Plans for 2026

Happy New Year! Hopefully you all had a good break.

As 2026 starts it felt like a good time to assess upcoming Libraries Hacked strategy for the year, in relation to the purpose of Libraries Hacked. The stated goal of Libraries Hacked is:

Promoting open data and digital prototypes in libraries

Libraries Hacked

How can this be done in 2026?

Open data

Open data is data that anyone can access, use, and share. Public libraries hold huge amounts of data, while not having the resources or time to do much with it. More should be invested in service skills and time, but it would be a huge benefit to make data as widely available as possible. It is also fair to say that despite libraries being wonderful and much loved, a lack of data-informed policy and decisions is consistently evident.

Unfortunately times are tough, and engaging in open data is out of the reach of many services. Heads of service don’t have the time or inclination, while fighting declining budgets and trying to keep staff employed and branches open. Where data analysis is being done, it’s often in advocacy and social value analysis that rarely delivers either insight or improvement, driven by a need to convince funders that libraries are worthwhile.

There is rarely active hostility to being open. We’d all love a culture of open working to improve services. Good data standards and open schemas for sharing, responsible data management and stewardship, and policies of open by default (aside from personal data). The data would be available through public APIs (application programming interfaces) and data downloads. But we don’t have those things, and that level of data maturity is a long task. That means it should be a high priority, and we need to continue trying to convince people that better data, made widely available, can make a huge difference. And crucially, making it open is the essential part of that. It’s not a nice to have, or a good thing for transparency, it’s the key to making use of that data.

So, what to focus on in 2026? Firstly there are plenty of professionals in the sector who are pushing for open data, and are doing all they can to work towards this. It would be good to share their voices and see if there are ways to help them.

There are also a few ‘low-hanging fruit’ data options for public libraries. The British Library Public Lending Right team are in the process of collecting comprehensive loans data from all public library services on titles being loaned, and we’ll continue to push for this to be open. It’s a dataset that could serve many organisations and individuals in the reading sector.

“We are pleased to inform you that from 1 July 2025, PLR figures will no longer be based on loans data collected from a sample, but national loans data from all UK public libraries.”

From British Library - PLR loans data - Will this data finally be released this year?

There are other library organisations working on library data. The Arts Council and Libraries Connected have significantly increased data projects in recent years. However, while sympathetic and supportive of open data, the remit of their work is primarily to serve sector stakeholders and their goals.

A recent Libraries Connected commissioned report, conducted by Independent Mind gathered loans data from 34 library services and analysed it. However, the outputs from that project were 2 PDF print reports and an internal webinar for library services. No reusable data, or web content, or open engagement.

This isn’t a particular criticism of that project, which had a lot of interesting analysis and was skilled. This is the way most public library research is conducted, as one-off reports with an outcome in mind. Those commissioned to do the research are not tasked with improving the long-term data maturity of the sector, and the library services involved tend to adopt a risk-averse attitude, only sharing their data for the purposes of the research.

More can be done by the sector to lead by example and recognise the huge task in changing the culture to an open by default one, and encouraging data reuse for service improvement.

Anyway, it’s good to have a different focus to other organisations, and open data advocacy and pressure needs to come from outside. Libraries Hacked will carry on collecting data from library services using Freedom of Information requests. These will remain genuine requests for data with a purpose, there’s no point spamming services for no reason. This is currently the only public mechanism for obtaining data, and it’s a reminder that the primary audience for public library data should be the public.

When data is released by libraries it’s important to keep on top of it. In 2025 the Arts Council released a high level library usage dataset across most of English library services. Within weeks a Libraries Hacked project published the Library activity dashboard, and this will continue to be enhanced, and updated to include future data.

Digital prototypes

A digital prototype is an initial version or representation of a digital product (such as a web application). It may have some functionality, but is closer to a proof of concept or simulation rather than something real.

Libraries Hacked prototypes have always gone a bit further in creating working prototypes, so the term is slightly misleading. Library Map was originally developed in 2020 and clocked up many hundreds of hours of development time on it. In commercial terms that would amount to >£100k, excessive for a prototype! Hopefully it did its job - for a while it was directly used on the LibraryOn website, and is now properly replaced by their own excellent Library Finder. Hopefully projects like Mobile Libraries can go on to inform future library sector developments in areas like communicating mobile library timetables.

As an aside, if anyone ever begrudges public investment in digital projects like LibraryOn, it’s a reality that good digital applications, developed properly, need time and money. The public library sector needs publicly developed and owned applications. We’re immensely lucky that there is an excellent digital product team dedicated to libraries, and we need to help it succeed, give it more work, and cling on to it for as long as possible.

For 2026, one Libraries Hacked prototype is lined up. A mobile application (a proper one on the app stores) that helps people discover libraries when they are out and about by detecting when they are close to them. Nothing too complicated, and more tourist-y than really practical. But a good opportunity to experiment and create something fun. If anyone would like to be involved in that please do get in touch.

Other than that it will be chilling out!