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Funding and governance of library and information services for visually impaired people: international case studies

Part2:Country studies

South Africa

Public libraries

According to a report by Elisabeth Anderson, Public Libraries A way Forward (Feb 2005), there are approximately 1240 public libraries in South Africa. Their geographical distribution and level of resources is heavily influenced by the way they developed in the apartheid era.

“The Group Areas Act enforced residential segregation which carefully limited the drain on white revenues. This enabled White municipalities, reliant upon municipal rates and taxes, to be responsible for and manage a large number of well stocked libraries. Very little revenue was generated in other areas and as a result Black, Coloured and Indian Municipalities had fewer and less well-stocked libraries. The “Homelands” had no municipal government at all and very few public libraries indeed. This imbalance is still apparent. For instance in Limpopo the number of people per public library is 112 000 whereas in the Western Cape there are 7807 people per public library.”

Though reorganization has now resulted in 284 municipalities, the responsibility for public libraries shifted to the provinces in the post-apartheid period; however, funding did not and about 80% of funding still comes from the municipalities.

The report referred to some previous research:

“In 2001 Dr Peter Lor and Professor Paul van Helden, in conjunction with the Print Industries Cluster Council Working Group on Libraries and funded by the Carnegie Corporation, developed a questionnaire for an inventory of public libraries in South Africa. The resulting clarity on the geographical spread of libraries, their size and their addresses has been invaluable. The more probing questions on finance and bookspend were answered in such a way as to foreshadow this new research. Librarians appeared to be confused, without much sense of ownership or control over their own libraries, which all had particular populations and diverse needs. Decisions seem to have been made elsewhere, either at municipal or provincial levels.”