Baby steps out of lockdown.

Resuming business after closing a service — particularly after an unexpected closure — is always more work than the closing was. There are all the consequences of the closure to be tidied up, all the preparations for reopening, all the things that need catching up with before it's business as usual.

And then there's the additional complication where nobody knows if it's necessarily safe to go back to business as usual. And whether or not it will stay safe. It's like working in a building where you can't be sure there's not an unexploded bomb in the cellar or that somebody won't accidentally bring one in with them.

I suspect all returning workforces will have a tricky tension between the popular idea that they've had a rest so should have plenty of energy and the exhausting reality that lockdown will have released a lot of adrenaline over an extended period without the options of fight or flight. The challenge for managers is:

• Not to fall into the trap of making the assumption people have had a rest; 
• Making sure staff don't fall into that trap and start beating on themselves and/or colleagues; 
• And also watching out for their own wellbeing.

The return to business as usual needs to be treated as a managed change process.

• Each step must be specified, planned, and have a rollback plan in case of failure. 
• The physical and mental safety of staff and customers need to be success factors as much as much more than the delivery of intended outcomes. 
• An essential component is transparency: being upfront right from the start that business as usual will be a while coming and that each step taken towards it is dependent on the safety of staff and customers. It's imperative that all stakeholders are told this loud and clear.

There will be a lot of pressure for a sudden abracadabra transformation back to business as usual. It is the responsibility of senior managers and politicians to resist that. (Some will resist the responsibility or even be the loudest voices demanding a swift return to the old status quo. They will be godparents to the local 2nd and 3rd pandemic spikes.)

And then, of course, there's the question of how to manage staff who've worked throughout the lockdown. They'll need a lot of help processing the experience and returning back to normal. That in itself is a significant task and may need support from external agencies. Added to that is the need to manage the relationship between those who worked through the lockdown and those who didn't, the risk of resentments ("We had to work and you didn't," "Why are they getting special treatment?" etc.) needs to be managed out.

All of this is a big management load and I'm not convinced every library service is going to have enough management resource to do this by themselves, especially as many of these issues will apply to the managers as much as the people they are managing. There will need to be a national matrix of support coming in from both library and corporate local government perspectives. I'm hoping that the various national associations, professional organisations, unions and government departments are working on resources to help local managers address both the operational issues involved in the safe resumption of services and, just as importantly, the personnel issues involved in returning back to normal business in times that are very far from normal.

My Library By Right

This.

Go and sign the bloody petition already.

UKOLN Informatics

Sad to hear of the closure of UKOLN Informatics. This unit set in train and/or encouraged a wide range of digital and e-library (for those of us of a certain age) initiatives over the years, particularly in the late nineties and turn of the millennium. It's a relief to see that some of its progeny have found good homes but a shame that the doors are set to close. Many thanks and good wishes to all concerned.

As one door closes...

I may have visited my local library for the last time today.

In a couple of weeks' time it will have closed as a public library. The news isn't all entirely bleak: the school that hosts the library and the local housing trust have both recognised the importance of libraries to the community and have stepped in to try and rescue at least some part of the service. So the library will reopen as a "community library" staffed by volunteers with support from the school librarian. It's great that they've recognised the need (and a measure of the way these types of organisations have changed and expanded their remit over the years) and I wish everyone involved the best of luck but I worry about its sustainability, especially with a prolonged period of the austerity experiment stretching out ahead of us.

This sort of thing is happening all over the country: unprecedented cuts in local authority budgets are leading to unprecedented cuts in services. Westminster government's cuts in public sector funding have hit local authorities disproportionately and within each authority the burden of cuts has affected some services more badly than others.Some areas — support for schools, child care services, adult care services and public health services — are ring-fenced by central government decree so receive some degree of protection (but only some degree of protection); the remainder, including statutory services like libraries, have to do as best can with their share of the meagre scraps remaining. And it will get worse as there are fewer and fewer options left for responding to each fresh demand for required savings.

It's easy to say that library managers should do this, that or the other. In some cases this may still be the case. In the past, certainly, a generation of library managers revelled, almost to a masochistic degree, in the challenge of demonstrating that it was business as usual no matter how their budgets were chipped away. Those days are long since gone and are already almost a fading memory. It's much tougher now and there is scant wriggle room or scope for creative budgeting for library managers to be able to present business as usual. And in some cases it's downright impossible…

I hadn't realised it was 15 years since Lostock Library was moved out of its own purpose-built little building next to the bus stop and shunted into a small room in the corner of the school next door. I'm a middle-aged male with no children so I have views about shifting libraries into venues that tend to exclude a significant minority of public library users. And my experience of libraries' moving into schools has been that they tend to become a really useful resource for the school and rather less so for the local adult population. Still, we were better off than some: during the post-millennial boom where many councils, including the one I still work for, were investing in their libraries Trafford Council were making cuts. Two libraries were closed and replaced by what were, in effect, deposit libraries in corners of leisure centres. Ironically, these leisure centres are now also both at serious risk of the chop to save money. When last year, after more than a decade of cuts and hollowings-out, the library service was faced with a cut of one third of its budget it would have been impossible for the service's managers to deliver the existing service and, to be fair to them, they didn't pretend to anyone that it was possible. It was no great surprise when the cuts proposals were made public: the writing was already on the wall for Lostock when the opening hours were changed so that as children were coming out of school the library closed its doors. I went to one of the public consultations about the closure and for all that members of the public complained about the unacceptability of what was being proposed they were under no illusions about the impact of a cut of this magnitude on a service that was already down to the bone. When, at half-past the eleventh hour, the school stepped up to the plate to offer to take over it was seen as a lifeline. It can't be a like-for-like replacement and staff will still be losing their jobs and that is awful but the thinking is that it's not a complete loss and it may be a way of keeping the patient alive until times change and some sort of rescue becomes possible. On the flip side, there'll be a building with the word "Library" on it and the doors will be open sometime so some politicians could present that as being business as usual. It's the community-level version of the prisoner's dilemma and it's being played out nationwide.

I may not be able to be a customer of the new library in any case: the school's closed on Saturdays and it's only odd times like my being on leave today when I could visit during the weekday opening times. I could be wrong: there may be other options in the pipeline that allow more convenient opening hours, I don't know. But in any case, fifty years after my first visit it's almost certainly the last time I'll have visited Lostock's public library.