Speaking in tongues

I was chatting to a friend the other day. He's a lecturer and, like many people in the academic sector, his school was being required to justify its worth to the university in business terms, which was proving difficult. For one thing, it just doesn't seem right philosophically: while the university can, and does, work closely with business should it actually a business itself? For another, those of us over the age of thirty have had so much half-chewed and often misunderstood business-speak spat at us over the years that even the best-conceived and well-founded attempt at setting out a mission statement for our organisations will set off a five-bell alarm on our bullshit meters. But ignoring it and hoping it'll go away isn't an option. These things have a habit of hanging around like a bad smell on the landing and if you don't provide the necessary input somebody else, who may not necessary have your best interests at heart, will. So he was chafing at the question: "given that there are private companies providing similar or the same services as you, what is your unique selling point?"

This sounds horribly familiar.

Since well before the days of Best Value Fundamental Service Reviews public libraries have been facing similar questions. The public sector as a whole has being doing it for a generation. It's sadly inescapable in the consumerist society we find ourselves in today. We can't wish it away, we've tried that and it doesn't wash. People who care about public libraries -- not just librarians -- are stepping up and making the case at a local level and, increasingly, nationally as well. Campaigns like "Voices For The Library" are starting to do a really good job at pulling together the value of public libraries to communities and individuals alike. This is great, but it's only half of the job. It's important, we need to support and share it, but there's something else needing doing.

There is an oft-cried lament: "why is it so-and-so who always gets interviewed or consulted about public libraries and not us?" Well... always being available is one reason. A journalist or researcher desperate for copy within a tight deadline can always find a place for an off-the-peg statement from a convenient source. A politician or chief executive trying to manage the eternal search for the efficiency saving that will deliver more for less is in the market for easy-to-find solutions.

The other, more telling reason, is that the statement will be presented in a vernacular that makes sense to the person who will be using it. Whatever you may think of the worth of the advice being given, these people have got one thing devastatingly right: they are talking to their audience in the language they understand. The advice being presented makes sense to the audience because it references the priorities and terminologies that are part and parcel of their workaday realities. Conflicting advice, if any is being made available, is usually presented in a way that isn't easy to relate to those realities. And so...

So public libraries need to find voices that talk to these audiences. Journalists, politicians and chief executives aren't, for the most part, businessmen but the vernacular that they use is derived from corporate business-speak. We need to be able to communicate our values and our worth in that vernacular. Some would argue that this is selling out. I would argue that this is being professional. You explain to a child how to use the library. You explain to a new borrower how to find the books they want. You explain to a student the importance of information literacy. You explain to a colleague the nuances of a new library system. If you used the same reference points and vocabulary with all those audiences you would fail. But you wouldn't do it, would you? What you would do is explain: "this is what it does, this is why it's useful to you" and you would make sure as best you could that it made sense to them. So why is it any different when we're talking to the movers and shakers and purse-string holders? It isn't. We need to explain that a world without public libraries would be less rich but more expensive. We need to explain the return on investment provided by having professional library staff and the added value provided by the librarians amongst them. We need to explain that public libraries can teach government departments a thing or two about distributed asset management; efficiencies through effective resource sharing and active, personalised online service delivery. We need to ask why our mayors can find a book in a library a thousand miles away but not know what information assets can be found in their town halls.

We need to do these things and more. And this would need to work hand-in-hand with the voices to the community that are already being established. By explaining our worth to both sides of the political (small p) machine there is a chance that the true potential of public libraries could be recognised and exploited for the benefit of future generations.

Oh, and my friend? It took us a few minutes once we took a step back to have a look at the picture properly. The private companies may be doing a serviceable job of teaching people how to use the tools presently to hand to do the work currently required. The job of my friend and his colleagues is to also teach people how and why the tools are designed and made and how they can evolve or be replaced to adapt to changing circumstances. The private companies are equipping students for the next five years; the university is equipping them for the next twenty-five years.

Just the same as public libraries are resources for life, not just for exams and the workplace.

Voices for the library

While I was working in the garden this weekend I was sketching out some ideas for a post suggesting things that librarians could do for themselves to illustrate the real-life impact that public libraries have on real people.

It's nice to have been beaten to it! Good work and well done to all the people involved.

And especially for picking up and running with the fact that it isn't just librarians doing all this. That's a very encouraging sign. I've recommended that my colleagues should drop by this site every so often to remind themselves of the worth of their work. We're also going to try and encourage a few contributions to the site from our neck of the woods.

Oh yes?

It is a basic eternal and unquestionable tenet of public library life that public libraries are in decline. It was all busier and better back in the Golden Age. And like all Golden Age mythologies there is a spark of truth in there. After a hard day's grind, faced with the choice of the Archbishop of Woolwich on the BBC and a kitchen sink drama on ITV the horny-handed son of toil would switch the telly off and read a book from the library. In those long, endless sunny summer days the knee-scabbed child, weary of being told off for playing football in the street, would be glad of an event at the local library and performers would play to packed houses. Now, with so many competition attractions and distractions it is the library's fate to fall into desuetude.

Oh yes?

I'll let you into a secret. We have no evidence as to whether or not we were any busier then than we are now.

Seriously. The only numbers we have that are worth spit are the number of members and the number of items, usually books, issued. That was no more a true reflection of the actual use of the library in 1960 than it is now. All those quiet readers, the scholars, the audiences and the enquirers are all unrecorded.

Oh, but we have visitor count figures, haven't we? We were asked for visitor count figures so we've got them, haven't we? Up to a point. We have no evidence of how many visitors we had in August 2005. Or August 2000. Or August 1995 come to that. None. Like many library authorities, and probably longer than many, our annual visitor figures were derived by manually counting the number of visitors over two slow weeks in Autumn (there was no point doing them during the busy weeks as staff would have been too busy to do the counting) and then multiplying the result by twenty-six. How true or not a reflection of the year's bodily throughput was that? Looking at the seasonal variations in issues and events and anecdotal experience it's unlikely that those figures reflect very much more than two slow weeks in Autumn.

We don't have enquiry statistics. I can't and won't defend our not having enquiry statistics, I'm baffled by it. I won't get started on the subject.

So we have the issue statistics. Overall, these have gone down significantly over the past two decades, though the details are a bit more complicated and worth coming back to later. We know that currently three-quarters of the visits to our libraries do not result in a loan. (We'd like to change that pronto but that's the proportion at the moment.) Has the proportion of visits to loans always been 3:1? We don't know, we have no safe evidence to say. Intuitively one would suspect not: with The People's Network, Bookstart, joint service centres and the like one would suspect not, but I can't prove it. And neither can anyone else. Which is a bit galling because it's significant: if Library X had a proportion of visits to issues of 2.7:1 in 1990 and issues have dropped 10% in the past twenty years they would have been dealing with exactly the same number of customers back then, just doing different things. One obvious different thing is that instead of borrowing the reference library's cast-off ten-year-old encyclopaedia to do their homework children can come in and use one of our computers to look things up in one or other of our online reference services. Or even --horror of horrors! -- log onto them at home with their library barcode.

The other change in use, hinted at earlier, is the relationship between the big libraries and their satellites. Time was, the only way you were going to get to browse a big selection of books was to go into the big town and visit the big library. Time was. Now, you can browse the whole library system's catalogue from the smallest branch, or even from home (or sitting in an airport in Hong Kong while waiting for a delayed flight, or so I'm told). And you can reserve an item (we let you do it for free in our service) and arrange for us to deliver it to the library that's most convenient for you. So instead of going home from work and then having to turn round and go into town to go to the library you can just nip round the corner. Which in lots of respects is great: it's a major convenience for our customers and the first thing they pick up on when we explain how the web catalogue works. So the issue figures for main libraries inevitably decline and the branch libraries' issue figures rise. And we can actually see those trends setting in. But here comes the down side: the small local community branch library is traditionally the one with the limited opening hours. So we actually impede the customer-driven service transformation, and the new age of austerity threatens to make that worse. It would be interesting to see the results of a library authority deciding to chop a few hours off the opening times of a main library and using the staff to extend the opening hours at two or three branch libraries.

The bad news is that decades of wistful mooning over a long-lost Golden Age has come and bitten us on the arse. The good news is that there's never been a better opportunity to try something different and that difference doesn't necessarily have to lose the traditional identity of the community library if we get the opportunity to give it a go.