Don't forget your local!

To my utter shame I rather neglected local studies and archives in my last post. Which is a shame as these parts of the service are essential to the sense of identity of communities and the individuals in them. Whether it's family history, local annals, contemporary datasets with their proper contexts or whatever else illuminates the journey taken to get to the here and now it all has more than just a frivolous value. The content of these collections is the very personal experience of the communities the library service serves.

All those adverts for Ancestry and Find My Past in the breaks during the re-runs of "Who Do You Think You Are?" tell of the value of this content for that sense of identity. More than that, the collections don't tell of a straight-line lineage of connections over time. People, groups of people, come and go and some come back again, each wave of immigration bringing in something new and fresh stories to tell whether they're Beaker Folk or Flemish weavers, Irish navvies or Somali refugees, exiled princes or people looking for a fresh start. If your family came to Britain any time after the last glaciation you're an immigrant so get over it and share in the story.

Less obviously, these collections can provide significant scientific data. Epidemiology has benefited from the mapping over time of disease outbreaks. Climatology draws upon the seemingly-trivial stuff like the first records of primroses and swallows of the year as much as the dramatic chronicles of great storms and little Ice Ages. Astronomy, biology, geology are all the richer from having data sets available that stretch back over the centuries and which often describe that which has been lost to extinction, war and development.

Reminiscence events drawing on local collections have considerable therapeutic benefits which chime well with libraries' wider contributions to the health and well-being of their communities. And they're fun. In fact, a lot of these collections are fun; because they're about people and people like having fun and often record it.

New, digital, technologies provide challenges and opportunities — how to usefully preserve digital content, how to make it more widely available and present it in exciting and interesting ways whilst preserving the authenticity of the material. And when it works, it's brilliant: if you want a good example of getting it right and getting archives out of the cellars and attics of our buildings, go and have a look on the ground floor of Manchester's Central Library. The pity is that this is only possible at a large city or regional scale. And then for how long before somebody insists it gets sent to London to be properly looked after because us provincials don't know no better? The neglect and dissolution of small local collections in community (not "community") libraries feels more and more like Doctor Beeching is in charge of our heritage.

Libraries deliver and can deliver better than this

I've had my go at responding to the libraries deliver survey. Here are a few of my thoughts. I've tried to be positive, honest.

The lack of vision as to what is to be provided, by whom and with what resources runs throughout.

The context section of the document's a lot thin. This is the "as is" description of a fragmented public library service but you wouldn't know that by the reading of it, Entirely lacking from this context is the pick 'n' mix selection of service delivery models and services provided; poor (or at best extremely patchy) workforce development; lack of regional or national leadership; and lamentable approach to evidence-based decision and delivery with no KPIs that weren't developed before the 1964 Act,

What libraries can achieve has some notable omissions, Information literacy is a very important omission, especially in the digital age. The traditional strength of the library's providing the gateway to a sense of self and a sense of place is part of its USP. As, indeed, is the fact that the library is one of the increasingly-few places that are still a free and public place to be. 

The ambitions aren't especially ambitious.

• Reading & literacy: should include the systematic impact of everyday reading for pleasure and informal learning (i.e. impact analysis of non-programmed lending library activity); staff development programme for the creation of reading and literacy champions.

• Digital literacy: this is phenomenally weak and describes should have been being delivered in 2011, let alone 2021. Information literacy is an essential and is entirely disregarded here. There also needs to be something here about the use of assistive technologies; UX development; online resource curation and promotion; creating a skilled digital workforce within the public library service and having public library leadership that doesn't see "digital" as a cheap adjunct or alternative to the expensive business of having a load of buildings with the word "library" stuck on them that can all be somebody else's worry entirely. 

• Health & well-being: is co-location really a valid indicator of qualitative improvement in this area? Just because the services share a building doesn't mean they're working collaboratively in the community's interest (and there are too many examples where co-location breeds resource competition between services rather than collaborative cross-sectorial working).

• Economic growth: over the past twenty years I've seen numerous examples of models for evaluating the economic value of the public library service by itself. This is important: libraries by themselves have an impact. These models need to be evaluated and the best national model should be implemented.

• Culture and creativity: there needs to be a recognition of the amount, value and impact of cultural and creative activities in libraries, from reminiscence sessions to knit 'n' natter to full-blown cultural festivals. A revival of outreach activities outside library buildings. And building and supporting local cultures that aren't driven by the Westminster bubble or big corporations, including the acceptance and promotion of local authors in both the library and their catalogues and a locally-delivered national programme for adding local self-published authors' works to the national bibliographic record. Building a vibrant local metadata has been sacrificed on the altar of saving a few quid by buying in all the MARC records and getting shot of anyone who knows how they're built.

• Communities: it's sad that this doesn't include making sure that there are skilled jobs and career paths in libraries available to people living within deprived communities (volunteering doesn't pay the rent); and why nothing on demographies and active support of minority groups?

• Learning: one of the eternal values of the public library is its importance as a resource for informal learning, it's important that the autodidact tradition be included within the ambitions; and again, on the staff side: monkey see, monkey do: there's no point in saying that the library service will do oh so many wonderful things for learning and skills development within the community if it isn't committed to delivering this for the workforce that is supporting those communities.

• Who will be available to deliver all this? With what resources? With what leadership? With what support? Where are the continuous service improvement review and feedback loops?

Even in the world of English public libraries the proposed indicators are more than a tad disappointing.

• Reading and literacy: FFS! If you must use issues as an indicator at all. at least do it per capita per annum. And if we're limiting ourselves to the easily-reportable, what about the no. hours of programmed reading/literacy/storytelling/writing activities per annum and the no. attendees of these activities. Advice from literacy experts on evidence-based qualitative assessment within the community would be instructive to this particular narrative.

• Digital literacy: Why only makerspaces? (and why necessarily makerspaces?) The indicators need to include at the very least: analytics of use of online resources — do they reach intended audiences? can those audiences use these resources?; digital collection development metrics — scope, reach, audience, purpose, use, satisfaction; delivery of programmed digital literacy activities — no. sessions, no. people; delivery of programmed information literacy initiatives — no. sessions, no. people; community-based qualitative assessments as per reading/literacy.

• Co-location is a really crap KPI for the well-being agenda. While we're on the subject of col-location…
• We've flogged co-location to death over the past couple of decades. Co-location with schools and colleges results in well-resourced school and college libraries that exclude much of the local community (not everybody had happy schooldays and schools actively discourage the presence of adults who are not on the payroll).Similarly, there are too many instances where co-location with health centres, councils or business units has just been a few shelving units with books on and a member of staff on the ground (if the library is lucky) to try and fight the library's corner when somebody fancies that bit of space for something or other. 
• There has to be a business case for any location that isn't just about the money, it has to be about delivering the preferred outcomes of the community involved.And if the co-location compromises the delivery of the library service it should be deprecated.

• Economic indicators should include the economic value of the core public library services.

• Culture and well-being: needs to include metrics on creative activities in libraries; creative outreach activities delivered by library services; additions of local context and content to the national bibliography.

• Communities: should include a qualitative analysis of the value of each library to its local community; also a demonstration that the demography of use of each library fairly reflects the demography of its community.

• Learning: should include a measure of the investment in learning and skills programmes for library staff so that they can help develop and support learning and skills programmes for their communities.

Governance and the national structures are the same old same old. My reactions seem strangely familiar:

• The existing fragmented, pick 'n' mix, "everything that's called 'national' is really optional" service delivery model has to be tackled for any of this document's ambitions to be credible.

• The Department that holds the purse strings (DCLG) doesn't have the responsibility; the Department that has the responsibility (DCMS) doesn't control the resources. And *something* has to be compulsorily uniform nationally, because at the moment nothing is, not even the submissions to CIPFA relied on in this report.

• SCL provides little functional national leadership. Until extremely recently CILIP has been more concerned with filling discussion lists every Summer with childish spats than the support and delivery of services in public libraries (to be fair, CILIP's belated conversion to the cause should be welcomed). Neither organisation pays much heed to the support and involvement of the bulk of the public library staff who are not trained librarians but do have a wealth of knowledge and experience that is all too often ignored, disregarded or just plain dismissed.

The section on evidence mapping misses one ever-so essential prerequisite: you can't begin to do this without a comprehensive review of the lack of nationally-applied KPIs of any kind and the lack of any qualitative metrics being applied to these services. Otherwise your mapping exercise is just a distance-between-two-dots exercise, literally drawing lines between libraries on a map and imaging you've addressed the evidence.

There are some astonishing omissions from the skills strategy: 

• Reader development! 
• Information literacy! 
• Library technical skills (somebody's got to be able to create acceptable-quality local content) 
• Project management  
• Operational management 
• Product design and development 
• Service development and delivery 
• Continuous service improvement 
• And validation and certification.

And all this cannot be limited to just those parts of the workforce that went to library school.

I have qualms about "voluntary accreditation" because at the moment everything in the English public library service is optional. It should be a statutory requirement lying within the DCMS and included in the DCMS annual report on its own performance.

Is commissioning proven to be the best model for service delivery to our communities? I'm not convinced that it's the given presented in this document.

Finally, to my mind the Action Plan needs:

1. A time scale for the delivery of a nationally-adopted scheme of KPIs to provide the evidence base for the rest of the action.
2. A time scale for delivery of a national public library staff skills audit and staff development programme addressing the need to deliver on the ambitions of this document
3. A project plan for the funded delivery of actions 1 and 2

I expect you have some views one way or another. Please respond to the survey. I know it's just another survey, but please…

Upon hearing the first English public libraries consultation of Spring

DCMS have issued a consultation on the "draft Ambition document" "Libraries Deliver: Ambition for Public Libraries in England 2016-2021."

It isn't a bad document and has lots of the right stuff in it. Perhaps I'm just jaded with it all.

The latest DCMS review

I admit it, I missed the boat. By a long chalk. And so I didn't submit my views to the latest public consultation on public libraries. A combination of too many ideas, too little time and self-discipline and worrying overly-much as to how I'd make any of it fit to the three questions asked by the commissioned group.

I've no illusions that I would have made a ha'penny's difference but here are my workings out, in case anyone can use any of it:

At the outset I would like to wish you the best of luck with this latest review of the public library service in England and the hope that whatever your conclusions they are operationally practicable and support at least a decent-quality library service for our communities. You start with a serious handicap: DCMS announcements of reviews of the English public library service are a seasonal thing like the first cuckoo of Spring or the first M&S advert of Christmas. Each comes and goes and together their total operational impact in the real world has been the square root of jack all. This appalling legacy is going to colour too many of the views you are likely to hear. Including mine, unfortunately. I would love it if you could confound my cynicism.

• There is a crying need for national leadership.
  • Now the Olympic Games are over and done with, what is DCMS for? Over the past decade — aside from the occasional launch of an enquiry into the public library service — the department’s engagement with the service has been not so much arm’s length as running a mile from.
  • The public library service in England is undefined, at best weakly supported and subject to no performance management.
  • Regulatory guidance on the delivery of the service is virtually non-existent.
  • The potential for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the public library service by pooling resources and delivery channels across local geopolitical boundaries is being driven patchily at the local level at the same time as long-standing sharing mechanisms are being abandoned or left to wither on the vine.
  • The English public library service is not an integral part of a national literacy programme, a national digital literacy programme or a national information literacy programme despite the huge amount of good work being locally done in these areas by many, if not most library authorities.
    • DCMS is not demonstrating that it knows or much cares about:
      • How many public library buildings are currently still in use;
      • What other delivery channels are being made available for library services;
      • What services are being delivered by these delivery channels;
      • Whether or not these services adequately reflect the needs of the communities they serve;
      • What resources should be employed to provide these services.
• Nobody knows what the public library service is. Everybody has an opinion, nobody has an empirical measure and there is no bottom-line base level of service that can be expected nationwide.
  • The sad fig-leaf that is the 1964 Act provides a fine-sounding but practically-useless sound bite. The sole practical impact of the Act is that public libraries used to get listed under “Statutory” rather than “Discretionary” when the auditors came round to see how well the local council was doing.
  • There is a view that if a building has had the word “library” stuck on it some time in its lifetime and the doors are still open then all is well in the world.
  • There is another view that so long as a building is open to the public and has some books for loan that it is a public library.
  • There is yet another view that wonders why, so long after Erasmus talked about “libraries without walls” and after nearly two decades of public libraries’ beginning to deliver their services online, English public library services are so often defined by the buildings with the word “library” stuck on them not the services being provided and delivered, often outwith those library walls.
  • Ironically, while there is a long-standing UK standard specifying the base common denominator functions for a library management system there isn’t a similar baseline specification for the service such a system would be supporting.
  • There are no baseline metrics for the public library service. The old public library standards were limited in scope and flawed in definition but they at least required that some attempt at performance management and the accumulation of business intelligence was being made. One would not want the public library service to be defined only by what could be measured (worse still only what could be measured forty years ago!) but any credible argument that the service being delivered is anything more than “the doors are open, end of story” must be supported by robust data. CIPFA returns provide some useful data but this is limited, not always freely available and not at all concerned with outcomes. Benchmark data Should include:
    
    • Traditional transactional and visitor throughputs.
    • Outcomes of programmes of library activity.
    • Demographic engagement and outcomes — a demonstration that the service is serving its communities and not just providing services “for people like us by people like us.”
    • Stock analyses, including data on special collections, reserve stock and specifically-local elements (not just “local studies” collections). This would also include contextual age-related data — a collection of Victorian books in a special collection is a matter of interest, a collection of fifteen-year-old children’s picture books is a matter of concern.
    • Performance at each service point, including buildings, outreach and digital channels. Transactional data at library buildings normalised to numbers per staff hour so that variations from the norm can be readily identified; while there should be some variation in response to the needs of the local community other variations may be cause for concern.
    • Analyses of delivery channels both within and without the library buildings managed by the service.
  • Once benchmark data had been established, openly-reported trend analyses should include:
    • Patterns of change of use;
    • Patterns of replacement of use — this might be as simple as 78’s being replaced in stock by mp3’s or as complex as a community of use migrating from one library to another;
    • Contextual commentary — for instance a note of the impact of the school next door closing; a new motorway cutting off a community from its library; or the involvement in a new programme of activities.

There is a need for the availability and application of librarianship skills at a community level. (This is not a call for a quota of “professionals” in each library authority: this has been tried before and too many of us have experience of working alongside librarians who were doing nothing that the “unqualified” library assistants were doing at least as well.) The librarian is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

• The creation of local, parochial bibliographic metadata is culturally- and economically-beneficial to our communities. This is not limited to the traditional form of local studies collections — though these may be seen as an important component of the Arts Council’s commitment to the accessibility of the nation’s heritage.
  • Small-scale publication — especially self-publication — is easier than ever, particularly in e-book formats. There is a very real danger that much of this material will be permanently excluded from the national bibliography. Librarians, working with local authors and publishers should be tasked with the creation and publication of the appropriate metadata.
  • Many titles have a geolocational context that is not recorded or reflected in the commercially-available metadata. Making this local context available provides a hook for the recreational reader; resources for researchers and for teachers creating reading and learning materials; and support for literature-based community activities and tourism programmes.
• A national audit is urgently needed of those special collections not already dispersed, dissolved or disposed of as a result of austerity measures. In particular it is important to find out how much — or little — of these have been catalogued and published electronically so that a programme of work can be set up to address the oversights.
• Community knowledge bases.
• Grey literature.
• Information literacy.
• Local Freedom of Information libraries.

Engagement with the digital world

• Digital inclusion/digital literacy
• Digital libraries
• Integrating the virtual and physical worlds
• Crowdsourcing literary engagement
• Curating user-created content
• [All that stuff you’ve been arguing for fruitlessly for the past decade]

Staff development and continuous service improvement

• Essential — needs to be resourced and needs a proper framework for all staff
• Need to avoid replicating the errors and missed opportunities of the NOF-funded training programme for supporting the People’s Network — no “magic bullets” like ECDL
• Training needs dovetailing with service development needs
• Anticipating the support needs of communities and customers

Use and management of volunteers

• Complementary to paid staff
• Needs to be fair to the volunteer — what’s in it for them?
• Needs to be fair to the service — what’s in it for them?
• Needs to be fair to the community — what’s in it for them?
• Not an easy management win
  • Greater churn that paid staff — constant need for recruitment and training support
  • Too little good supervision of remote front-line staff at the moment — how would the same managers add supervision of volunteers to their portfolio?
  • Discipline and behaviour (this is true of all staff — not just volunteers — but fewer available sticks and carrots)
  • How to manage reputational damage when things go wrong?