Dementia is a condition that can have a profound impact on an individual and on their family and friends. Traditionally, the focus for dementia care has been medical treatments and care services. Increasingly, however, there is a focus on how we can enable people who have been diagnosed with dementia to live as full a life as possible, and encourage communities to work together to help people to stay healthier for longer. This means that libraries, alongside other services and organisations, have a potentially critical role to play in supporting people with dementia and their carers. This book aims to help library staff across a variety of sectors to gain a better understanding of the different ways in which library customers may be affected by dementia, and how people with dementia can continue to contribute positively to their communities. It presents ideas for ways in which libraries can better support people with dementia and their carers through approaches to customer service, design, resources, reading interventions and a range of other activities, as well as prompting more positive and inclusive attitudes towards people living with dementia amongst library staff, customers and communities more widely.

History and prevalence of dementia

Although there is evidence of an awareness of dementia since ancient times, the first modern recorded use of the word ‘dementia’ as a medical term is thought to be by Dr Philippe Pinel in 1797 (Torack, 1983). In 1906, German physician Alois Alzheimer made a significant breakthrough in understanding dementia. He inspected the brain of a deceased woman whom he had known to experience aggression, paranoia and memory problems that began when she was 50. Alzheimer discovered there was damage to the cerebral cortex of her brain from what he called ‘tangles’ and ‘plaques’. This type of dementia was named Alzheimer's disease in 1909 (Ryan et al., 2015). Around the same time, German-born American neurologist Frederic Lewy discovered abnormal protein deposits in the brains of people with Parkinson's disease and identified what would become known as Lewy body dementia (Rodrigues e Silva et al., 2010).

However, despite these important breakthroughs, for the first threequarters of the 20th century, there was relatively little interest in dementia in scientific circles. The person who probably did most to change perceptions was neurologist Robert Katzman.