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.

Don't blame technology for bad management attitudes

Once upon a time, back when the millennium bug was a thing — or we thought it was — the Director of Recreation & Community Services as was told me to put together a roadmap of the IT developments the library service should be undertaking if money wasn't a big issue. We didn't have the money  and there wasn't any immediate prospect of having it but it would give him a sense of where we wanted to be and the opportunities we'd like to grab if they came along. The results included the usual suspects: we desperately needed to get all the libraries networked and onto the library management system and staff on enquiry desks needed access to the internet as well as the library catalogue, and internet access for the public would be good. I also said that we needed to invest in self-service circulation.

I'm now going to say something heretical, please bear with me. There is no intrinsic value in stamping a due date in a book. There, I've said it. The value in a staff-mediated issue/checkout transaction is:

• The borrower gets to borrow an item
• The loan is recorded
• There's the human interaction, which may be the only one some people get that day
• The library staff get the opportunity to provide information about other library resources and services ("We've got that author's new book on order," "Did you know we've started having toddlers' tales sessions on Wednesday afternoons?" etc., etc.)

The value of the return/checkin transaction is similar.

To my mind the high-value parts of any transaction are the ones you need to put your resources into. Anything that takes resources away from the high-value areas needs to be designed out.

In those days our busiest library was issuing between four and five thousand items every Saturday. More to the point, six Library Assistants were issuing between four and five thousand items every Saturday. And returning a similar number, which creates a lot more work as something needs to be done with all that incoming  stock. A lot of the time the queues at the counter were awful with staff and customers both having a stressful experience. Consequently the value of the issue transaction was compromised — the loan was effected and recorded but there was no time for the human stuff: both the staff and the customers felt under pressure to get the transaction over and done with as quickly as possible. Some customers even gave up and didn't bother: they wanted to become borrowers and our process stopped it happening. If someone desperately needed that human interaction they were badly short-changed. At the returns desk it was even worse: some borrowers lost patience and just left items on the corner of the counter and in the confusion these sometimes got back onto the shelves without the return having been recorded. The rest of the week there were other, smaller, stress points and other events and activities in the library added to the mix. By this stage we'd successfully made the case for some more Library Assistant hours but there's a limit to the number of bodies and workstations you that can physically fit behind even the huge counter that was in this library.

So I argued that we needed to include some self-service issue/return functionality to try and ease the burden a bit. Some people just want to be in and out, they want to borrow an item or return it and they're not much fussed about anything else. Some people would have privacy or safeguarding issues that could be addressed by allowing them to self-issue a book. Giving these people the self-service option would address their needs and also reduce the queue, allowing more time for the people who did need the human stuff at the counter. The director, whose background was adult and community education, was enthusiastic about the idea: "You mean that we could get the library staff off that production line at the counter so that instead of stamping books they could be doing something more interesting like helping people to find things and getting them interested in something new?" Yes, we could have.

Some years, and a couple of directors, later we were in a position to credibly rattle the begging bowl to fund self-service circulation. The world had changed somewhat. Library managers nationwide had picked up the idea that this functionality was a way of saving money on staffing and particularly cutting Library Assistant hours. Although I got cross when my library managers saw self-service as an opportunity to cut staffing costs I couldn't really blame them as individuals: they were coming late to a game that already had this established narrative. It was a massive pity but there we were. We weren't alone. And as Austerity took its toll self-service circulation became one of the quick fixes — I know of one library authority that cut staffing hours on the basis that kiosks were going to be installed at a couple of libraries and the next year cut the hours further because the self same kiosks had been installed. So self-service kiosks replaced staff instead of freeing them up to do other, more important, things.

The point to this story is that the technology wasn't to blame. Technology is never neutral — design must have an end in view — but the way that it is used and the consequent outcomes are largely down to human decision. In this case the opportunity to enrich the very many parts of the public library service that aren't the issue and return of books was passed over because neither the staff nor the service were being valued by "Professionals" in managerial positions. It wasn't a decision forced on them by outside forces, it was one they came to themselves collectively at the turn of the millennium and which they then transmitted to the people who hold the purse strings. Which makes it deuced hard for people now arguing the case that public libraries have never been only about issue counts: if front-line staff can be replaced by one-trick-pony kiosks all that other stuff can't have been all that important could it? Well, yes it was and yes it is and it's scandalous that enabling technology's been abused in this way.

Library authorities are repeating this mistake with technologies such as Open+. Open+ is a good way of extending the use of a building and some of its resources. Many of the running costs of a building are incurred whether or not that building's in use: the fabric of the building deteriorates regardless and the lights may be out but you'll need the heating on sometimes unless you fancy having a lot of burst pipes in Winter. So it makes sense to maximise the return on this investment in running costs by maximising the building's availability for use. Especially if that use is currently particularly limited: if you have a building and it only has a useful life of ten or twenty hours a week then this is a huge waste. In these cases using a technology like Open+ makes sense: it allows access to the building as a community venue or a quiet study space and you could make stock available for self issue/return, thus extending the reach of part of the library service. What it doesn't do is replace the shedload of other stuff that gets delivered — or should be delivered — by the library service in that building. It isn't a replacement for a library service, it just extends some people's access to some of those parts of that service that can be passively delivered.

Anything else is yet another abuse of library technology.

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.

Doorbells of despair

Back in the old days, Oh Best Beloved, when your parents were still young and didn't have mortgages, I used to work with council one-stop-shops. At one place I worked the need for a separate customer services service was self-evident as everything about the corporate culture and customer journeys screamed out that it couldn't keep the public far enough away for its own comfort. Its council offices had the nearest I have seen to a moat filled with crocodiles that could be practicable in a 20th Century building.

The most frequent customers were council housing tenants, or hopeful tenants-to-be. The customer experience was painful. They had to:

• Know that they had to go to the council offices for a particular service and not one of nineteen other offices scattered around the town;
• Know which floor to go to;
• Know that when they got out of the lift at that floor they had to turn right and go through the big, wooden, unmarked door;
• Know that once inside the reception room (not a lot bigger than a telephone booth) they had to ring the appropriate door bell for assistance;
• Know which of the six doorbells on the wall to use, which wasn't obvious as they were hand-labelled with the names (or even initials) of the housing teams, not their function.

If you picked the wrong doorbell you were tutted at and left to your own devices to have another guess.

I'd hoped those days were long gone but looking round at public service web sites I begin to wonder. The vogue now is for pages to be stripped down bare save for a small number of icons taking you to the services you are most likely to want.

I have a few issues with the more extreme instances of this:

• Where's the information telling the user who you are and what you do? Not a mission statement (God help us!) but a simple narrative explanation of your function. Don't assume that because you know then so does everyone else.
• Where's the support? What if these icons and labels mean nothing to me? What do I do? Who do I ask for help?
• Who says these are the services I am most likely to want? You don't know me, you don't know what I want.
• Who says these are the services that the average user is most likely to want? Customer insight might be able to tell you which of the existing options the customer is most likely to find and use but that isn't necessarily the same as "want." Is a page popular because it is useful or because it's easily accessible (or least-inaccessible)?
• Beyond the metrics, who determines which services are promoted? Is it the comms team? Is it the web team? Is it the service? Is somebody waiting for the research to demonstrate a demand for resources that have effectively been hidden?

But most of all, whenever I see one of these web sites I have to ask myself: have we really gone back to the customer having to guess which doorbell to ring for attention?

Self-service - the "how not to do it" workshop

My bank's changed it's self-service paying-in system. In doing so it has provided an object lesson in how not to design and deliver a self-service solution.

Up to a couple of months ago it was dead simple:

• Go to the bank.
• Pick up an envelope.
• Put the details of the payments-in on the slip attached.
• Put your slip and cheque(s) in the envelope.
• Seal envelope.
• Put envelope in the box provided.
• Go away and get on with your life.

From the customer's point of view this was good:

• No queueing
• The transaction took a minute or two tops.

From the bank's point of view it was bad:

• Anybody who wanted could could fill in spurious details on the receipt slip and claim that the transaction had taken place as described.
• Employees of the bank had to manually retrieve the slips and cheques then effect the transaction.

The balance of power lying with the bank, not the customer, the system had to change. So we now have these self-service machines to use. Which means that you now:

• Queue to use the machine
• Log in with your bank card and PIN
• Stare at a menu providing a choice of options, most of which are not appropriate to the function. Paying in is the second from the bottom on the right.
• Feed the slip and the first cheque into the machine.
• Get a member of staff to help you work out why the papers were accepted the first couple of times of trying.
• Wait for a scanned copy of the cheque and slip is printed as a receipt.
• Repeat the above for each cheque being presented.

These days I queue up and pay in with the cashiers.

"Do you know that you could do this with the self-service machine?"

"Yes, that's why I queued up to be served by a cashier."

"Why's that?"

"Three people have used the machine since I came in. I'd still be fourth in the queue waiting my turn."

Customer service skills: a collaborative training event

There's a nice bit of live-blogging of a useful workshop discussion on the ALA Learning web site. Don't be put off that the results conveniently fall into a "top ten" list: the ideas presented are simple and entirely do-able. In fact they're uncannily similar to the topics I used to include in customer care training sessions in the early nineties, so I might have been getting something right.

In principle I'm torn on live-blogging. On the one hand it's a good way of delivering a running account of a discussion or workshop. On the other it can be a bit off-putting for participants to be hearing the tap-tap or click-click of the recording angel. When it works it can be extremely useful. I think success hinges on the working brief:

• It has to be an appropriate topic - there's no point in live-blogging somebody doing a PowerPoint presentation, for instance.
• It has to be an appropriate audience - if the participants are going to be paying more attention to the recorder than the facilitator it's a waste of time. (I'd argue that live-blogging any activity involving young children is a hiding to nothing.)
• It has to have an appropriate purpose - you need to be doing something with the results or else you've wasted your time.
• The recording angel has to pay attention to the activity, not the recording thereof.

While I'm on the subject of customer care in the library, there are some useful notes about communicating in the virtual reference library environment on the Association of College & Research Libraries web site.