On Libraries
To start with I need to acknowledge that this article might be a little unfair on librarians, a commentator on social media suggested it was a “dick move”, and I can see where they’re coming from and will discuss it later in the article, but we have some quality data to look at first.
The censuses of 2011 and 2022 reported there were about 1.5 million Scots speakers in Scotland, making up around 29% of the population, and other research by the General Records Office in 1996, building on a survey and interviews conducted by Professor Steve Murdoch in 1995 also suggested that 1.5 people speak Scots, so two or three independent sources confirming that around 30% of the population were Scots speakers.
So I wondered, what proportion of the nation’s library stock is written in Scots and is it proportionate to the Scot-speaking population?
Local authorities
Almost all of Scotland’s 32 local authorities have their library catalogues online and we are able to search by language to find the number of titles with the language category set to English, Scots or Scottish Gaelic.
You might want to skip this list, and look at the graphs below
Glasgow City (pop. 622,820 - 28.2% Scots speakers)
33 public libraries
142,247 English titles
150 Scots titles (0.10%)
38 Gaelic titles
City of Edinburgh (pop. 514,990 - 23.5% Scots speakers)
28 public libraries
449,852 English titles
331 Scots titles (0.07%)
730 Gaelic titles
Fife (pop. 371,340 - 37.2% Scots speakers)
51 public libraries
176,370 English titles
131 Scots titles 0.07%
107 Gaelic titles
North Lanarkshire (pop. 340,930 - 33.9% Scots speakers)
19 public libraries
146,677 English titles
79 Scots titles (0.05%)
284 Gaelic titles
South Lanarkshire (pop. 327,430 - 32.5% Scots speakers)
23 public libraries
129,391 English titles
73 Scots titles (0.06%)
105 Gaelic titles
Aberdeenshire (pop. 263,750 - 47.5% Scots speakers)
33 public libraries
214,706 English titles
128 Scots titles (0.06%)
34 Gaelic titles
Highland (pop. 235,710 - 23.9% Scots speakers)
40 public libraries
102,477 English titles
65 Scots titles (0.06%)
1,393 Gaelic titles (1.4%)
Aberdeen City (pop. 224,190 - 35.2% Scots speakers)
12 public libraries
233,138 English titles
204 Scots titles (0.08%)
128 Gaelic titles
West Lothian (pop. 181,720 - 34.9% Scots speakers)
14 public libraries
101,072 English titles
49 Scots titles (0.05%)
8 Gaelic titles
Renfrewshire (pop. 184,340 - 30.3% Scots speakers)
12 public libraries
No language search function
Falkirk (pop. 158,450 - 37.7% Scots speakers)
8 public libraries
124,183 English titles
77 Scots titles
65 Gaelic titles
Perth and Kinross (pop. 151,120 - 31.7% Scots speakers)
14 public libraries
179,698 English titles
170 Scots titles
445 Gaelic titles
Dumfries and Galloway (pop. 145,770 - 34.2% Scots speakers)
24 public libraries
148,339 English titles
No Scots and Gaelic language search
Dundee City (pop. 148,350 - 34.2% Scots speakers)
13 public libraries
202,421 English titles
133 Scots titles
76 Gaelic titles
North Ayrshire (pop.133,490 = 38.3% Scots speakers)
15 public libraries
67,180 English titles
68 Scots titles
155 Gaelic titles (0.2%)
East Ayrshire (pop. 120,390 - 41.9% Scots speakers)
12 public libraries
No general search function
Angus (pop. 114,660 - 39.4% Scots speakers)
7 public libraries
No language search function
Scottish Borders (pop. 116,820 - 33.8% Scots speakers)
12 public libraries
118,591 English titles
92 Scots titles
56 Gaelic titles
South Ayrshire (pop. 111,560 - 36.4% Scots speakers)
11 public libraries
No language search function
East Dunbartonshire (pop. 108,980 - 24.2% Scots speakers)
17 public libraries
60,475 English titles
No Scots language search option - but they do have a “Scots Language Collection”
105 Gaelic titles
East Lothian (pop. 112,450 - 31.2% Scots speakers)
14 public libraries
98,605 English titles
83 Scots titles
35 Gaelic titles
Moray (pop. 94,280 - 42.9% Scots speakers)
11 public libraries
160,716 English titles
130 Scots titles
143 Gaelic titles
East Renfrewshire (pop. 97,160 - 22.5% Scots speakers)
10 public libraries
71,280 English titles
44 Scots titles
170 Gaelic titles
Stirling (pop. 92,530 - 30.2% Scots speakers)
16 public libraries
133,116 English titles
83 Scots titles
197 Gaelic titles
Midlothian (pop. 97,030 - 33.9% Scots speakers)
9 public libraries
108,316 English titles
52 Scots titles
42 Gaelic titles
West Dunbartonshire (pop. 88,270 - 32.6% Scots speakers)
8 public libraries
233,204 English titles
52 Scots titles
39 Gaelic titles
Argyll and Bute (pop. 87,920 - 24.3% Scots speakers)
11 public libraries
72,866 English titles
35 Scots titles
356 Gaelic titles
Inverclyde (pop. 78,340 - 29.9% Scots speakers)
6 public libraries
52,591 English titles
45 Scots titles
74 Gaelic titles
Clackmannanshire (pop. 51,750 - 37.35 Scots speakers)
5 public libraries
48,933 English titles
No Scots language search option
25 Gaelic titles
Na h-Eileanan Siar (pop. 26,120 - 16.3% Scots speakers)
4 public libraries
77,000 English titles
9 Scots titles
301 Gaelic titles
Shetland Islands (pop. 23,020 - 41.0% Scots speakers)
108,019 English titles
92 Scots titles
30 Gaelic titles
Orkney (pop. 22,020 - 38.7% Scots speakers)
2 public libraries
113,617 English titles
70 Scots titles (0.06%)
20 Gaelic titles
In summary the median or typical public library service in Scotland will have 118,000 titles written in English, 79 titles written in Scots, and 105 titles written in Scottish Gaelic.
As percentages 0.067% of books in each library catalogue is in Scots and 0.089% of books are in Gaelic.
Compare this to 29% of the population speaking Scots and 1.5% of the population speaking Gaelic.
As ratios this means there are about 1,500 times more books in English than Scots or 1,100 times more books in Gaelic than English.
Why are libraries spending so little of their acquisitions budget on Scots and Gaelic books?
The Western Isles have the greatest proportion of Gaelic speakers, almost 50% of the population reported in the census that they were able to speak Gaelic, the library service holds 77,000 books written in English and 301 books written in Gaelic. Whilst this is one of the better proportions we might imagine that the library service acquisitions budget is around £5,000 per year, paid for by the residents of the Western Isles, both English speakers and Gaelic speakers.
Based on the proportions of titles in the Western Isles library catalogue, this budget is spent £4,960 to English language writers and publishers and only £40 to Gaelic writers and publishers.
How can it possibly be fair, that the Gaelic speaking residents pay their council tax, which is then doled out to the libraries, who then give almost all of it to English-speakers. Those taxpayers are effectively paying for the minoritisation of their own language.
Double-checking
Now, before we get too het up about this, it is necessary to validate the data.
Many Scots language books have ISBN records that state the book’s language is “English” and not “Scots”. There could be many reasons for this, perhaps the administrator at publisher doesn’t recognise Scots, perhaps they have political views that Scots is a variety of English, perhaps it is so the book shows up on English language searches. Perhaps no one in the whole supply chain, publisher, subeditor, distributor, retailer, library acquisitions librarian, Nielsen and ISBN, none of them care in the slightest about me doing a search on the language field of their databases.
Luckily I have curated by own list of books written in Scots, that doesn’t depend on the library’s language classification, and my list includes the Amazon Best-sellers Rank so we can make a good stab at searching for the books that libraries are most likely to have in stock.
I’m not going to check every single Scots title in every library service, but we will search through Glasgow City Libraries’ catalogue for the top 80 bestish selling Scots books:-
Out of these 80, only 22 are correctly tagged as being written in Scots, 22 are tagged as English and 15 have no language classification at all.
From this we can estimate that when a search for Scots books comes up with, for example, 100 titles, the library service might have between 2.5 and 3 times as many books in reality, so between 250 and 300 titles.
When we found out that on average a library service might have 0.067% of books tagged as being written in Scots, if the books were correctly tagged it might rise to as much as 0.20%. this is still an insignificant proportion of the collection compared to the mass of English books and the proportion of Scots speakers in the population.
Since we noted the number of copies of each book held, we can play with the stats, out of these 60 titles a total of 387 copies were held by Glasgow libraries.
The average number of copies held of each book is 6.5 copies, the median number of copies is about 2. There is something of a long-tail effect going on.
The catalogue search originally revealed 150 Scots titles, supposing this is an undercount by a factor of three because things wrongly categorised as English, they might have a total of 450 Scots titles. Multiplying this by 6.5 (the average) suggests that a maximum of 2,925 copies of Scots books held by Glasgow libraries, multiplying by 2 (the median) gives us a low estimate of 900 copies of Scots books.
Would English titles have the same distribution of quantities? There might be an even longer tail so the average and median might be lower, but I don’t have data on this, It could be that Glasgow has almost a million copies of English books, and so the 900 to 2,925 Scots books is still a tiny proportion compared to the 30% of Scots speakers.
Luckily someone submitted a Freedom of Information request to Argyll and Bute asking how many library books they chuck out each year, and the response suggests that their current library stock is 146,279. Our catalogue search count suggested 72,866 English titles, 35 Scots titles and 356 Gaelic titles. This suggests that on average there are 1.99 copies of each title.
Also the FoI suggests that about 5,500 books are added to the Argyll and Bute stock each year. For information 24.3% of people in Argyll and Bute reported they could either speak, read or write Scots.
We can plot a graph to visualise the how many copies there are of each Scots title in Glasgow Libraries.
From list of the top eight best-selling Scots titles we might categorise the books into four quantity classes:-
For about a tenth of the total number of titles they hold around twenty copies
For about a fifth of the total number of titles they hold around a dozen copies
For about a third of the total they hold a single copy
For the final third they do not have any copies
We might note that Glasgow has 33 public libraries, so for the top class of books its about one copy per library, for the second class one book is shared between three branches, and for the third class there is one copy shared with all branches.
If a Scots speaker walks into a typical branch library, they might find 45 Scots titles on the shelves and 10,000 English titles.
Finances
The Scottish Languages Bill is currently going through Holyrood, in theory there is something of a big public debate on the matter (although this seems to take the form of three newspaper articles and the same old commenters leaving tired comments recycling the same old tropes). The issue of funding frequently raises its head, both in parliamentary discussions and in online bunfights.
My own view, from a practical point of view, is a little nonplused.
I mean I worked for a few years as the admin chap in a road maintenance depot, road signs get replaced all the time, both as a cyclical activity, every ten years, or if they are getting rusty and as a result of knockdowns.
A bilingual road sign costs almost exactly the same amount of money as a single language road sign. Even if its slightly bigger. Compared to the cost of sending out chaps in a van to replace the sign, any cost differences are insignificant.
Basically we already pay for road signs, the language issue shouldn’t make any difference.
Similarly we already pay for education and schools, teaching Scots or Gaelic in schools should cost almost exactly the same amount of money as just teaching English. Of course things like textbooks will have to be written, but we were going to write textbooks anyway.
The issue perhaps is that if 1.5 million people already speak Scots, then why not just employ them as teachers and writers, and office administrators.
Instead of paying extra to get Gaelic translations of roadsigns, why not just employ people who speak Gaelic as part of the normal mix of skilled employees.
If 30% of people can speak and read Scots, and 22% of people can write Scots, why weren’t organisations like Holyrood and Education Scotland already employing people who can speak and read Scots? Why does it take extra funding?
I accept that this is a naïve viewpoint, but with regards to libraries, there is already a acquisitions budget, each library service has a few thousand pounds to spend on books each year, and manage to buy a few thousand books. It ought to just be a trivial matter of adjusting the ratios of how much goes to English publishers and how much goes to Scots and Gaelic publishers.
Previously councils have been literally, taking money from the 30% of Scots-speaking taxpayers and handing it to English-speaking writers and publishers. The typical Scottish council library service will buy between 5,000 and 10,000 English library titles each year and about 10 Scots language library titles.
The complaint that finances are tight seems a bit unreasonable, and difficult to justify when what finances there are are spent disproportionately.
Dick move
I appreciate that given the size of the English speaking world compared to the Gaelic- and Scots-speaking worlds, this idea of having a proportionate number of books in each language is difficult, and in some ways its unfair to put this on the shoulders of the librarians.
My thoughts that led me to libraries started with looking at census data that suggested that people in the Education and Communications sectors were disproportionately less literate in Scots than the general population. There were fewer Scots speakers in these sectors and what Scots speakers there were a smaller proportion of them reported they could write Scots.
The census also suggested that whilst on average 30% of people speak or read Scots, among those with degrees level education its only 18%, those with upper school qualifications it is 22%, those with only lower school school qualifications or who left school with no qualifications at all reported 58% Scots speaking ability.
Rather than Scottish schools “educating Scots out of people”, it seems this is survivorship bias and actually schools just filter out Scots speakers, leaving them unqualified and unable to get a proportionate number of jobs in Education and Communications.
Whilst we might forgive high street bookshops for not stocking Scots language books for commercial reasons, such restrictions don’t apply to libraries, they are free to represent their local communities and have been given budgets to do so.
Perhaps librarians, as a class, are functionally illiterate in Scots, and apart from a few exceptional Scots writers among the librarian community, they have no conception of the language. And so when each year the acquisitions librarian is desperately trying to use up the budget for buying new books, it never occurs to them to buy Scots.
They might get catalogues and marketing materials from major publishers and publisher industry organisations, they might get special offers and recommendations, but these will disproportionately be from English-language sources. Its a circular argument, Scots language publishers have less money to spend on marketing because institutions like libraries give them less money.
The publishing sector is again made up of highly educated people whose English language ability survived the Scots-filtering effect of schools, so its like an echo chamber, “everyone speaks English, buy these English books, no one speaks Scots, no need to buy Scots books”. This ignores the census data where literally 1.5 million people ticked the Scots box, and relies on a elite few English-speakers who aren’t representative.
This process leads to the libraries of the Western Isles having 99.8% English books to support a population of 50% Gaelic speakers, and similarly Glasgow and the rest of the mainland having 99.85% English books supporting a local population who are 30% Scots speakers.
Demand
It has been suggested that libraries and librarians would have more Scots and Gaelic books if people asked for them, the staff would be delighted to order any specific title, they have the acquisitions budget for precisely this.
However, that’s not how libraries work, most libraries users come in and browse what is on the shelves. The 142,000 English titles in Glasgow aren’t there because 142,000 people dutifully queued up and asked for each on individually. Only a small fraction of them were bought by request.
About half of all library books are never taken out on loan, some might never be touched. Most are just browsed, people see the title on the spine, pick it up, flick through, and decide not to.
I take my kids to libraries often enough to see them retrieve a pile of books from the shelves, have me read out one or two of them there and then, and then we dump the books on a nearby trolley. Those are the lucky few books out of thousands.
But by not even stocking Scots books at all, the libraries are depriving the library users and the books of the whole browsing activity. Generations of library users wander in and wander out thinking that no one ever reads Scots books because the libraries have no Scots books there to read.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Scottish libraries appear to disproportionately and massively support English language publishing, they oppress Scots publishing by omission and whilst the reasons for this might be understandable, in my opinion they aren’t forgivable.
The Council of Europe’s report on minority language in the UK suggested that languages such as Scots and Gaelic are lacking from public life, and libraries represent a significant part of this lack, for no good reason.
It ought to be an easy problem to fix, once it has been identified and brought to the attention of librarians. Organisations such as the Gaelic Book Council and the Scots Language Centre ought to be able to provide endless lists of which Scots and Gaelic books libraries should exhaust their budgets on each year, as the libraries clearly lack the expertise to do this themselves.
Postscript
I’ve done another of my Scots language newsletter things that covers pretty much the same topics covered here, this time on two pages. I’m still feart to actually send it out by email as a newsletter to potential subscribers.