On July 13, 2010, an open lecture meeting "Libraries and Reading in Germany and Europe" was held in the Tokyo Main Library, inviting Ms. Barbara Lison, former president of BID (Bibliothek und Information Deutschland), the national umbrella organization of German library associations and information associations, and also the Director of the Bremen Public Library at present. Following the lecture meeting, an open discussion by Ms. Lison and Dr. Makoto Nagao, Librarian of the NDL, was held. Here are outlines of her lecture and the discussion.

Ms. Barabara Lison gives a lecture at the NDL

Lecture: Libraries and Reading in Germany and Europe

Introduction
Knowledge and information have always been crucial for the development of societies, nations and even worldwide progress. But with the digital revolution there is an emerging fundamental change in handling information. This change, subsumed into the terms "information society" and "knowledge society" has a strong impact not only on people's working methods but also on their everyday lives. Libraries always have been dealing with information. They acquired information and stored it, made it accessible, and mediated information; they also told people how to use information properly. The most important issues of the work of modern libraries are support for intellectual development and for satisfaction of the cultural needs of people, lifelong learning for all age-groups, independent decision-making, promotion of reading as a key competence in modern life, media literacy, overcoming the gap between information rich and information poor, and so on. Giving support for reading and by offering a mix of printed and non-printed material in welcoming premises and with friendly staff, libraries will continue to be important institutions also in the future. The combination of people, ambience and information on the spot as well as in the worldwide web is the unique sales point of libraries.

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Co-operation and Networking as a basis for innovation in Europe
In all countries belonging to the European Union (EU) libraries play a major role in securing free and unrestricted access to information, supporting education and lifelong learning. But the situation of the libraries in the 27 EU countries is quite diverse and the European library landscape shows rather great differences in funding, quality, performance and legal status. The legal status of libraries is often the basis for the level of their resources and, in consequence, their potential effects and outcome. Unfortunately, Germany is among ten states without a specific library act. So far only two out of 16 federal States in Germany actually do have a library law which, unfortunately, contains no obligation for local authorities to maintain a public library.

Those EU countries with a national library law indeed mainly profit from this fact. They mostly have a better basis for their work in relation to resources and political acceptance. Also in these countries the library associations and related bodies like unions have to lobby steadily in order to bring the libraries into the scope of the political decision makers.

This rather complex situation in particular European countries is mirrored on the level of the EU. The EU Commission as the administrative body of the EU as a whole, unfortunately, at first did not pay very much attention to the European libraries as important players in the intellectual development of the European citizens. Only in the early nineties did the European Commission discover the libraries. But initially they were not regarded as players in the world of the knowledge and information society but rather as players in the development and application of information technology. There were some projects and a very few projects, were not or not only orientated on the use of IT-features in libraries, but most of them are mainly focused on IT-application.

Starting from the mid-nineties there were also projects with a more general scope in the European public libraries. The main frame of the project was called PubliCA (Public Libraries Concerted Action). PubliCA was meant to help support the development and enhancement of public library services throughout the EU as essential information resources for their communities, sustaining democratic opportunities and creating social cohesion. PubliCA's objective was to enable a coherent approach to the development of new services to meet the needs of the citizens in the information society, while ensuring that the new services were integrated with traditional public library services. Within PubliCA there were several sub-projects like PLIS (Public libraries and the information society) which examined the challenges for public libraries in Europe in establishing their role in the information society. Another major project in the PubliCA was the project PULMAN (Public Libraries Mobilising Advanced Networks). This project was designed to strengthen the performance of public libraries in their innovative new roles by consolidating, packaging and translating relevant social and technical standards and best practice guidance.

In 1999, at the end of the PubliCA project, it also produced an important final communiquunderlying the potential of libraries for the European citizens. This document, the so-called "Copenhagen Declaration" was directed to the library professionals, to the EU Commission and to national policy and decision makers responsible for culture as well. This declaration requires key priorities to be addressed, covering actions by the European Commission which should set up a program framework, especially for libraries, and establish a European level information policy.

The most striking effect of these more holistic library-related projects was the growing awareness amongst the library professionals about the need for co-operation and networking in order to meet the huge challenges of the information society and the digital revolution.

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EBLIDA (European Bureau of Library, Documentation and Archive Associations)
To secure access for all to the benefits of the information society in all formats, EBLIDA with its motto "Lobbying for libraries" was established to cooperate and support libraries in aspects of legislative and administrative issues which are of relevance to the library and information sector, culture and education. EBLIDA's working strategy is based on networking with other institutions such as the European Parliament, the European Commission and other European libraries. And, of course, EBLIDA is also involved in the Euro-wide crowning achievement of all European library projects, Europeana.

Europeana
With its motto "Think Culture!" Europeana is a Thematic Network funded by the European Commission to make European information resources easier to use in an online environment. At the moment, Europeana offers links to six million digital items and by the end of 2010 it will be 10 million items. With the extension of Europeana to Europeana Local, there will be a huge enlargement of the number of digital items which are searchable through the Europeana portal. The aim is to establish simple, efficient and sustainable processes through which local and regional institutions can easily make their content available through the Europeana portal. And with the development of Europeana German, like many other European countries, has established a national widespread collaborative project in order to contribute digital content to Europeana. This project is called The German Digital Library. This project will be going public in 2011 and will provide a national portal for digital content from more than 30,000 memory institutions like libraries, archives and museums.

Drawing a conclusion from the development of libraries in Europe in the last 20 years I would like to present six all-embracing proposals:
1. Through intensive lobbying and good experience, European libraries were recognized by the European Parliament and by the European Commission as important players in the information and knowledge society.
2. European libraries were successful in lobbying for their interests by forming an European-wide coalition in EBLIDA as an umbrella organisation of the national library associations.
3. European libraries profited from the European strategy of fostering IT-application in the member states.
4. European libraries are aware that learning from each other and learning from the experiences of other sectors is efficient and crucial for innovation and professional progress.
5. European libraries are more effective in serving the interests of the users by joining their forces to build up a European Digital Library.
6. European libraries understood that they need to cooperate with partners from different cultural sectors when creating an innovative user-friendly cultural interface for the European citizen: the Europeana.

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How German libraries promote reading as basic competence
Public libraries in German are well used, but when the results of the PISA-OECD (Program for International Student Assessment) study 2000 deeply shocked Germany, promoting reading in public libraries became popular. The shocking results for Germany have their roots in the fact that the German libraries were not recognized by the politicians as important players in education and in supporting reading and media literacy. After having set this background, I would like to present to you some of our "Post-Pisa-strategies" of German libraries in promoting reading and supporting reading skills. The reading programs for the youngest clients, babies and toddlers use the library services with the help of their parents as mediators. The library developed measures for early childhood education and carried them out together with the nursery teachers. We developed a program called "Start to read" which is addressed to the parents of babies to make them understand the importance of reading aloud to their children. This program is a co-operation with an association of paediatricians in Bremen. When the children go to the kindergarten the library tries to reach them as well through the co-operation with the nursery teachers. At that stage we start with a special modular programme called "Spiral Curriculum," which comprises a whole set of different measures for reading promotion up to the seventh grade.

The evaluation of this concept shows that most of the teachers are very happy with this service as they confirm that the children gain a lot from the library programs. Many children who have regularly visited these arrangements are regular library users.

Reaching out to young adults, who today have a huge variety of commercial entertainment distractions, is much more difficult. But it is important that the library keeps on contact with these young adults at the age from 14, 15 onwards and offers them services beyond mere school material for homework or lessons. Therefore it is very important to find out the personal interests of this target group and to start at that point when designing services for them. The library should be "a place" for them. That means that the library premises should have a special young adult zone, totally different from the children's zone. Next step is to give them the media they want, that is books on topics which are relevant for them. But that is not enough. Young adults want and need permanently special attention and want to be courted. That is why we developed special programmes also for them. One programme which in this year is being run for the fourth time is the "Summer Reading Club." Last year we had over 500 participants of whom nearly 40 percent were male. Reading promotion even works with young adults when you meet their interests and find the right way of addressing them.

We think that by inviting a football star as a testimonial we might come nearer to our goal to have more young men among the participants. Using popular people as testimonials for reading promotion is practised also by the German Library Association in the nationwide Reading Campaign "Germany reads the library is THE meeting place." This campaign is directed to the general public and is carried out in over 2000 libraries. The objectives of the campaign are promoting a positive image of libraries and their services, promoting the importance of reading and media literacy, and promoting the other different function of libraries.

eBooks
Since the arrival of eBooks and digital reading, reading is going digital by the appearance of Amazon and Kindle. Libraries cannot ignore this fact and stick to the good old physical media. Therefore in Germany, the public libraries together with a library supplier have built up a consortium which offers eBooks to be lent out to the PC at home or even to a mobile device. With a very comfortable user-interface which can be designed accordingly to the respective library homepage and a sophisticated digital rights management system, more than 100 public libraries offer 24 hours a day eBooks and other digital content for download at home. This service is a very useful innovation for the German libraries which shows their awareness of the need to integrate the possibilities of the new technology into their activities. And this service promotes reading in a totally new way for the library clients.

Conclusion
Coming to the end of my talk, let me conclude with some final proposals as a perspective:

1. As long as libraries will be able to integrate technological and other innovation into their services and make them accessible for their users, libraries will be useful and well used public institutions.
2. As long as libraries design their services in the interests of their users, whatever ages those might be, libraries will be attractive service providers.
3. As long as libraries are attractive and welcoming physical public places, libraries will be highly frequented and will be recognized by the patrons as a special branch of their "personal living room."
4. As long as libraries promote reading and support it as a basic human competence, there is a good chance of further intellectual development of our society.

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Discussion between Ms. Lison and Dr. Makoto Nagao

In the discussion, picking up broad topics including questions from the audience, Dr. Nagao posed questions to and exchanged opinions with Ms. Lison

Dr. Nagao: I got an impression that the EU supports European libraries, which seems to affect Germany and other countries. Is there any difference between each country's approaches?

Ms. Lison: The EU has 27 member nations, which means there are 27 different library policies. The copyright policy of each country differs, as in France and in Germany, although the directive of copyright that comes from EU is quite open. The difference depends on each country's interests and lobbying possibility. When we look at the EU, on the one hand it is a body which is becoming more and more united, and on the other hand, there is still sovereignty in each nation. So, there is a competition between the EU and each nation that requires a compromise. Compromising in the EU is a big issue.

Dr. Nagao: The European libraries have various problems and have been making efforts to overcome them. In this context, how are you tackling the issue that each library uses a different language? I would also like to know the effect the Europeana or the European Digital Library have brought about.

Ms. Lison: When the librarians in EU assemble, English is used as a common language. However, the Europeana is a multilingual portal where various languages other than English are used. EU respects the culture in each country though English is a special common language. I think that it is important to have an identity as a European citizen and also as a German.

Dr. Nagao: In Europe, the concept of the library seems to be broadly understood to include museums and document archives. How are these broad-ranging activities done in this context?

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Ms. Lison: For example, a citizen who is interested in knowledge is not interested in where it from. A cultural institution like a library, an archive or a museum must comes be a kind of one-stop-shop for users. A lot of European library projects are intended to combine the contents and services of libraries, museums and archives into one new digitized map. Users are interested in that kind of digitized map. We think it very important in Germany. If you realize that you are working for the users, perhaps you can understand that it is not necessary to discriminate between the institutions.

Dr. Nagao: Cooperation of museum, library and archive has been considered an important issue in Japan, too. In your lecture, you talked about some trials for reading promotion for youngsters in Germany. What kinds of initiatives are carried out to increase their reading ability in schools?

Ms. Lison: That really depends on the teachers. They are very important partners for us. We need to catch the teachers and tell them that they may have an easier life when they bring students to the library. I think there is a lot of good cooperation between librarians and teachers in Germany. An even more important thing is to start from babies or very small children, to get them used to the service of libraries. It's too late when you catch them at 12 or 13 years old. We have to make them think of addressing libraries when they have questions.

Dr. Nagao: Here we received a lot of enquiries from the audience about PISA problems which also gave a big shock in Japan. We have been making various attempts to recover from it, but they are not always working out since professional school librarians are very hard to hire. The school libraries are not operating well. Could you tell us the current situation of school libraries and the organic cooperation between school libraries and public libraries in Germany and in Europe?

Ms. Lison: That is not such a nice topic for Germany. Many German school libraries are not very well equipped or developed. Local administration is unfortunately not much interested in school libraries. The library association lobbied for school libraries from the 2001 PISA results, but it was not successful in general. School libraries are not attractive for young people because the materials are not interesting. That is a big problem in Germany.

Dr. Nagao: This is an interesting question, if there is a concrete way in Germany or in Europe to nurture children's ability to think, judge and express themselves, as these abilities are important besides enhancing reading ability.

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Ms. Lison: I think it is very important. Libraries support the development of creativity and the potential of the children to the maximum. For example, we show "Picture book cinema," which is a digitized picture book, to children and get the children to develop stories. To make them create and tell stories as they like is a simple but very effective way to improve their expressiveness. To learn on their own initiative is also important for children. We try to show them that they can be creative by making something by themselves using various tools in the library. We give them an opportunity to express themselves. We also try to show them that they need to express themselves. Of course there is a quiet zone in the library, but we also offer a place where you can talk and express yourself.

Dr. Nagao: It is a difficult question, how much educational guidance for children libraries provide that ought to be done in the schools. But I think that is something we cannot ignore. There is another question. I think the number of immigrants into Germany is increasing. Could you explain what kind of educational support or activities libraries provide to those children?

Ms. Lison: We provide different measures for immigrants. We do not organize language courses, but we lend out digitized materials and books which can be used for reading the German language. We provide information on the German political system, social system and other lifestyles as well as information on the country where they came from in order to support their personal identity. We think it is not good to lose your identity. And we try to indirectly reach immigrants who came from countries where there is no library culture through their children.

Dr. Nagao: Yes, I understand. How many languages are included in the collection of the Bremen city library, for instance?

Ms. Lison: Books and DVDs in 38 languages are collected in the Bremen city library. There are books in 50 languages in the International Children's Library. Parents can also learn German through bilingual children books.

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Dr. Nagao: Now the budget of the libraries has been decreasing on a global basis. In Germany, what kind of effort do you make when you select books for collection, taking foreign books into consideration?

Ms. Lison: Budget reduction is very frequent also in Germany. However, the libraries can set priorities according to the library's concept and the budget can be used wisely as a result. The concept of the book collection is different according to the library. When the budget is reduced, the library checks the concept. We decide where to set our priority between users' demand and the commission of the library set by the politicians.

Dr. Nagao: The resident complains when the local public library does not buy a lot of copies of best-seller books in Japan. On the other hand, publishers and authors complain to the library because they fear their books won't sell. In Germany, do you buy only one or two copies of a best-seller book?

Ms. Lison: German libraries have a "Best-seller book service." It means if you pay 3 Euros voluntarily, you can read a book earlier than other people. We try to convince the publishers that this system is lawful and not bad because we are not doing it for the money profit. Some people buy the book because after having read it, it becomes more attractive for them.

Dr. Nagao: In Japan it is hard to imagine paying some money to the library, because using library must be free. But in your lecture, you said that sometimes you need to pay to get a library user card. In what case do you need to pay money to the library?

Ms. Lison: Of course taxpayers can enjoy general services. It is free to come to a library and to receive services on site. In Germany, if you have a general user card for an annual fee you can borrow books and get internet services etc. However, if the service becomes more personal it will be charged. For instance, people who cannot wait for a best-seller book can pay some money to borrow it earlier. As a general rule, some fee is incurred when the service is a personal one. Copying service is charged as it is provided for individual request.

Dr. Nagao: Such a charge system also might serve as a reference in the libraries of Japan in the future. Please tell us about the German current state and future prospects of reading terminals like "Kindle" or "iPad" and a digital library which provides contents to them.

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Ms. Lison: Although neither Kindle nor iPad so far is very much used in Germany, PDA and portable terminals are widespread and many people use digital contents. Not only the public libraries but also the entire library world should deal with this situation. About one hundred libraries are providing a service which enables users to download an e-book for one week. I want to develop contents in our e-library more, and to enhance it, although there are already 30,000 titles in it now.

Dr. Nagao: There is a problem that publishers and authors complain that they may lose sales when it becomes possible to read digital contents free of charge by downloading. In addition, digital contents cannot be distributed without the permission of the author. How is it in Germany?

Ms. Lison: German Copyright Law is also stringently regulated. However in Germany it works out to pass the copyright to the publisher after the author passes the publisher the contents. Therefore, we only have to deal with the publishers, and not with the author. The authors get compensation through a collecting society which is paid by the German states for the use of their works in libraries. There is a big collecting society which distributes a lot of money to various authors in Germany. Publishers also agree to this model because when someone downloads a book, other people cannot read it. This it the same way as borrowing books in a "physical" library.

Dr. Nagao: I think it is a wonderful system that the country makes compensation to the author. I think that some efforts are also necessary for us as a nation in Japan. This will be the last question. Directors of public libraries are mostly males in Japan. Does having a female director like you make any difference from a male director?

Ms. Lison: When I became the director of the library most library-directors of metropolitan libraries were male in Germany. But now female directors are twice as many as male directors. That situation owes a great deal to the equal opportunity legislation for men and women. I think it is a good example of legislation changing a situation and society itself.

Dr. Nagao: Thank you for your very valuable talk for such a long time.

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