The Europe Challenge

Public libraries are quietly doing some of the most important community work in Europe. But how well do we actually know what that work involves, and what is asked of the people who do it?

To find out, the BUDDIES project (Connected Libraries & Communities) ran a pan-European skills survey in spring 2026, thanks to our partner Public Libraries 2030. 222 library employees from 32 countries answered. Most of them are experienced workers: two-thirds have worked in libraries for eight years or more. The resulting data set points to a sector that is value-aligned and self-aware, but structurally constrained in translating intent into practice.
Three findings stand out.

1. Being a place for the community is not the same as working together with it

This is one of the most surprising findings. Almost everyone believes in community work: 85% of respondents said that adapting services and programmes to their community’s needs is “very” or “extremely” important. But only 15% described that kind of work as a “core activity” of their library. For most, it happens regularly, but it isn’t the thing the library is really built around.

At a closer look, things get even more interesting. Libraries that see themselves mainly as community-gathering places engage with people all the time, but only 6% report that their communities are deeply involved in designing what happens.

So the assumption that a warm, welcoming space naturally becomes a co-creation environment turns out to be wrong. At the moment, most participatory work is staff-driven, with community input rather than community authorship; only 3% of libraries describe their work as fully community-led. This is a baseline, not a deficiency, but it clarifies where most libraries actually sit on the engagement spectrum, as distinct from where they perceive themselves to sit.

2. Stated training priorities and actual competency gaps diverge

Asked what training they wanted most, library staff put community engagement at the top (70%). But community engagement is one of the areas where they are already quite strong. More training there would mostly be watering ground that is already green. The real gaps are instead in three quieter competencies:

• Facilitation. General facilitation is a skill most possess in the field, but the same does not apply to co-designing with people and to managing difficult conversations. Over 40% of respondents rate their organisation’s capacity to deal with difficult conversations as “limited”.
• Inclusion and intercultural work. The ability to cover intercultural communication and to work with marginalised groups are consistently rated as “limited” by more than half of respondents.
• Measuring impact. Many participants find it really hard to evaluate the social difference their work makes, and that difficulty then becomes a reason participatory projects stall. This does not mean that community engagement does not matter. It means the most useful growth is often in less obvious skills, skills that actually help workers reach people who are usually left out.

3. The biggest constraint is time, not budget or training availability

76% of the participants named “Lack of time” as the biggest obstacle, far ahead of “Limited budget” (46%) and “Shortage of relevant training” (42%).

This reshaped our understanding of the profession: the problem is not a lack of will or ability. Instead, the biggest issue is that community work is actual work, and it needs recognised working hours to happen. This problem interests frontline staff and small rural libraries the hardest, which is why the survey’s implicit message to funders and managers is blunt: participatory work needs dedicated, funded staff time, not goodwill.

Backing from organisations and institutions makes a huge difference too. Among libraries with strong institutional support, 96% engage with their communities regularly or as a core activity. Among those with weak support, only 29% do.

One last assumption is proven wrong by PL2030’s survey: the idea that workers grow mainly thanks to formal courses. Three-quarters of respondents stated that they learn on the job, and 60% said peer learning with other libraries is the support they want most. This was the strongest preference in the whole survey. Respondents learn best by doing the work and comparing notes with people with the same tasks, somewhere else.

So where does this leave us?

The picture sketched by the survey is quite encouraging. Libraries are rich, active, community-minded spaces, run by people who know exactly where they want to grow. What stands between them and deeper co-creation is not a lack of skill or commitment: it is time, support, and the chance to learn from one another.

That is exactly what BUDDIES is building next: a Competency Framework and a KnowHow Lab designed around how workers can actually learn. Peer-to-peer, library-to-library, across borders. The library of the future won’t be built for communities. It will be built with them and, just as much, with all of us.

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BUDDIES is a project funded by Erasmus+, working with The Europe Challenge to support library and community workers through mentoring, networking, and policy recommendations. It is coordinated by the European Cultural Foundation, in collaboration with Aarhus Public Libraries, Comicdom Press and Public Libraries 2030, and cofunded by the European Union.