Abstract thinking

I've been having a play with some photos of our libraries, for no good reason other than I found the effects to be pleasing. As you can see, it's a simple application of a kaleidoscope function. I'm wondering if there's anything to be read into the results.

I'll come back to this in a few weeks, when I've forgotten the running order, to see if I can pick out which have been recent refurbishments and/or relocations.

Equality in electronic delivery - thinking about inclusion

I got to thinking the other day about if/how delivering library services electronically had any positive effect on equality issues. I imposed two conditions on this thinking:

• I've always been wary of the "which groups' needs do we need to be addressing?" approach. Partly because in principle equality should be about everyone. Partly because this usually degenerates into a box-ticking exercise. (A colleague was once told that his library service needed to do more to address the needs of women, retired people and children. "That is the sum total of our customer base," he replied.) Mostly because we need to be addressing the actual needs of the individual customer, not the perceived needs of the group we have shoe-horned them into.


• Adaptive technology doesn't count for this exercise. This isn't to belittle its potential usefulness, it's just a separate issue.

I'm concerned about the impact - or not- our mainstream, vanilla-flavoured services are having. If a customer has to identify themselves as having "special needs" of one sort or another we're already playing from the back foot. With all good intentions we can sometimes be creating a barrier; as I once heard someone say to a council official: "Sometimes I feel like saying to people: 'look, this is about me, not my disability!'" Libraries can, and do, address those special needs very effectively and sensitively, but how far can we can deliver an appropriate service through the usual channels without first having to identify the need as being "special?"

One commonly-perceived negative becomes a potentially-important positive in this context: the electronic delivery mechanism is impersonal. It doesn't notice your height, weight or gender. It doesn't know the colour of your skin or your tone of voice or your accent. Your hair could be green or white or ginger. All those subjective value-loadings that human beings are prone to are not involved in the process. In that respect, at least, there is an equality of offering. Of course, there is no guarantee of equality of delivery - the layout, or language, or choice of service(s) may be excluding factors.

At the moment we provide a fairly basic suite of services:

• A web site with information about services and events
• A web catalogue allowing
• Searches, including a few hundred reading lists with directed searches
• Customers' building their own personal reading lists
• Reserving titles
• Loan renewals
• A bunch of online reference and information resources

We could, and should, do more than this. Especially bearing in mind the interactive potential of these resources and the various web 2.0 resources that are available. I'm frustrated that we don't have more interactive forms on the web site, particularly something as basic as a membership form. There are technical reasons with the corporate content management system that makes it difficult to create forms but this is something we're going to have to find a way of addressing or working round pretty soon.

The online services we do currently provide are available remotely 24 x 7, which means that customers don't have to be able to physically get to a library building during library opening times to receive library services. Which is a great boon for people who are time-poor due to family or caring commitments. And for housebound people.

Some of our housebound customers search the web catalogue, place reservations on the items they want and the items are delivered to them by the housebound library service. They continue to get the personal interaction with the Library Assistant who does the visits but they gain some control over the selection of items in the basket. It's a win:win situation - the customer can make specific choices and the Library Assistant can provide additional reading/listening suggestions based on those choices.

I think there's a lot of scope for doing more work with the reading lists. We could do more to explain the ways that people can build their own reading lists, or use the online reading lists I've already created, to help them with their studies or literacy skills. Or reading lists for people working with people with special needs or who need help with their English literacy.

And we shouldn't forget the online e-book resources we've been using to meet the needs of visually-impaired people wanting to study classic texts. Librivox and Gutenberg have both been useful a few times.

I think I'm barely scratching the surface here, even with the limited services we're providing...

Ten tips for entrepreneurs

Another nugget of gold on The Travelin' Librarian site flagging up a post on the ReadWriteStart channel for first-time entrepreneurs and start-ups. In it, Kevin Rose, Digg's founder, provided ten tips for budding entrepreneurs - you can see the details here. None of it is rocket science, indeed at least a couple are self-evident truths until you take a step back and realise how often they aren't acted on in real life.

I'd argue that they apply significantly to developing a public library service.

1. "Just Build It: You don't need anyone's approval and in fact, you probably won't get it, so don't even try." -- you're working in a bureaucracy; in all probability you're working in one of the more conservative corners of that bureaucracy. Sometimes you've just got to let that genie out of the bottle.
   
2. "Iterate: Build, release and iterate. Make a list of the features you want to create over the next six months and get going" -- definitely!!! Don't imagine you've finished the work. Look at it, review it, ask yourself how it could be made better. If resources allow, do it. If resources don't allow, why did you do it in the first place? Development needs to be sustainable.
   
3. "Hire Your Boss: Make sure you hire people that you would want to work for, who challenge you and you can learn from." -- I think this is the single most challenging idea for an English public library service to take on board. The rigid, top-down hierarchical model of working didn't work all that well in the first place and has become a liability if library services are going to use all their available resources nimbly and effectively.
   
4. "Demand Excellence: Ensure staff are committed to and understand your vision" -- the second sentence is important. Excellence isn't something that is measured after the event, it is something that's signposted to before the event. You demand excellence by delivering vision.
   
5. "Raising Money: The higher your evaluation is, the more equity you have to work with. Beg, borrow and steal. Be creative about finding ways to cut costs." -- more pertinent now than ever! If you can get money, use it. They can't take it off you if you've spent it. Investigate new delivery channels to see if you can do the same or better cheaper (at least one example will be coming up in point 9).
   
6. "Hack the Press" -- make sure that you're getting your message out there. Not just to via "official" channels: chat up anyone and everyone who might be useful.
   
7. "Invest in Advisors" -- not necessarily consultants in the bureaucratic sense. Invest in people who know things that you may find useful. (Including your own staff!) The investment doesn't necessarily have to be in money or stocks: librarians around the world are sharing ideas, advice and news in all sorts of different forums, make sure you're tapping into them. And then make sure that you're also using the same model to tap into networks outside the library arena (be creative about it) - you will be amazed at just how often the answer to a problem is a devolved community knowledgebase with meeting and event management facilities and free internet access. Join in, be positive, be useful; the effort you invest this way can be paid back many times over later on.
   
8. "Connect With the Community" -- any public library service that isn't doing that already should be boarded up.
   
9. "Leverage Your User Base to Spread the Word" -- talk to your customers; tell them what you're doing; then get your customers to be your marketing tool. Time was, we only had word of mouth to work with (but when it works it works very well indeed). Now there are all sorts of new opportunities, many of which are free. Which ties in nicely with point 5. If it costs £x to print out a couple of hundred leaflets which may or may not be actually read could you not use the money one something more concrete that you could tell people about buckshee on Twitter, Facebook, etc.?
   
10. "Analyze Your Traffic: Pay attention to how people are using your site, and then learn and evolve" -- not just your web traffic (though that's important). How does/doesn't your online audience traffic relate to your library's visitors?

I know which ones I have and haven't been doing (and I'm not going to say here which they are!)

Libraries working with vulnerable people

This is an interesting blog about work being done in Dundee Libraries. There are some good stories of relatively-low cost, high impact work here. Almost as heartening as the services that are being provided here is the fact that somebody's recording and celebrating them.

A lot of libraries, including Rochdale's, are doing similar types of activities to a greater or lesser extent. I'll encourage the people in our Special Services Team to have a look at this blog, for both the reasons stated above. It would be good if they could share experiences. It was nice to see how they do reminiscence work. Special Services work with "reminiscence packs," which tend to include more objects than books or other reading materials (very often they'll take along some books or audio items along to complement and support the reminiscence packs). The Library Service also does occasional one-off reminiscence events. The last one, I think, was this:

Do you remember the times when washday was always on a Monday?

Fourteen people came along to our morning of washday reminiscences at Castleton Library on Friday 16 January. This was an opportunity to swap memories of living, working and shopping in Castleton, Middleton and Rochdale. We used the "Women's Work" reminiscence pack to prompt discussion, support by materials from the local studies collections in Middleton Library and the Local Studies Collection in Touchstones. It was also very useful to be able to link this with the "Shop" exhibition in the Heritage Gallery at Touchstones.

My conscience is pricked: I need to do a proper page about the reminiscence packs on our web site.

Reflective journal processes

There's a nice diagram of the Reflective Diary/Journal Process on the Businessballs site. I'm forever telling people that "experience isn't what happens to you, it's what you do with it" and this diagram provides a useful template for following this through. One of the more dispiriting truths is that too many people's experience of training or development activities stop at stage two of this process: "What did you think of the training?" "Very good/bad" and back to business as usual.

And how many pieces of work do we get involved in that completely ignore the question: "How will I measure and know that I've succeeded in this?" I know I'm a bore about needing to know the success factors but I do feel this is absolutely important. If you don't know how to tell when you're successful you can only know how to fail.

Library web page development

It occurs to me that if I do a web page for each library pulling in the appropriate news and events it would be a good idea to also populate it with appropriate statistics and factoids.

Just making a note before I forget.

Games people play

Interesting piece in "Government Technology" (there's three pages of this article). I'm pretty agnostic about the virtues of gaming in libraries: if people choose to come in and play games on the public PCs and they aren't doing anybody any harm, that's fine. It keeps them off the streets, and in a few cases some of our staff have actively encouraged this precisely to stop kids and youths hanging round making a nuisance of themselves. So I can see the benefits from a social perspective. I just haven't seen much, if any, evidence of libraries using gaming to deliver on traditional library purposes. It's interesting to read how some libraries are using games for media literacy and reading literacy programmes.

Derring-do

While I'm on the subject of adventure, the British Library's just added Captain Scott's Diary to its collection of virtual books.

Minette gloves not mandatory!

The grandeur of life

A friend works at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City. I was extremely impressed when I went to visit him, not least by the very friendly and helpful staff who let me have a look at some of their rare books. At the time they were running an exhibition on polar exploration, which gave them the opportunity to display some of the classic texts of Victorian adventure (and which leads me to wonder what the rest of the world really refers to instead of "Victorian"). Their Darwin exhibition is just coming towards the end of its run now. It makes me wish we could do something similar with some of our special collections. I'm a voice in the wilderness on that one but I'll keep banging on about it.