Investing in Children:A real strategy for future development?

Abstract

It is almost twenty years since Janet Hill's seminal work, Children Are people 1 was published in the UK. Since then, other books have been written about British public library services to children 2,3,4 but none of these have taken a visionary approach. There has been little attention paid to the ways libraries have responded to the multifarious influences presented by society or any real attempt made to anticipate a future role or philosophy for public library services to children. Research in the area has been thin and has not kept pace with research in the school library field.Concern about the low profile of children's libraries and lack of understanding at national or government level of their role in the intellectual, social or cultural development of the child has been a source of concern for a number of years. A recent report by a working party set up to look at the current state of library services for children. Investing in Children, attempts to redress this balance. This article assesses how effectively this has been achieved and analyses how practitioners have responded to the report.