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

Part I: Summary Report

Sources and extent of funding

Our survey sought information on the total amount of funding for these services, and also the sources: central or local government, charities, overseas aid etc. Ideally, it should be possible to calculate a per capita spend and so make a meaningful comparison across countries. Unfortunately, that appears largely impossible. Such an exercise would require consistent data on both expenditure and the relevant population, neither of which is currently feasible.

This is because in systems where there are many different providers, public and third sector, there is usually no single authority which is calculating total expenditure and its sources. Where there is a single government source for funding, it is possible to determine total expenditure. But where general library services for visually impaired people come principally from third sector organisations e.g. Canada, Australia and the UK, and there is some government funding to public libraries and via the education system as well as for particular projects, it becomes extremely difficult. The amounts actually spent by different public libraries in their budgets vary within countries and there is no consolidated figure for spending on services to visually impaired people in cases such as the UK and Canada. In the USA, the NLS budget is publicly available, but there are many other organisations involved, public (e.g. public libraries, education authorities, universities) and private/voluntary (e.g. charitably funded alternative format providers). Postal subsidies are also very important in most countries.

Calculating the relevant population is somewhat easier, but even then varying definitions of vision and print-impairment between countries mean that figures may not be comparable.

We have grouped countries into categories according to the predominant funding source.

Funding coming predominantly from national government

Denmark

Netherlands

Funding coming predominantly from local government

Japan (there is an expectation that donations will become more important as government funding is seen to be increasingly constrained; public library services are also being outsourced to the private sector)

Funding coming from both national and local government

Sweden

Funding coming from a mixture of government and third sector fundraising and revenues

USA (federal, state, local, and third sector)

Australia - third sector funding predominates

South Africa

UK - third sector funding predominates and there is no regular national government funding

Croatia - government funding predominates

Korea

Canada - central specialist library is third sector, but users are also served from public libraries and the education system

How adequate is the funding?

Most respondents felt their services were not adequately funded, but the degree of perceived inadequacy varied considerably. There is also the issue of how adequacy is defined - in relation to the current scope of services or in relation to an ideal level and scope of service? Respondents tended to nuance their replies accordingly. No country is able to provide a service that gives visual and printimpaired people the same access to library services and materials as everyone else; funding would not be the only solution here as there also needs to be advanced supply of files from publishers in order to ensure that alternative format versions are available simultaneously.

Of the respondents to the survey, the most satisfied with their funding were the USA and Sweden. Those least satisfied with the adequacy of funding were those relying mainly on third sector and local government funding.

Two countries' respondents felt funding was not entirely adequate:

• Denmark - not adequate for full equality of access
• Netherlands - adequate for existing services but services need extending. Study materials need 30% more, general library services 10% more

Seven countries' respondents felt funding was very inadequate:

• Canada - likely that current expenditure is less than 10% of what is needed to provide an equitable service
• Japan - would need 10 times as much money
• South Africa - only serves 1% of the potential client base
• UK - hard to estimate what would be needed as there is no figure for current spending due to very fragmented provision, but the current level is considered to be very poor
• Australia - only 16,000 out of 300,000 visually impaired people and 1.4m print impaired potential service recipients are served. Each state should fund services for visually impaired people as a public library, with at least matching federal funding (A$14m for each state versus total $A4m current special library budget)
• Croatia - funding is very inadequate and decreasing, needs to increase 20-30% per year as planned
• Korea - not adequate - need to fund national special library and then that could lead in the upgrading of public library service to visually impaired people

Of course, since we have been unable to measure the level of funding objectively across all countries, this is a subjective view, and it could be argued that it tells us nothing about how efficiently money is spent, nor how satisfied the end users are. But these estimates do come from organisations in the front line of providing services.

From these responses, the conclusion would be that regular government funding is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for adequately funded services. Relying mainly or purely on third sector funding results in the least satisfactory outcomes, but also some countries which rely mainly or wholly on government funding, such as Croatia and Japan, also feel that funding is very inadequate. In Japan this is related to the general squeeze on public spending which has hit local government particularly hard.

Perceived adequacy of funding of these services is not easily correlated with the percentage of GDP devoted to gross social expenditure; though Sweden and Denmark were the highest in the OECD in 2001 and Korea second lowest (after Mexico), the UK's spend was higher than the Netherlands, but because funding in the UK for these services does not in the main come from government, this is largely irrelevant.

There may be some underlying issues about local accountability and the strength of local government spending as well. OECD figures (admittedly from 2001, but the proportions are not likely to have changed radically) show that local government spending as a percentage of total GDP was especially high in the Scandinavian countries: over 30% in Denmark and over 25% in Sweden, compared with about 17% in the Netherlands. In the UK, the figure was only around 11%.

South Africa has a legacy of extremely uneven local provision from the apartheid era which means that public library services are very much better in areas where white people lived and reforms since have left public library funding in something of a limbo and carrying a low priority - though efforts are being made to put library services at the heart of drives to improve education and literacy.