From Shared Cultural Services to Wider Shared Services

A few weekends ago I was unexpectedly musing to myself on shared services while sitting under a replica cast of an italian classical frieze, eating chicken sandwiches -




Frieze element, Harris Museum Cafe



- and gazing into the central lending library through the door opposite. As you do...(!)

Main Lending Library



Indeed, I was in Preston! In the café, in the middle of the Harris Museum, that adjoins through open doors straight into the public library.


Lending Library doorway off the Cafe area



 



View through Lending Library door



Shared Cultural Services

All in all the set-up brought back to mind a visit to Leeds Central Library a couple of years back. Leeds Central Library adjoins onto the Tiled Hall (gorgeous café) and you walk straight through doors in the Art Gallery seamlessly into the Art Library. So it’s a quite similar feel to it as in Preston, only more so.

Of course it’s not to say similar things don’t sometimes happen my (Scottish) side of the border. The public library in the basement of GoMA (Gallery of Modern Art) is a few streets away from my own workplace for example…

So there is a bit of a tradition of large spacious public buildings grouping together various different cultural services under one roof for ease of access and to form convenient hubs. Also presumably assuming that folk who access one of the services are also likely to be users of at least some of the others.

To…. Shared Services

Shared services as commonly understood term has expanded in reach a bit recently though.

On the purely public sector side it’s become a lot more associated with a wider local government delivery agenda. That may encompass services from job centres to housing advice to local taxation to the library all in one fairly open-plan space. Staff may work between various parts of the Council rather than just within one domain such as the library service.

It’s also become more common parlance in cross-sector delivery agendas too. Shared spaces that deliver public and school library services for instance, or access initiatives that share resources between university and public libraries, or wider regional groups of library services.

So mostly what I found myself thinking about as I ate lunch and gazed through into the Library beyond is that shared services isn't really new in some aspects. The ambit and scope in some of the current applications has been widened hugely though.