...of Share the Vision in 1989 via enhanced partnership working within and between the voluntary and public sectors; and practical measures to achieve this and campaigning work to include consideration of the needs of visually impaired people within mainstream services and to persuade the UK government to adopt more proactive role. It sets out an ambitious vision statement for library services for visually impaired people in the UK that has still to be achieved.

INTRODUCTION

Depending on the nature and extent of their sight impairment, all visually impaired people throughout the world need to make adjustments to normal reading methods in order to have access to content. For some of these people it is possible to make self-adjustments that permit them to carry on reading, most obviously enhanced illumination and a magnifying glass. However, the ageing process dictates that these people, like the remainder of visually impaired people, are primarily dependent on the adjustments that society makes to enable them to carry on reading later in life or, if born blind, to commence reading in the first instance. The provision of alternative format reading materials and the exploitation of information technology are the obvious ways of removing the personal and societal barriers imposed by their sensory impairment.

In all countries the major social agency responsible for providing access to content is the publicly funded library, but not all countries have adopted a national, planned structure for addressing the special needs of visually impaired and other print disabled people. Other articles in this issue set out the approach adopted in the United States and the Scandinavian countries. This article attempts to outline how publicly funded libraries in the United Kingdom (UK), another developed country, have so far failed to address the needs of visually impaired people in an adequate manner appropriate for their special circumstances and comparatively recent attempts to improve this situation.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Public libraries in the UK funded from local rates were founded from 1851 onwards under the terms of the Public Libraries Act 1850, which permitted municipalities with a population of over 10,000n to vote whether to spend a 1/2d rate ("the halfpenny rate," equivalent to 1/480th of the current [pounds sterling] sterling) to establish a library building but not to buy books. The honor of establishing the first library under these provisions went to the ancient city of Winchester in Hampshire, which had once been the capital of England; but, not surprisingly, the major northern cities of Manchester and Liverpool quickly followed suit in 1852. Kelly records in his History of Public Libraries in Great Britain 1945-1975 (1977) that another thirty-nine authorities established public libraries over the next twenty years, but only one was in a London borough.

In the meantime, Thomas Rhodes Armitage had established the British and Foreign Blind Association for promoting the education of the blind in 1868. This organization became the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB)--the leading charity in the United Kingdom for all matters relating to blind people. Armitage was convinced that the alleviation of the destitution of most blind people was dependent on their being able to be educated. Armitage recognized the need to have a standardised embossed print for the production of reading materials and set about investigating what was the most appropriate method. Today most people associate blind readers with the Braille system invented in France by Louis Braille in 1827 when the first Braille book was produced. However, in 1868 there was a multiplicity of alternative systems. The Moon system, invented by Dr. William Moon in 1845, remains in use to this day, but Thomas (n.d.) lists at least nine other systems in existence in 1868.

Armitage decided that a committee of highly educated blind men should determine which system of embossed type should become the standard. The guiding principle was that they should be conversant with at least three of the systems and have no pecuniary interest in any. In May 1870 the committee announced: "It was unanimously decided that the Braille ought to be adopted as the written character, though the members present were equally unanimous that something better might be devised for the printed character, and that Moon's type approached the nearest of any of the existing types to which is needed" (as cited in Thomas, n.d.). This historic decision shaped the future provision of library services for blind people in the UK and elsewhere.

As is typical in most matters charitable, the key factor is the determination of one individual to address a problem. As Braille books became more available, Martha Arnold, herself blind, decided to establish the Lending Library for the Blind in her London home in 1882. As membership grew it was realized that the service could not be solely dependent on volunteers to produce and administer the collection of Braille books. In 1898 the Lending Library was registered as "The Incorporated National Lending Library for the Blind" (now the National Library for the Blind or NLB) and employed paid staff for the first time.

At this stage in the development of public libraries Kelly notes,

The provision of books for the blind was a matter of concern in many places. Most libraries provided and issued the books themselves, but some preferred to assist local institutes for the blind. Bradford, for example, established in 1912 a branch for the blind in the Royal National Institute for the Blind, which transferred its own stock to the library's control. Manchester, which at one stage employed two or three blind copyists continuously in the making of Braille texts, eventually transferred its library to the Manchester Blind Aid Society and agreed to subsidize the Society's work. In 1918 the Society was reconstituted as the Northern Branch of the National Library for the Blind and it was this latter body, founded as a voluntary association in 1882, which gradually assumed the major responsibility for the supply and distribution of books for blind readers. (1977, p. 190)

Accordingly, within fifty years of the establishment of publicly funded libraries in the UK, the trend had begun whereby the special needs of blind people were detached from mainstream provision used by the remainder of the population. Whatever the logic and merits of such arrangements, the dependency of blind people on charitable efforts to provide basic services was being instituted at an early stage.

Indeed, this separation was reinforced by the seminal Kenyon Report of 1927, which had been charged "to enquire into the adequacy of the library provision already made under the Public Libraries Acts, and the means of extending and completing such provision throughout England and Wales" (as cited in Kelly, 1977, p. 234). By this time the NLB in Westminster had 100,000 volumes and 10,000 readers, whereas only 41 of several hundred public libraries had their own special collections. Accordingly, Kenyon recommended that "any new scheme would probably best take the form of a subscription to the National Library and the delivery of books from the National Library direct to the blind reader or to the institution for the blind which the blind reader attends" (as cited in Kelly, 1977, p. 241). This recommendation was adopted as Kelly records that in the 1930s "Few libraries now maintained a special collection of books for the blind, the general practice being to subscribe to the National Library for the Blind. The operations of this continued to expand, and the enlarged and reconstructed building in Westminster which was completed in 1935 had accommodation for over a quarter of a million volumes (1977, p. 288). At the same time library services for blind people took a momentous leap forward with the launch of the RNIB's Talking Book Service in November 1935. The motivation for introducing this new service was to address the needs of the many men blinded in the First World War who could not read Braille. The original system was based on recording books onto long-playing records that were played on standard gramophones, and it quickly became popular. Within a year, 2,639 books were available to the 966 members who had been sent gramophones, according to Salandiak (2005). By the 1960s, Kelly states in relation to public libraries,

Concerning provision for blind readers there is by this date little to be said. For the most part such readers now secured their books direct from the National Library for the Blind. A few public libraries, mainly in the north of England and in Scotland, operated a...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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