Outreach and Colocation

Co-location is something of a buzzword in public libraries.  This is generally taken as keeping a traditional library in a building alongside other services, such as Council advice.  The theme has actually been around a long time, with the Willesden Library Centre being Brent's best known (if poorly executed) example.

However, I think this idea needs to change from bringing other services into a library building to bringing library services out to other buildings.  This is more or less what has been happening with Brent's outreach service (which now lends more books than Harlesden Library).  Over the past two quarters, the outreach service has gone to 77 locations away from Brent's traditional library buildings.  These have sometimes been aimed at attracting different audiences and sometimes giving better geographical coverage.  Thus we had library stalls at the Olympic celebrations as one-offs, but also had a book collection in one of the Salusbury Road coffee shops during the Kilburn Library refurbishment.  Customers who might not normally interact with the library service might come across it as they went for a coffee, which is a reversal of the usual model of adding a coffee shop on to a library.  Geographically we have used outreach to get to parts of the Borough that have never had their own services.  For instance, library outreach has occurred in a children's centre on the St Raphael's estate, which has never previously had a library, and is fairly hard for people to travel from.

Another aspect of this mixing is the use of library buildings on a temporary basis, as happened during Brent Dance month, when Brent libraries were used for hosting dance events that possibly draw people into Brent libraries who may never have used them before.

Co-location in this sense is a much more fluid and changeable concept than is generally recognised.