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?

Library audiences: talking to the other 54%

A couple of months back I had an interesting Twitter conversation with some local government comms folk which got me wondering why so few English public library services have much in the way of child-centred content on their web sites. I asked the very splendid Ian Anstice if he could canvass for examples of good practice on his Public Libraries News site. The good news is that he got some positive responses, including Devon's "The Zone" and Stories from the Web; the bad news is that there are so very few examples. Ian's musings on this point are here.

For me there are a few contributory factors to this famine:

• The web is still seen as largely "something other" to the public library's service offer. At best a way of promoting activities in the library and somewhere to keep the catalogue and the e-books; at worst an abstraction of resources from beleaguered libraries. (There are plenty of exceptions to that rule, thank Heaven!)
• If you're doing it right it's going to take time and people to do it. These are increasingly scarce resources.
• It's difficult to reconcile the needs of a children's page with those of a council's corporate branding, particularly if the brand requires a single monolithic corporate voice.
• It's a complex and sometimes unforgiving audience: what's great for a five year-old may be acceptable to a seven year-old but puerile to a nine year-old and beyond the pale to an eleven year-old.
• There's often a confusion as to whether the audience is the child or the parent. Ironically, the younger the intended audience the older the people you're going to be talking to.

Despite these problems there are still some things that can be done without too much expense and hassle.

Customer-created content

There are easy ways of adding children's voices to your content:

• If your OPAC includes the facility to publish readers' ratings and reviews, actively encourage children's reviews. You might need to do it for them; if so, an ethical solution would be to set up a dummy customer account specifically for posting them.If you have children's reading groups, encourage the groups to post their reviews, too.
• You'll probably already include links to writers' web sites with the rest of their works in your catalogue; why not also include links to appropriate fan sites?
• If your children's reading groups have their own web pages link to them from your site.
• Many OPACs have the facility to build saved lists and incorporate them into URLs to create canned searches. Canvas ideas for reading lists, "top tens" and the like and build them into links in your site. If you can present these as carousel galleries of books covers - yay!!!
• If you have good working relationships with schools and youth workers, get them involved, too.

Changing rooms

If you can't have child-centred pages on your council's web site, can you provide separate versions of your OPAC for children?

• The basic model would just be to have a version of the OPAC that's limited to the children's collections (this is where we're at in Rochdale at the moment).
• A modification of this would be to change the wording for this version's home page and search forms (which could probably do with simplifying anyway). You'll need to be pretty clear about which particular audience(s) you're addressing here. You might want to do a CBeebies/CBBC split.
• If you have a useful working relationship with your comms people and if your corporate brand is either flexible enough to deliver or allows permissible exclusions in particular circumstances, then you could do some interesting work on the stylesheets, etc. to make the look and feel more friendly. This isn't necessarily about using primary colours and Comic Sans (catalogue records look really horrible in Comic Sans, I've tried it). It's usually about: 
• Simplifying elements, or eliminating them altogether. Is the link to the corporate web site useful to a nine year-old?
• Adding pages specifically aimed at your audience. The obvious ones would be your help pages.
• Illustrating ideas and instructions with graphics.
• Perhaps even having its own character-based branding (like Bookstart Bear).

These are just a few potential quick-win options. Given time and resources there's a lot more that could be done but I think there's a danger of ignoring the basics in pursuit of the cutting edge and sexy.

QR

I know that QR codes are considered a bit old hat in some circles these days but I think there's still scope for doing interesting things with them in the library. The obvious idea, I think, is for signposting Useful And Interesting Facts about the library. Or at least doing a bit of in-library marketing using out-library resources.

Shelf guiding tends to be one or two words, which isn't a right lot for selling the product on the shelves. You can do a bit more with card inserts and shelf wobblers but after a bit they start getting lost or looking tatty. A QR code, strategically placed on or by the shelving, could add another string to the bow by pointing to appropriate web resources, for instance:

• A page on the library's web site 'selling' that particular collection.


• The web site of one of the authors of titles on the shelves, particularly if it's not one of the usual suspects. Many new authors have very interesting blogs which are good introductions to the ways they think and write.


• A genre blog or web site. Get your chick lit readers looking at sites like http://chicklitbooks.com/, for instance.


• Appropriate articles available online. Just because a newspaper essay about a particular author or book is a few months or years old doesn't mean it might not be interesting to some of your readers.


• Appropriate web sites to pique readers' interests in a particular style or subject. There's scope for a bit of creative thought here, especially if it's a good way of spinning strands between Dewey ranges. An article on lumbago and housemaid's knee might be useful to the older reader of gardening books!


• Or just something random but fun and interesting?

I think this has potential for increasing the library's potential as a serendipity engine, introducing customers to new ideas and/or authors. Especially if the code's used to flag up neglected areas of stock rather than the usual headliners.

OK, the audience is likely to be a bit small and niche but what does it cost? A bit of time to decide what to point at (and/or create a bit of new content if you need something locally-specific) and to create the QR code from one of the many free generators you can find on the web; and the price of printing the code out. Definitely worth having a think about…

It's nice when something works

We've been doing customer surveuys using one of CRT's Viewpoint workstations for a while now. They're pretty robust and largely trouble-free, which is always a welcome set of attributes. I find creating a survey a bit of a faff but not so much as to be off-putting.

What's really good is the analysis and reporting tools. Within half an hour of uploading the data I've got access to a very straightforward mass of meaningful statistics that can be easily exported to a spreadsheet for tarting up.

Particularly nice is that all the iffy stuff gets quarantined. If it's obvious that somebody's just been hitting keys or inputting a pre-disposed set of answers the responses get put to one side for you to check up on. We knew this latest survey had been nobbled by somebody with an axe to grind, so I'd set myself up to go through the data to see if I could identify the offending responses on the days involved. Much to my delight, I found that they'd all already been shunted over to the Quarantine folder (on account of their being twelve very similar responses in the space of ten minutes). I'm suitably impressed.

Looking through the responses to open-ended questions is always an education. It shouldn't surprise me that youngsters see it as the opportunity to post love grafitti on the screen ("Charlotte loves Lewis TLFE"). Looking at this set I'm going to suggest to the Branch Assistant that she should have a word in Nathan's ear: if he doesn't borrow lots more books we'll tell Caitlyn about Bridie and Bridie about Caitlyn.

Is your library making milkshake mistakes?

A useful heads-up on The Unquiet Librarian's site (thanks again to Marianne for the link).

It's a variation on the "can't see the wood for the trees" problem where the purpose of a development activity has become ill-defined. In this case the key question for the developer is: "are we wanting to improve [however defined] the product or are we wanting to improve its sales?" If the former, then the behaviour of the product is paramount. If the latter, then the behaviour of the [potential] customer is paramount.

It doesn't matter how excellent your product is if the customer can't, or won't, use it or afford it. A 'good enough' product that doesn't require the customer's having to radically modify their usual behaviours is always going to have something going for it.

Listening to global voices

Food for thought in one of the TED lectures. In this one, Ethan Zuckerman talks about the need to open up your online world and read the news in languages you don't even know.

He argues that "the web connects the globe, but most of us end up hearing mainly from people just like ourselves." Which is uncomfortably like the problem with some public libraries — "for people like us, by people like us," with everybody else fringed off and assigned their special label to be treated differently. We know that this doesn't have to be so, and there's a lot going on in our libraries to try and knock that sort of attitude on the head. Which is just as well as public libraries are excellently positioned to help foster Zuckerman's "xenophilia" and have excellent reasons for making an active effort to do it.

• Public libraries are — or should be — important serendipity engines within the community. The key purpose of the library is to give the user the keys to the world. This can't be effected if the library only delivers what the specifics that customer asks for. As Arkwright says: "What they come in for is up to themselves. What they go out with is up to us."
• The survival of any public sector service is dependent on not just being important to "people like us." The more "people not like us" that a service engages with, satisfies and delights the better for its chances of survival. Which is why, for all the breast-beating over the years, the prospects for the public library service are better than those for the municipal blacksmith, the lamp-lighter and the knocker-upper.
• Local economic recovery is dependent on entrepreneurship and inward investment. These days the key markets, and the money, are in Asia.
• We need to maximise the chances of serendipitous discovery of opportunities for local entrepreneurs.
• We need to maximise the chances of serendipitous discovery of local opportunities for overseas entrepreneurs.

How to do it?

• We need to make sure that we don't make all our user interface too relevant. At first that sounds counter-productive, we don't want to be wasting our customers' time after all. All I'm saying is that there always needs to be a small but visible proportion of almost randomised, but certainly unexpected, content or activity that can act as a bridge between the user's daily information/cultural commuting route and roads less-travelled. The whole customer experience needs to enable the same scope for serendipitous discovery as a browse of the library bookshelves.
• We need to be open to and promote user-generated content that provides useful bridges. And perhaps even be brave enough to let customers themselves define and share "useful."
• We need to mainstream and actively promote those activities that link us with "people unlike ourselves."
• We need to make sure the we, our content and our community are available. If we're not there we won't be found. Back in the nineties a friend's library service scored quite a few Brownie points because a Japanese company used the library's online community information database to investigate the local social infrastructure, which led to them setting up a factory there.

We should be doing that anyway. It's worth testing whether or not we actually do.

LMS musings: customer management

I wanted front-line staff to have the opportunity for a bit of structured brainstorming amongst themselves without (at this stage) being prompted or led by somebody higher up in the food chain. But I also wanted to avoid their feeling left to flounder so I circulated a note to help get them started. The responses to date have been very useful. I wish we were currently able to free them up for a get-together to bounce ideas around more thoroughly, I know it would be very productive.

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Library customers (not only borrowers!) management — brainstorming the business needs

We want you to think about how we would use a new library management system (LMS) to manage our customers, and not just borrowers.

If at all possible, we need to include all our customers in the system and if at all possible we need to have auditable data about all our customer transactions. In reality this isn’t always practicable or desirable but we need to include as many customers as possible.

What we want you to do:

1. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Or some post-it notes if you prefer.
2. The questions are:
1. What information do we need to be able to provide services to our customers?
2. What information do we need to make sure that we’re providing the appropriate services for each customer?
3. What information do we need to make sure that we’re putting the right resources (staff, stock, events or whatever) in the right places to deliver these services?
4. How do we prove that we’re earning our keep and doing it right?
5. How do we prove that we’re meeting the needs of the whole community?
3. Forget about what how we do things now.
4. Think about what we should be doing now and what you think we will need to be doing in the future.
5. Don’t worry about putting the ideas you have into any sort of order, just get the idea noted down while you remember what it was.
6. Once you’ve got your ideas noted down you might want to come back to them and decide whether each one is something:
• We need;
• We want; or
• We would like.

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Before you start, have a look at a few issues that we need to bear in mind…

All systems begin and end with somebody wanting something to happen.

A computer is not a system and a system does not need a computer.

Your business needs are:

• What needs to happen at the beginning?
• How will you know it has happened at the end?
• Don’t get bogged down with the intermediary steps; and definitely don’t get bogged down by “this is what we do now”
• At this stage of the game you’re wanting to know whether the system delivers the end product.

The way that you work with a new LMS will be very different to the way you work with Dynix.

• Different systems will work in different ways. I guarantee that any new library management system will not work like Dynix and will not be “a more modern version of Dynix.” For better and worse it will be very different.
• The technical installation of a new LMS is the easy bit. The hard bit is changing the way you work so that your business processes take advantage of the most efficient and effective ways of using your new system to deliver your services, rather than bodging the new system to mimic existing business processes and compromising the services in the process. This is referred to as process re-engineering. This needs to be a constant process, starting as early as possible during the installation and continuing until you start installing your next management system.

Don’t confuse process and product.

• Do you want that green flashing light because the system’s designed to give you a green flashing light or because you want the system to tell you that something’s just happened? In which case, would something else do the job just as well?

Think about how you as a customer would want to interact with the Library Service.

• The Library Service is not a building, and a building isn’t the Library Service. We can, do, and will increasingly provide library services beyond the walls of the library building.
• When you log onto an e-commerce site like Amazon or Tesco Online; or onto a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter, the system…
• Provides you with information/advertising based on your previous activities;
• Provides you with information/advertising from resources/people you have said you’re interested in; and
• Provides a personal service to you.

So can, and should, your LMS.

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Help sheet
(Only to be used as a last resort if the blank sheet of paper’s getting to be too intimidating!)

Seriously, only use these questions if you desperately need a kick-start to get yourself going. We want as many ideas and perspectives as possible and we don’t want you to feel that you’ve got to follow this structure.

• Who uses the library?
• What are the different needs of different customers?
• What do we want them to do?
• What do we want them not to do?
• What do they do?
• Where?
• When?
• Were we any use to them?
• What else do they do?
• Where?
• When?
• Were we any use to them?
• What information do we need about them?
• How do we keep their custom?
• How do we market our services to our customers?

Driving Change, Creating Experience & Moving Forward

A very nice presentation on Michael Stephens' "Tame The Web" site. I particularly like the slides which show some unflinchingly unflattering perspectives of libraries from the customer's point of view. (It's been one of those months!) It's reassuring that I'm not entirely on my own in worrying about some of the bad habits of libraries.

There are a lot of slides in this presentation, but that's OK, I promise you, because each one's quick and punchy and leads you swiftly on to the next. And the journey's worthwhile:

• The strength of a library, particularly a public library, is its potential for being inclusive of a community and its being a trusted knowledge base within that community.
• The survival of libraries depends on its active engagement with the community and, perhaps more crucially, the active engagement of a critical mass of individual customers and stakeholders.

There are a lot of very easy, affordable, friendly and fun ways of turning the passive customer or potential customer into an active user and participant without losing sight of the core business of the libary. Quite a few are included here in a nicely-digestible form.