National planning for public library service: the work and ideas of Lionel McColvin

Library Trends, Spring, 2004 by Alistair Black

ABSTRACT

Lionel McColvin (1896-1976) is regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of British librarianship. In the specific context of 150 years of public librarianship in Britain, his reputation as a visionary influence is second only to that of the nineteenth-century pioneer Edward Edwards, while in the twentieth century his reputation is unsurpassed. McColvin was the major voice in the mid-twentieth-century movement to reconstruct and modernize public libraries. He is best known as author of The Public Library System of Great Britain: A Report on Its Present Condition with Proposals for Post-war Reorganization, published in 1942 at a moment of intense wartime efforts to assemble plans for social and economic reconstruction. The "McColvin Report," as it came to be termed, was a landmark in the struggle to de-Victorianize the public library, not least by emphasizing the institution's universalism and its function as a national, not just a civic, agency. This article briefly describes McColvin's notable contribution to twentieth-century librarianship, resulting from his work as a public librarian, as a leading figure in the Library Association, and as an influential player in the international library movement. The article's core aim is to offer a critical appraisal of McColvin's vision for public libraries by placing it in the context of the project to build a better postwar world. This project was defined by the conceptualization and development of a welfare state in Britain, the underlying values of which can be seen to correspond to McColvin's national plan for a rejuvenated public library system. McColvin drew on the spirit of the time to produce a plan for public libraries that was shot through with social idealism and commitment and with a confidence in the need for intervention by the state--values that perhaps provide lessons for current and future library and information policymakers and professionals.

"ONE OF THE BEST KNOWN OF ALL LIBRARIANS" (1): MCCOLVIN THE HERO

If the nineteenth-century world of British public librarianship belonged to Edward Edwards, the powerhouse behind the inaugural Public Libraries Act of 1850, that of the twentieth century was dominated by Lionel McColon, author of the seminal survey The Public Library System of Great Britain: A Report on Its Present Condition with Proposala for Post-War Reorganization (1942)--the McColvin Report, as it came to be termed (McColvin, 1942b, abbreviated in textual references hereafter to MR). (2) Unlike a number of other library leaders who have been the subject of biographical monographs (Gobolt and Munford, 1983; Miller, 1967; Munford, 1963; Munford, 1968; Munford and Fry, 1966), coverage of McColvin's life has been restricted to short biographical sketches and to interpretations of particular themes (for example, Collison, 1968; Gardner, 1968; Jefcoate, 1999; Kerslake, 2001; McColvin, K. R., 1968; Vollans, 1968b; Whiteman, 1986 and 1967). The nearest thing to a full biography that has been produced is the festschrift edited by Robert Vollans, McColvin's former colleague at Westminster City Libraries, seven years after McColvin retired (Vollans, 1968a).

Assessments of McColvin's professional life and contribution have invariably been glowing and congratulatory. Immediately after his death, McColvin was assessed as "truly a Colossus of librarianship," the author of his obituary in the Library Association Record arguing that "it is difficult to think of any aspect of librarianship in his time in which McColvin did not play a leading and often decisive part" (Harrison, 1976, p. 88). Such was his standing in the profession that during his life he became known, colloquially, as "Mr. Public Libraries" (Vollans, 1968b, p. 17). The library historian William Munford viewed McColvin as "the outstanding librarian of his generation and one of the greatest figures produced by public libraries since 1850" (1951, p. 54), and this was a decade before McColvin had even retired. On the matter of the McColvin Report, Mnnford was equally generous, calling it "the most devastating and ... perhaps the most influential" of all public library inquiries (1951, p. 51). "It is unlikely," he continued "that the full influence of the report, direct and indirect, can be felt in the lifetime of any who first read it in 1942" (p. 51).

Given such eulogistic assessments of McColvin's career and the significance of the McColvin Report, it is perhaps timely to examine his career and especially the Report more critically by attempting to place them in the context of their times and to assess them from the historical perspective that the passage of time allows. Such an approach might help suggest to others the importance of undertaking the fuller, more complete biographical study that McColvin deserves.

The historical context of the McColvin Report is the climate of optimistic wartime debate concerning arrangements for a better postwar world. It was in the cauldron of heated anticipation of an improved, more just society that the McColvin legend was forged. Particularly noteworthy is the timing of the McColvin Report. Published just before a major turning point in the war and discussed during the ensuing period of increasing optimism and purpose, the McColvin Report took on a reputation of almost mythical proportion, a momentous, "watershed" event in the history of libraries and librarianship in Britain and a product of the spirit of renewal that was sweeping the country at the time. Irrespective of any criticism it generated at the time, it has always carried with it the "feel-good" factor of the age in which it was produced. It is one of the purposes of this article to describe and explain that "feel-good" factor, in keeping with the need to encourage cool and critical appraisals of the heroic myth that McColvin has become in the minds of many librarians and library historians.