Aims & Objectives

Public libraries have a number of natural advantages including: their strong roots in local communities, a tradition of partnership with schools and provision of learning-oriented services of various kinds for children; and an increasingly established role as part of Lifelong Learning ‘landscape’. There is a strong political assumption, both implicit and explicit, that informal/non-formal learning organisations such as libraries have a vital job to do by supporting individual learners’ needs, providing them with choices and flexibility, helping people to continue and return to learning, enabling adults to get a job or qualification, signposting and inspiring people to take up other courses, helping children to learn and supporting schools in diversifying children’s experiences.

The specific case for investment in this area needs to be demonstrated more fully, conclusively and measurably to policy makers and funders in the many and various national and local environments across Europe. Exploitation of project results, deployment and mainstreaming of innovative activities and services remains inconsistent across EU member states as whole. Even within many member states effective co-ordination in support of nation-wide deployment is lacking.

Libraries themselves need to embed more thoroughly into their policies an elearning culture and to find ways of measuring and demonstrating their impact on people’s learning. A greater effort to spread awareness of the results of successful initiatives across Europe in addition to the development of a framework which will help to convince education and cultural policy makers that Europe’s libraries have a key role and to determine where their major value lies in delivering new learning agendas appears essential in order to ensure the full exploitation of this valuable resource.

The main objectives of this project were therefore:

• to identify, describe and disseminate the many instances of good practice, specific services, tools and approaches used for learning in public library settings, building on work conducted under a number of different actions, in order to support the multiplication and mainstreaming of these activities and to enable a fuller understanding of their contribution to Europe’s learning agendas, backed up by recommendations to Member States and the EU for supporting and extending the contribution of this part of the informal sector to lifelong learning policies and actions.

• to provide an evidence-based framework for further and wider comparison and exploitation of these results within and between countries, especially where this relates to impact on learners, with potential for future use in the context of comparative research studies.

The key results of ENTITLE include:

• the production of guidelines and recommendations; the establishment of a web-based dissemination environment for guidelines, recommendations and case studies;

• consultation and the promotion of innovation via a series of national workshops; the establishment of an impact assessment framework which will contribute to the comprehension of the whole learning sector of the specific contributions which are being and can be made by libraries;

• provision of a basis for future comparison, experience sharing and assessment of progress.

The results were valorised and endorsed by means of a Final Conference for policy makers.