A number of our Library and Information Services (LIS) members have approached us directly with requests for information, and questions, on the restructuring of our Library and Information services (LIS) in Addis Ababa. This restructuring process has been in progress now for just under a year, and is nearing completion, with the introduction in October, of a fully automated library and information system.

Throughout our restructuring process, our aim has been to offer much higher quality services to our target audiences in Ethiopia. This inevitably, I'm afraid, means a move away from our traditional role as a public library. Amongst our LIS and policy specialists, a global consensus has evolved that, due to constraints on our funding, the British Council can no longer afford to run full-scale public libraries, which carry everything from tertiary level medical textbooks to specialised collections on environmental engineering. We now have to meet global standards, such as the following: our ratio of books to library member should be 4:1, and we must invest in the replacement of a minimum of 10% (preferably 15%) of our book stock every year. We have to focus more on key sectors, strengthen our collection development policies, involve our users much more intensively in the selection of books that you yourselves want to see in the library, and invest much more in the quality of services we provide. Three months ago, we added three thousand new books, audio-tapes and videos to our stock, which had been selected as a result of careful analysis, to meet the needs of our users. Within ten days of their being put on the shelves, a total of 2994 volumes were in circulation!

We would love to be able to offer a free library and information service to all interested individuals and groups in Ethiopia. But in the real world, I'm afraid our funding cannot hope to stretch to this.

As mentioned above, British Council Ethiopia works in four key sectors. Each sector has its own objectives, planned activities and target audiences to reach. BC Ethiopia currently works on four key sectors namely; English Language Teaching (ELT), Education, Information and Governance. The objective of BC Ethiopia’s Library and Information services’s (LIS) is to deliver Information services which can further the use of English language, the development of education, management and utilization of information and governance in Ethiopia. We therefore need to define both institutions, organisations and individuals as target audiences for our LIS. In doing so a number of factors have been considered. The first one is the type of profession or work that individuals and institutions are engaged in. Accordingly, individuals and institutions who are working in the area of ELT, Education, Information, Governance and Knowledge Management are clearly core members of our target audiences. But we haven’t narrowed down the list to focus exclusively on these groups, as we know that professionals from a number of other sectors are long-standing members of the British Council. Nevertheless last month we had to introduce a more focused list of LIS membership groups.

In summary, individuals and institutions who are coming to us from the four sectors are considered to be Target Audiences or Priority Groups. If we opt to serve the general public coming from all angles of the society, it is difficult for us to provide them the quality service we need to maintain at all times. Failure to meet the standards will have a negative impact on our performance and could even jeopardise the future funding of our Library and Information services. Council’s objectives.

• The membership fees for our LIS are actually only a minimal contribution (less than 15% of our total expenditure on LIS (which is over a quarter of a million pounds per year)
• If we were to cover all our LIS operational costs even without any surplus, we would have to charge between 7 and 10 times the current membership fee.
• We offer and operate LIS at a very high international standard of quality
• We maintain a quality stock (with a current 10% annual replacement rate; we’re aiming for 15%)
• We maintain up-to-date and modern facilities (computers, etc.)
• If we were to offer free membership, then we would have to restrict membership even further than we do now, so as to be able to offer a quality service to our members.

• To maintain the quality of our services

• There is inflation both in the UK and Ethiopia. We don’t want this negatively to affect the quality of our services.
• We’ve just introduced a more flexible list of LIS membership categories, which means that if you only one type of service, you’re actually paying less than previously.

Why do you have to downscale the number of your members?

For some reason, this year, we have had an unprecedented number of additional requests for LIS membership. In a real-life situation where we can’t access further funding for our LIS in Ethiopia, we have, with great regret, to restrict the number of our LIS members in order to maintain standards of quality within a fixed budget. It would be lovely to think that we could expand our resources indefinitiely to meet the demands of a growing number of LIS members, but I’m afraid this isn’t possible in the real world.

• We haven’t withdrawn all our science and technology books. We still believe that these are very important areas of development. We withdrew only textbooks and highly specialist materials as we do not want to duplicate what academic (school, college, etc.) libraries are already doing. Many science and technology books have been presented to these more specialised libraries where they will be more easily accessible i.e. to science lecturers and students.
• We still maintain book collections in science which are of a general – not specialised nature.
• We continue to make donations of science and technology books to such libraries in Addis and in the regions through many outreach projects we manage to support library development in Ethiopia.

I’m afraid we currently can’t do this as membership of our priority groups is not based solely on the basis of specialization; but also on that of institution-centred roles where individual professionals can contribute practically to the country's development initiatives in the British Council’s priority sector

Our further aim is to support grass-root development initiatives in Ethiopia in order to facilitate the research and development efforts of key players and professionals involved in the selected sectors.