THE National Library of Scotland experienced its busiest summer since 2017 last year, with visits up 30% from pre-COVID levels.
While the surge in numbers could be attributed to a general uptake of visitors to Scotland’s capital, national librarian Amina Shah says the library has transformed its public programme offerings over the past five years.
Amina said: “Not long before I was appointed to this job, the library launched a strategy called ‘Reaching People’, named after its primary goal of broadening our audiences.
“We embarked on a major project to understand those we were reaching and those we were not reaching.
“This, coupled with the phenomenal hard work of my colleagues carrying out outreach activities, has boosted visits to our exhibitions and events.
“What we’re finding out, particularly post-Covid, is that people are hugely invested in libraries.
“They care about them, and they care about places they can go to meet other people and to engage with the collections.
“Covid brought home even more to people how important it is to see ‘the real thing’ and to have real experiences. And I think that’s why we’ve seen this uptake in general.”
The library also achieved other targets, such as completing a third of the collections in digital format by 2025 (two years early).
This enables people to access a large portion of the collections from anywhere in the world.
Amina added: “We also had a target to reduce our hidden collections. And what I mean by ‘hidden collections’ is, we’ve got them, they’re in the library, but we’ve not managed to catalogue them.
“This means people are unable to find out what’s there or what’s available. We were going to reduce that by 75% by 2025.
“We have now reduced it by 78.5%, and we’re just at the end of 2024. So those are massive pieces of work which make a real difference.”
The library will consult on its next strategy at the end of January, the same day it will announce its centenary programme.
Amina continued: “Now we know who our audiences are, the next five years will be focused on us having more of a physical presence around the country.
“Working with partners around Scotland will be crucial in allowing this to happen.
“We’ve reduced our carbon footprint by almost 75 per cent since 2008. We’re at the point now where we’re getting to the really difficult pieces of work around environmental sustainability.”
Amina Shah says the National Library will do everything possible to mark its 100th birthday throughout 2025 and broadly celebrate libraries.
“You’re only 100 once. And while we have so much to celebrate as a national library, we don’t work alone.
“Libraries in Scotland are part of a network, and we want to take the opportunity to celebrate all kinds of libraries and the impact they have on people’s lives.”
For full details of exhibitions and events at the National Library’s buildings – including Kelvin Hall in Glasgow, visit nls.uk/whats-on
