develop a broader range of skills. This has usually been to the detriment of the young
people’s service.
The other potential threat has been the decline of specialist courses in children’s
literature and librarianship in university departments of library and information studies
in Britain (Elkin 1992). The halcyon years of the 1970s and mid-1980s have gone, and
there are now few specialist modules on offer in those departments. There is little
prospect that this situation is going to alter in the near future and it is likely that
individual public libraries will have to provide good quality in-service training for their
staff in a time of marked economic constraint.
Children’s librarians do, however, have the support of a professional body, the Youth
Libraries Group of the Library Association. From its inception in the 1940s it has grown
into an influential body supporting training programmes, professional publications, and
publicity material. At a national level it liaises with professional and non-professional
organisations concerned with children, and is a mouthpiece for children’s librarians; it
administers the Carnegie and Greenaway Medals. At a local level, its regional
committees do much to enhance the rapport amongst staff within the local authorities.
Library accommodationA wide variety of approaches are evident with respect to the design and planning of
children’s libraries (Dewe 1995). The most common form is the separate children’s room
which offers the advantage of creating a suitable space and ambience with which the
child can identify, and which allow the sort of noise levels associated with the young and
their activities. During the 1970s, open plan libraries became fashionable, offering easy
access between the young people’s and the adults’ sections, and often permitting an
intermediate area for the teenage collection. Problems of noise do exist, although some
libraries use screens to partition off the children’s area during the more riotous events.
Dual purpose or dual use libraries as they are variously called are another
manifestation, with the public library sited usually in a secondary school. The idea of
drawing communities together in this way gained popularity in Europe and North
America during the 1960s and 1970s but later waned as a result of conflicting
ideologies, and few dual use libraries have been established in recent years. Separate
mobile libraries for children are quite common in some Scandinavian countries and
across the Atlantic but in Britain they normally comprise holiday mobiles or book buses
which are used for special events.
Purpose built activity areas are found in the larger libraries, comprising story-telling
wells and arenas, rostra for staging plays, and facilities for parents with babies and
young children. The advent of information technology is occasioning some fundamental
re-designing to accommodate workstations, although there is little evidence of the SciFi
hypermedia centres now found in some South-east Asian children’s libraries, such as in
Malaysia.
Whatever the form of provision, it is important to create the right atmosphere. To
achieve this and to cater for the varied physical requirements of a diverse range of
children, specially designed, highly colourful and imaginative shelving and furnishings
are provided. It is not uncommon to see display equipment in the shape of space ships,
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