Sustainability and social utility: Economic development with innovative library tools

Abstract

Libraries cannot confine their activities to merely preserving and providing documents; the wide range of their functions flexibly responds to the rapidly changing needs of society. Besides library services becoming more complex, over the past three decades, since the change of the political system, Hungarian libraries have also adapted to operating within a market economy framework. From public institutions operating under a lot of pressure among their competitors this requires a major shift in perspective, still ongoing today. To remain competitive, five criteria need to be met: (1) Leaders of libraries shall have adequate financial knowledge and management skills. (2) Libraries are required to continuously prove their social utility to their maintainers. (3) There is an increasing focus on effectiveness in the operation of libraries. (4) Embedded participation, in line with each library’s type both in nature and intensity, is expected in (regional) economic development. (5) The boundary between traditional and atypical services of libraries is beginning to blur; educational and social engagement needs to be increased. This study examines, both from a theoretical and a practical perspective, the international library innovations connected to the development of (1) digital literacy, (2) financial literacy, and (3) business, integrated into the current global and local, mostly education-oriented set of instruments related to sustainability. The paper also addresses the connections between library financing and economic value creation, and the possible returns on tax money spent on the library system. The analysis is concluded by posing topical questions on cultural economics requiring further research, from the field of library and information science, raised by rapidly changing circumstances (e.g., Covid-19).