Everyone’s Library Service 2022-2026 Survey

Essex County Council carried out a consultation from November 2021-January 2022, seeking views from Essex residents, library service users and organisations about the new draft plan for the future of library services.

The plan set out high-level aims for the service and areas of focus for the next four years:

• Library Service and Literacy
• Infrastructure and Communications
• Supporting communities and Levelling Up

People were asked to indicate their level of agreement or disagreement with the sub-areas of each aim. They were also given the opportunity to provide comments on each of the three high-level aims.

2,213 responses were received to the consultation - 2,185 from individuals and 28 responses from organisations. The analysis showed good support for the proposals in the Plan, with many showing strong agreement.

Agreement with aim one: Library Service and Literacy

• There was at least 90% agreement from individual respondents with the aims to support children to be school-ready and develop their reading skills, keep stock and resources up to date, help adults improve their literacy, ensure staff have the right skills, and provide books and resources in formats that meet changing need.
• Support to deliver a new and exciting programme of events and activities and to get more residents involved in shaping the service is also high at over 80%
• The aims to explore new opportunities to generate additional income, and new roles and opportunities for volunteers received around 70% agreement

Agreement with aim two: Communications and Infrastructure

• Developing the mobile library offer to support service outreach and community engagement and improving communications to help engage with existing users and new audiences were the best supported aims by individual respondents with at least 83% agreement.
• Improvements to buildings, including reducing our carbon footprint, and improving engagement with the staff gained 75% agreement and had strong support.
• Aims with agreement of 60% and above were: Roll out better mobile technology for staff and volunteers; Update printing services on offer to customers; Launch a new online library platform.

Agreement with aim three: Supporting Communities and Levelling Up

• At least 85% of individual respondents agreed with the aims to help reduce digital exclusion and improve digital skills, connect residents with other services, expand outreach services, and provide employability support. 80% agreed with supporting residents with their health and wellbeing.
• The proposal to explore options for providing chargeable activities alongside the existing free activities had 50% agreement. A significant proportion (31%) neither agreed nor disagreed with this aim

All feedback and comments received in response to the consultation have been reviewed and analysed by an independent organisation, and are now being used to inform an updated plan for library services.

• The insight and analysis from the consultation tell us where individuals feel most passionately about the ambitions and proposals. This has helped us to prioritise the ambitions for the library service. We propose some changes to emphasise and clarify what the public have told us is important to them. 
• The public have reiterated how important hard copy book stock is for them – an ambition we have always supported. We will make it clearer in the Plan that our ambition to keep our stock up to date and appealing includes hard copy as much as electronic resources.
• Outreach, communications and involvement of our communities in shaping the service will be given more prominence in our plan and we will specifically look at how we can localise communications and adverts of library events.
• Our skilled paid workforce are as important to the public as they are to us and we will reflect this more clearly. Volunteers support the work of the service allowing us to do more, as they work alongside our paid for staff. The Plan will emphasise the important link between the two.
• We will give more context as to why charging is required for some new activities and assurance how they could run alongside and complement free activities. Hosting these activities could enable us to provide an enhanced offer, service or experience to appeal to our existing customers, new users and to raise awareness of libraries as a potential partner and venue for other organisations. We are keen to drive up use of library buildings and increase footfall, which we hope will encourage greater use of library facilities.

The final plan is expected to be published in April 2022.

For more information and a full breakdown of consultation responses, please view reports below.

Full report

Summary report

Scrutiny Committee meeting papers related to this consultation are available here.

UPDATE 20th April 2022 

The final version of the new plan for libraries has now been launched and is available below:

https://libraries.essex.gov.uk/everyoneslibrary/