Including libraries in development strategies

Governments, as well as development agencies and civil society organizations (CSOs), increasingly understand the potential of libraries to address their development goals. Libraries, on their part, progressively reach beyond their more “traditional” boundaries to establish partnerships that advance economic and social development. These partnerships show a promising trend in global librarianship and turn libraries into digitally advanced and inclusive development hubs. This paper explores this potential by following several development initiatives in Ukraine and Romania from 2009 to 2013. The Ukrainian government was the first government in the world to create an Open Government Partnership Action plan to recognize libraries as corner stones of the country’s digital literacy program and e-government strategy. In Romania, the government created several successful partnerships with Romanian libraries and development agencies to address key development challenges. As this paper shows, libraries have great opportunities to work with governments and development agents to address these goals. At the same time, they face major challenges. Most public libraries around the world operate under the ministries responsible for culture or education, and are therefore driven towards those areas primarily by their line ministries and existing legislation. Many libraries also lack experience with partnerships outside the cultural and educational spheres, and development agents often do not think of libraries as relevant partners. This makes the development dialogue difficult to initiate. Additionally, at a time when ICT and development are increasingly connected, many public libraries do not have the technology and skilled staff necessary for libraries to become development hubs. And finally, libraries pay little attention to collecting and aggregating compelling national data about their impact that could be used in advocacy efforts.