Freckle Report 2021

Book excerpt: Freckle Report 2021 follows the Freckle Report 2020. It is an analysis of the performance and funding of public libraries in the United States, in Australia and in the United Kingdom It assesses the problems facing the service, the decline in use; the apparent denial of that problem; how library services can sensibly be measured; the pursuit of digital material and the increasingly diverse audiences. The reports contain original research of the most recently available figures about how the public make use of public libraries and how the libraries have responded to the demand for them in recent years In particular it reports how successful the library service in the United States has been in providing digital books, as audio and eBooks, during the Covid 19 Pandemic