinburgh. The major exhibition ‘Petticoats and Pinnacles will explore the relationship between women and mountains, focusing on the Scots who travelled, climbed and responded creatively to mountain environments, both in Scotland and across the globe. Through their stories, the exhibition will demonstrate the ways in which these women overcame ideals of femininity, masculinity and social convention to pursue their own goals and ambitions.
The characters range in date from the young Scottish lady who climbed Ben Lomond in 1760 (and was home in time for tea without appearing tired) to the first all-female expedition to the Himalayas in 1955, with a supporting cast up to the modern day. Better known women, such as Nan Shepherd and Isabella Bird, will sit alongside less familiar names such as Evelyn McNicol, Una Cameron, Maria Ogilvie Gordon, Jane Inglis Clark and Jane Ellen Duncan.
Our Collections in Focus display, 'The Eye of a Stranger: Henrietta Liston's Travels', explores the writing of Henrietta Liston, botanist and diarist, who sailed to the heart of the Ottoman Empire in 1812. Henrietta's husband, the Scottish diplomat Robert Liston, had been called out of retirement and reappointed British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte at Constantinople (Istanbul). Henrietta kept travel journals and wrote letters which, preserved in the Liston Papers at the National Library, offer a unique vision of Turkey in the early 19th century.
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Listons' final departure from the Ottoman Empire. This year also sees Bilkent University, Ankara and the National Library’s collaborative venture make Liston's significant, yet never-before-published, writings on Turkey available for the first time in print. Published by Edinburgh University Press, 'Henrietta Liston's Travels: The Turkish Journals 1812–1820' is accompanied by our online resource offering a digitised collection of her manuscript journals from both her Turkish residency and her earlier time in the United States.
Priority 4: Supporting learning, research, and discovery
4. We encourage and support research, learning and discovery.
4.1 We will support the contribution of new knowledge to the world by developing research collaborations and research fellowships.
4.2 We will encourage investigations of the collections from different angles, uncovering untold stories and giving fresh perspectives on society and culture, including key areas of public debate such as climate change and misinformation.
4.3 We will develop our digital scholarship service by presenting the collections as data, opening up new possibilities for research, learning and creativity.
4.4 We will provide people with access to learning through our collections in support of the curriculum, lifelong learning, creative practice and continuous professional development.
Priority in focus: Membership of professional networks
Just before the publication of this new strategy, we were delighted to learn that our application to join CENL was accepted by the membership.
CENL (The Conference of European National Librarians) is a network of 48 national libraries in 45 European countries. CENL works to advance the cause of Europe's national libraries, reinforcing our role in preserving the continent's cultural heritage and making it accessible to all.
At the National Library of Scotland, we have had a long-held ambition to be part of CENL, and we very much look forward to working with our national library colleagues from other leading European memory institutions to advance our collective mission.
Digital scholarship
Digital scholarship is a broad term encompassing the use of computational or digital methods to enable new forms of research, learning, teaching or creative outputs. This is why we are making our collections available in machine-readable form – as data — to support and encourage these new uses of the collections.
Dr Giles Bergel has been appointed as the first National Librarian's Research Fellow in Digital Scholarship. The fellowship is a three-month period of research into of any aspect of the Library's data collections available on the Data Foundry, using data science or other digital research methods or techniques.
Bergel is a digital humanist, based in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. He has a long-standing interest in the digitisation of cheap print, and is the editor of an edition of broadside and chapbook versions of the English ballad 'The Wandering Jew's Chronicle'. His other interests include bibliography, typography and book design, as well as the histories of copyright and the British book trades.
The Library has extensive holdings of chapbooks — small, cheap books sold by travelling pedlars, or 'chapmen', containing songs, poems, stories, prophecies and jokes. The Chapbooks Printed in Scotland dataset on the Data Foundry contains images, text and catalogue records of more than 3000 of the Library's holdings printed between circa 1700-1899.
Bergel's project will apply state-of-the-art computer vision methods to match and classify similar images, distinguishing blocks from their copies and grouping them by subject, date, printer and place of publication, leveraging decades of scholarship at the Library. The project will uncover relationships between members of the trade who copied, inherited or shared printing blocks across often considerable distances. It will make it possible to view chapbook illustrations in detail, and as a whole — as a unique collection of imagery that the printing press made available to countless people in Scotland and beyond.
The Library's Artist-in-Residence, Martin Disley, completed his residency this summer after nine months with us. Funded by the Creative Informatics AHRC project, Martin explored the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) — a form of machine learning — with the collections, to create new artworks based on the Library's digitised material.
The aim for this project was to explore how, and whether, it is possible to convey the key features of digitised cultural heritage collections using artificial intelligence and, in turn, if these methods and outputs can be used to create new works of art.
Martin's work has since been shortlisted for a John Byrne Award.
Priority 5: Developing the organisation
5. We will continue to be a great organisation to work for and with, developing new ways of doing, delivering and partnering.
5.1 People — We will support, develop and train our staff and recruit new talent to enhance our existing skills and knowledge.
5.2 Sustainability — We will continue our leadership role in environmental sustainability, developing a fuller understanding of our impact on the environment. We will reduce, monitor and reduce further the environmental footprint of all areas of our operation.
5.3 Estates — We will ensure our property assets are maintained and improved and collections are held securely in appropriate environments by implementing our Property Asset Management Plan.
5.4 Data — We will use data to help the Library optimise its services and business processes.
5.5 Finance — We will derive 'best value' from our current core income sources, develop diverse income streams and clearly communicate the value of the Library to external funders to attract additional income.
5.6 Partnerships — We will grow our partnership activity both nationally and internationally with the aim of introducing new ways of working, reaching new audiences and supporting Scotland's vibrant cultural sector, especially libraries and archives.
Priority in focus: Helping young people into employment
In September 2020, the final cohort of interns joined the Library, and they will be with us for the next six months. These internships will not only help the Library progress with some of our strategic priorities as part of 'Reaching People', but will also provide these young people or recent graduates with the paid experience they need to get that next job.
Interns will be working with us in the following areas:
Access and Outreach
Climate Crisis
Data Rights and Personalisation
Equalities, Diversity and Inclusion
Creating Media Content
Gaelic Translation.
Reducing our impact on the environment
As we work towards meeting the Government's ambition of becoming carbon-neutral by 2040, we have achieved considerable success in reducing our carbon footprint and are now exploring the latest low-carbon technologies on the market to help us meet these aims in our buildings and across our estate.
We're looking at air source heat pumps (ASHP) and ground source heat pump (GSHP) technology to reduce our reliance on gas and move towards electricity as the main source of heating in our buildings. We're also looking at decarbonising our transport fleet through the use of fully electric or hybrid electric vehicles. This means that when we're transporting collections items between buildings — including Causewayside and George IV Bridge in Edinburgh, and Kelvin Hall in Glasgow — it will be achieved with minimum impact on the environment.
We're making good progress. Since 2008/09, we have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 69 per cent, and reduced our energy consumption by 50 per cent. Our efforts have been recognised. We were delighted to take home two awards at the UK National Premises and Facilities Management Awards 2019. As well as being shortlisted for the Energy Management Award, we scooped the 'Partnership in Smart Facilities Management' award (with Craigalan Controls) which also won the overall winners award.
How we support a successful Scotland
The preparation of the Library Plan has been informed by the Scottish Government's National Performance Framework (NPF).
The National Performance Framework was relaunched in 2018 and sets 11 national outcomes. These outcomes are designed to support delivery of the Scottish Government's Purpose, which is:
To focus on creating a more successful country, with opportunities for all of Scotland to flourish, through increased wellbeing and sustainable and inclusive economic growth.
Although our work contributes to some extent to all of these outcomes, the Library is most closely aligned to five and we will monitor our performance against these. The table below shows how the Library's outcomes match to the Scottish Government's national outcomes.
Below, we outline examples of how the Library’s work feeds into the national outcomes.
We are creative and our vibrant and diverse cultures are expressed and enjoyed widely
Our collections help to enhance Scotland's international reputation for the quality of its literary, scientific and cultural heritage, and for treasuring this heritage.
By collecting and recording the knowledge of Scotland we preserve the memory bank of the nation.
The Library has the world's largest collection of Scottish Gaelic material.
Research into family history is supported, helping many people trace their Scottish family background.
Our exhibitions attract many international visitors, adding to their understanding of Scottish identity.
More than 48 per cent of all respondents to the last audience survey said the Library helped them better understand Scotland’s culture and history.
We are well educated, skilled and more able to contribute to society
The National Library is widely acknowledged as the premier library for many of Scotland's research communities.
We contribute to and create innovative resources for use in schools including 'Scotland on Screen' and the 'National Library Learning Zone'.
We link with Scottish universities, colleges and schools on innovative research projects.
More than 85 per cent of higher education students who completed the last audience survey said the Library helped advance their education.
By supporting the knowledge economy, we contribute to a modern, successful Scotland.
We have a globally competitive, entrepreneurial, inclusive and sustainable economy
Our collection of business information resources is one of the largest collections of company and market data in the United Kingdom and is a key potential resource for Scotland's business community.
We are the only National Library in the United Kingdom that provides direct access to an extensive range of market research reports, company and news data and guides to starting and running a business directly via the web, free of charge, to registered users.
We can deal with business enquiries in person, by phone or email or via our Library online chat service.
We have worked with collaborators to develop the Business and Intellectual Property Centre in Glasgow.
We tackle poverty by sharing opportunities, wealth and power more equally
We provide free access to all our collections, online and onsite.
We continue to seek community benefits through our procurement activities. This includes fair work practices such as the Living Wage.
We provide work experience and volunteer opportunities.
We have an active outreach programme that works with schools, local community projects and community libraries across Scotland.
All our educational resources link to the Curriculum for Excellence and are promoted to schools across Scotland.
We value, enjoy, protect and enhance our environment
We have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 69 per cent from 2008 to 2009 baseline levels.
Energy consumption has been reduced by 54 per cent from 2008-2009 baseline levels.
The percentage of waste that is recycled now exceeds 67 per cent.
We continue to operate a sustainable procurement policy.