Although 45% of the West Midlands population use a library and 32% visit museums, our services are not reaching all the people who could benefit from them. The role of MLA West Midlands is to encourage and support museums, libraries and archives to re-evaluate their core services so they can respond to the needs of current, intending and new users on a long-term basis. To do this, we need to know more about users and non-users, their preferences and aspirations.

We will:

• Work with West Midlands Life and others to gather and share information about our audiences and their needs
• Adopt an MLA West Midlands audience development policy
• Identify strategic marketing material for use by the sector, and commission new work to fill identified gaps in our knowledge
• Work with other cultural agencies to develop socially inclusive services
• Encourage a sector wide audience development /marketing network
• Work with the BBC to gather electronic written testimony of World War 2 from non-technically literate people who lived through the war, including the urban and rural elderly poor. These will be collected through The People’s War website.