How many?

I've started doing some work with the Libraries Taskforce. I'd been to one of their workshops and it was pretty apparent that potentially there should be a lot of work needing doing by the less than a handful of people involved and it wasn't easy to see how they'd be able to do it on their own. I've got some time now that I've retired from Rochdale Council so I asked them if they needed a hand with anything and they said yes please. So I'm lending a hand with the work strand that's hoping to develop a core data set for English public libraries that can be openly-available for both public use and operational analysis. It's a voluntary effort on my part; it's something I'm interested in and have been impatient about and it's a piece of work that should have some very useful outcomes.

Whenever you start talking about English public libraries data the elephant in the room very quickly makes its presence known. Before we can talk credibly about anything very much there is one inescapable question desperately needing an answer:

Just how many English public libraries are there anyway?

There is no definitive answer. There is no definitive list. There are at least half a dozen well-founded, properly researched lists. They each give a different answer and when you start comparing them you find differences in the detail. There are perfectly valid reasons for this:

• Each had been devised and researched for its own purposes without reference to what had gone before. Each started from scratch and each had a differently-patchy response from library authorities when questionnaires were posted.

• This data's not easy to keep up to date at a national level — especially these days! So some libraries will have closed, a few will have opened, some will have moved and some will have been renamed. 

• It wasn't always clear just how old the lists were. Some had been compiled as part of some wider project and there wouldn't necessarily have been the resource available to do any updating anyway.

So the decision was made to tackle this head on so that it could be settled once and for all so that the world could move on and they were a few weeks into this work when I signed on. Very broadly, here's the process:

• Julia from the Taskforce, who has infinitely more patience than me, trawled every English local authority's web site for the details of their public libraries.

• Between us we scoured the other lists and added any libraries we found in there that we couldn't find in Julia's list.

• We then went through this amended list to see if we could identify any points of confusion, for instance where "Trumpton Central Library" has moved from one place to another or where "Greendale Library" has become "The Mrs Goggins Memorial Information and Learning Hub."

• The Taskforce has sent each library authority a list of what we think are their libraries asking them to check to see whether or not these details are correct.

• The results will be collated and the data published by the Taskforce.

Ten years ago this would have been pretty straightforward. These days the picture is complicated by the various forms of "community library" that have sprung up over the past few years. These run the gamut from "this library is part of the statutory provision though it is staffed by volunteers some of the time" all the way to "we wish them well on their venture but they're nothing to do with us." So where a public library has become a "community library" of one sort or another that needs ro be indicated in the data.

Will this list be 100% correct? Probably not at first, this is a human venture after all. But even if it's only 98% correct in the first instance it should be treated as the definite article. It will then need to be corrected and updated as a matter of course; if that's devolved to the individual library authorities the work becomes manageable and the data becomes authoritative.

Why should anyone bother?

What's in it for anyone to keep their bit of this list up to date and details correct? In my opinion:

• It's basic information that should as a matter of principle be available to the public.

• In the past year alone, this question has tied up time and effort that could have been more usefully-occupied. All those enquiries, and FoI requests, and debates about data that could just be openly-available and signposted whenever the question arose.

• It is essential to the credibility of any English public library statistics. If the number of libraries is suspect then how trustworthy are any of the statistics being bandied around? If the simplest quantitative evidence — the number of libraries — is iffy then how much faith can be placed in quantitative or qualitative evidence that's more exacting to collect?
  
  For instance, counting the number of libraries within a local authority boundary if you're responsible for supporting or managing them is a piece of piss. Reliably counting the number of visitors to any one of those libraries most definitely isn't — I have 80% confidence in the numbers coming out of any automated system (not necessarily due to technical issues) and to my mind if you're relying on manual counts you may as well be burning chicken feathers. So when I hear that visits to English public libraries have dropped by a significant percentage over a given number of years I may be prepared to accept this in the light of a wider narrative, personal observation and anecdotal evidence but I have no empirical reason to know that this is the case. 

That's why.

Taskforce workshop: assessments

In Friday's workshop a few of us got talking about the idea of "voluntary assessments" raised in the Ambitions document. These weren't really defined so it was difficult to know quite which was the best approach for this topic.

There was some concern that any assessment would just be another stick to beat libraries with, like issue figures and visitor counts have become. Equally, would they become another set of targets to be gamed? Both are extremely valid concerns.

I think it's essential that public libraries have a solid suite of KPIs — not for comparison with so-called "peers" in a way that takes no heed of communities or contexts but for comparison with past performance and identifying strengths and weaknesses in the operation. But the "voluntary assessments" *shouldn't* be about KPIs: there are a couple of other useful functions they could perform.

One way would be to direct the stick upwards, towards the DCMS. It's vanishingly unlikely to happen but it could be that one of the Department's own performance narratives, published in its annual report, could include an assessment of the health of the national public library service derived from local returns. 

• I don't like expenditure as a measure of performance (any bloody fool can spend money) but given that the audience for such a thing would be a political one that largely measures achievement by expenditure one of the assessment measures could be expenditure per capita population, which could be broken down into: investment in buildings; investment in skilled staff; investment in stock; and investment in community activities. (Did you spot the gear-shift there?) 
• DCMS would — finally! — have to be able to report a definitive number of public libraries in the country, and any changes and trends. 
• It would be interesting to see a national picture of:
• The number of staffed library open hours
• The number of library open hours manned by volunteers
• The number of unsupervised library open hours
• The number of "daytime" (9am — 5pm) hours libraries are closed and left fallow
• And so on. I won't go into more detail because it's so unlikely to happen it's hardly worth the wishing for.

Another, possibly more plausible, function would use the assessment as a feedback mechanism for continuous service improvement (absolutely not a set of targets!). They would be used to evaluate rather than monitor the performance of the service and help direct local decision-making. 

• The assessment criteria could be deliberately aspirational and impossible to achieve: the assessment would evaluate the direction of travel of the service and the impact on resources, staff and the needs of the communities that the service serves. 
• Comparisons would be with past performance rather than against "peers," which would remove any unwelcome competitive friction between organisations that should be working collaboratively, 
• This would also mean that it would be harder to game the figures and it would be harder to coast on past glories as assessments would be reporting the direction of travel towards the impossible goal rather than the successful negotiation of an arbitrary obstacle.
• For example, one of the "impossible goals" could be 100% of the local population's being active members of the library (however that would be defined). Last year Library Service A could have attained 56% active membership and this year 58% while Library Service B managed 69% and 60%. Crude peer-to-peer analysis would suggest that Library Service B is performing better but A is actually making a better fist of continuous service improvement — it's the rate and direction of performance, not the absolute figures, that are the measure of how the service is being managed and resourced; they'll all have different baseline starting points.

There is a problem with this idea: while it works well in many organisations and is pretty standard performance management fare I don't think our political environment is adult enough not to try and turn this into a badly-fitting set of targets and league tables. It would be nice to be shown to be wrong, though.

Having a say

I went to Friday's Library Taskforce workshop in Machester Central Library on Friday.The aim of the workshop was to get feedback on the Ambitions document and suggest practical detail that should go into the action plan for it. I was interested so I signed up and was accepted in my rôle of "interested member of the public." It was an interesting few hours, here's a few thoughts on it.

Something that concerned a few of us was the rôle of the Taskforce itself. You don't have to go very far into discussions about English public libraries before you'll hear somebody say: "The Taskforce should do…" And that's a problem. The Taskforce is no magic wand, it has a finite life and actually it's just that scant handful of people who were going round sticking bits of paper on the wall in the library on Friday. It has the same rôle as a business analyst: it can facilitate and stimulate discussion, it can identify work to be done but it's down to other agencies to get on and get things done.

A recurring theme in the workshop was the need for a skilled workforce to deliver library services. A decade ago this would have been couched in terms of CPD for "professionals," here the conversation concerned all library staff. And not just the "we need people with digital skills" thing: there was a recognition that there's a swathe of skills that need developing and supporting, including having properly-trained library managers who can manage operations, services, programmes and projects. This is a welcome contrast to the ongoing narrative of staff losses, closures and farming out the work to volunteers. It's good that the Taskforce is talking up the need for a skilled staff. Translating that into action will be a stern challenge!

Another recurring theme was the tension between local authority control and opportunities for cost-sharing and delivering services to communities that aren't defined by geopolitical boundaries. Even when we look at delivering "bigger" we still seem to be bound by lines on ancient maps: local metropolitan authorities don't often think of working across the Pennine border.

Evidently there'd already been some feedback about the thinness of the digital strand of the document: there were a few more ideas pinned to the wall for us to respond to than I'd been expecting. This suggests that somebody's listening. Actually, I've been consistently getting the impression that the Taskforce members are listening to people. And they're trying to have conversations with people aside from chiefs and politicians. I think the workshops could have been better publicised away from the usual channels to try and get more library customers into the mix because I think it would have proved very useful.

A few of us thought that "income generation" is a tricky topic. It's important that libraries try to maximise their income (good services don't pay their bills in daydreams) but the phrase "income generation" is unfortunately a bit loaded. It's important that libraries stay that safe, trusted place where nobody's asking you what's in your wallet and that shouldn't be compromised. And whenever libraries are told to be more commercially-minded it's conveniently forgotten that local authorities don't work in a commercial environment. The twelve- month budget lifetime isn't anything any commercial operation would be able to live with: the mad March spend it or lose it would be ludicrous in that context. There was a lot said about that! The other problem, of course is that as soon as you say that you're going to generate some income some clever body will impose an income target. Income targets work this way: you make a business case for spending £100 to set up a business selling apples from a barrow; you're told: great, go ahead and by the way we're going to assume that you're going to make a £50 profit so we'll take that off you now; and you're left with enough money to buy either the barrow or the apples but not both and your business plan fails. There's no real money to be had selling off odd scraps of thing or hiring out rooms or buildings. There is potentially funding out there for programmes, projects and activities that are entirely compatible with the traditional aims and purposes of public libraries and I think this is what is meant by "income generation" in this context. I think it would be more useful for the Taskforce to be talking about "maximising the take-up of funding opportunities" instead.

We've until 3rd June to contribute to the discussion. If you haven't already, please do so.

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.

Library task force: "community libraries" toolkit

I can't say that I'm impressed with the notion of replacing public libraries with "community libraries," especially not when the engagement with the community is at the end of an Austerity shotgun.

That being said, one of the jobs to be done by the Library Task Force is a review of the process and the building of guidance — for and against the idea — for those thinking of embarking on the adventure. And they're inviting contributions to this toolkit.

This is the contribution I've added to the discussion:

I think we need to address the brief you've been given, not least because it gives the opportunity to explore some of the practical issues involved in taking public libraries out of the public sector and why there are real fears about it. 

Firstly, a strategic issue: review after review (and Sieghert was no exception) has noted that part of the problem with the public library service is its fragmented nature. That, together with the fact that nigh on everything in English public library land is optional, means that there's little strategic development; limited opportunity for significant economies of scale outside book-buying consortia; and nationwide initiatives depend for their critical mass on a postcode lottery of acceptance. Other important national failures are an absence of KPIs and no definitive asset register — the debates on the future of public libraries have no benchmarking to work from; no consistent trends data; no nation-wide evidence-based analysis of outcomes; and not only do we not have an empirical national picture of what the public library service is and how it's doing, we don't even know how many public libraries there are in England! (by way of contrast, I chose Moldova at random and found the answer in three clicks). Further fragmenting the service to a hyperlocal extent pretty much puts paid to any hopes that any of this could be corrected. 

Secondly, *whose* community? The idea of a single, close-knit, easily-identifiable community sits well with Camberwick Green but is meaningless in dormitory suburbs and mosaic inner cities. Back in Browne Issue days when demographic data was hard to come by it was horribly easy for some public libraries to become by ladies of a certain age for ladies of a certain age. Decades of work dedicated to building the culture that "public libraries are for everybody, not just people like us" risk being a waste of time and effort. How can equality impact assessments be made? How can they be made consistently? If made, what would be done with them? 

How accountable can the organisations running the community libraries be, and to whom? Whatever the shortcomings of elected members at least they can be voted out and are accountable to standards authorities. The model of imposition of community management doesn't allow for the organic growth of management and accountability structures. Grassroots voluntary activity works well when it grows from the ground up, it seldom prospers by parachute implementation and recruitment at bayonet point. 

Who owns the library data? There are intellectual property rights issues regarding the catalogue data. There are information governance issues, particularly data protection issues, regarding the customer data, loans data, the use of online resources and browsing histories within the library. Who are the Information Asset Owners? What are the information risk plans? Where are the data sharing plans? Who's going to be there to stop that person who thinks it would be a jolly good idea to collect all the names and addresses of library users and sell them to junk mail foundries to earn a few bob? 

The culture industry is one of the UK's big earners. A lot of small-scale, small-budget operations won't each have the critical mass needed to be able to afford both enough popular topics and best-sellers required for the bread-and-butter market and also a representative range of niche topics, new authors, locally-relevant stock and experimental guesses at The Next Big Thing. This will be a huge loss of seed-funding to the industry and a huge diminution of opportunity to the communities involved. One of the key drivers of human development is serendipitous discovery; if all that remains to be discovered is what is already known then there'll be a withering effect in both use and effectiveness of these services. 

That's my starter before bedtime. I hope more people add to the discussion.There's plenty more left for somebody to go at.