There was a concern among some heads of service and among professionals working in the field of libraries and literature that libraries were not reaching key sectors of the population. 

Librarians lacked skills and confidence in engaging with new writing and new audiences, especially in relation to younger adults aged 18-40.  Fiction purchase was often conservative, lagging well behind market trends.  The dominant library borrower from Portsmouth to Preston was an older female, reading popular genres.  Library staff were confident of her tastes and catered for her well but her actual and perceived dominance led to neglect of other types of readers.   This was compounded by the largely passive culture of adult public libraries; library staff were always ready to respond to requests but there was no expectation of active intervention to open up reading choices, or understanding of promotional techniques to create a demand, rather than simply respond to it. 

These concerns were first brought to prominence in the Arts Council/Library Association 1992 Conference Reading the Future , which was hailed as marking a sea-change in libraries' attitude to literature.  Over the next few years, especially thanks to the Arts Council's Library Fund, there were a good number of small-scale examples which showed that, given external support and expertise, libraries could assume a developmental role which was welcomed by readers.   But there was no framework to take local examples into a coherent strategy.