A question asked of Australian library staff in a project survey was: ‘How often are you aware of people in your library whom you or other staff think may be experiencing homelessness?”. These are the results of this question from 413 responses:

• Never: 4 responses
• A few times a year: 82 responses
• A few times a month: 71 responses
• Once or twice a week: 77 responses
• Daily: 179 responses

This is how those numbers look across each of our states and territories (these numbers look a little different to the above because some people answered this question, but did not answer the question about what state or territory they were from. These people are not represented in this table.):

So what can we learn from these results? What this is telling us is that every state or territory except Western Australia has library staff that see people they think might be experiencing homelessness in their libraries at least a few times a year. Library staff who are seeing people they think might be without homes in their libraries are most likely to be seeing this every day.

It is worth noting that these responses were based on library staff observing people who appeared to be homeless. Participants were not asked what they saw in a person that made them believe that person was homeless, but it is possible that the people they observed were sleeping rough, and that their appearance reflected this. When we consider that only 7% of people experiencing homelessness are sleeping rough (Mission Australia, 2021), there is a very good chance that there are many more people than this table indicates who are without homes and are using our libraries.

More reporting from the survey will follow soon.