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.
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?
