A blog post by Dr Jessica Gardner (University Librarian, Cambridge), based on her keynote for the Libraries Connected Annual Seminar, June 2026.
The Libraries Alliance began with a simple but powerful ambition: to tell a stronger, more confident story about the value of libraries in our society.
Conversations started about two years ago when Isobel Hunter (Libraries Connected), Louis Coiffait-Gunn (CILIP) and Richard Ovenden (Bodleian Libraries) convened a meeting of library leaders, from national and academic libraries to school and public libraries, with the goal to explore how we might come together to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Public Libraries Act of 1850.
Isobel was very clear from that first meeting that this should not be a story of austerity in the public library sector, but rather showcase its value and impact to help local communities flourish and thrive.
What emerged across our initial conversations was a strong sense of connectedness and commitment to the abiding values of our profession, including trust, inclusion, and freedom of access to knowledge.
The idea of the Libraries Alliance formed around a simple belief: the power of libraries through life.
This speaks to the profound role libraries play at every stage of our lives, from the public and school library, to the university and workplace, to specialist collections and, finally, to home library services. All types of libraries are welcome under the umbrella of the Libraries Alliance.
Two moments have stayed with me from those early conversations, and continue to shape how I think about this work.
The first was a deep sense of professional kinship developed while talking with Ed Jewell (former President of Libraries Connected) as we discussed what we had in common. We realised that so many of our concerns as library leaders (Ed in the public library sector and me on the academic and research library side) were the same, including our concern about how to develop services that helped our teams and users gain the skills they need to critically navigate information and misinformation in an increasingly AI landscape.
The second was when Isobel coined the term ‘our library nation’ at a meeting of the Libraries Alliance at Swiss Cottage Library last February.
And you know what? We are a library nation. Initial analysis on behalf of the Libraries Alliance by Andrew Holden (consultant, Activist Group) helped aggregate existing data to show:
- We represent over 4500 physical library sites which host over 232 million visits a year;
- We issue over 1 billion items each year, via digital or physical means;
- We are responsible for at least £1.8 billion turnover each year.
Whatever way you count, those are big numbers that demonstrate our collective impact and value and a very hard-working investment of people and funds.
The Libraries Alliance is still forming but we have identified four major themes to guide our work over the coming year.
- Data – we have started to map and gather an aggregated data set to ensure that we hold credible reliable, and consistent evidence space that demonstrates the impact of libraries together.
- Research – we have already completed our first research project, a systematic review exploring The Impact and Value of Public Libraries in the UK identifying current strengths and research gaps, authored by four early career librarians at Cambridge and Oxford.
- Workforce development – we plan to hold a workforce summit to identify key strategic areas of priority for workforce development and identify best practice across our different sectors so we can lead and develop our teams more effectively together for the challenges we face.
- Freedom of knowledge – we hold freedom to access knowledge and freedom to read as a central tenet of our practice and professional ethics and will speak up for this openly in our commitment to the place of libraries in an open, democratic and civil society.
The Libraries Alliance is not intended to be a replacement for the vital membership bodies which exist to help different sector specific parts of our profession, such as Libraries Connected for public libraries, Libraries Rising for library leaders of children’s public and school library services, or SCONUL for the academic libraries in the UK and Ireland.
Instead, it creates a space for collaboration enabling us to tell a bigger story about our library nation and to speak with one voice about why libraries matter.