Public library outreach and extension 1930–2000

Abstract

Although by 1930 the building blocks of the British public library were well in place, many questions remained about the level and extent of its social engagement. Traditionalists argued against an overt societal role: in their view, the public library should remain a limited, passive, book-based service aimed at the individual reader, ‘without the clutter of social reform, moral reform, literary reform and all the other reforms’. Progressives, in contrast, envisaged a wider public library: in 1927 the authors of the Kenyon Report urged that libraries should become an ‘engine of great potentiality for state welfare’ and ‘the centre of the intellectual life of the area which [they serve]’. Outreach (the provision of services beyond the physical entity of the library building) and extension (the development of library-related activities over and above the core provision of books) became important mechanisms in this progressive project. Over time they came to embody the ambitions of those librarians committed to harnessing the public library to bring about the good society in twentieth-century Britain. This chapter thus examines the ideas, practices and influence of outreach and extension, and it assesses the degree to which they have been accepted as legitimate models of public library service. It seeks to explain why the wider public library has never been fully realised and it considers the consequences of this failure for the social identity of the public library movement.

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