Archaeology: Library staff training ideas

I was digging round on an old laptop looking for a couple of photos when I bumped into this. Back in 2007 I was the library service's union rep, amongst my very many other sins. At that time Lifelong Learning UK (LLUK) was looking at the options for public library staff training. One of the stakeholders being consulted was our union, Unison, and the consultation documents were passed along to local reps. After a few conversations with members in Rochdale's libraries this is the response they agreed that I should send back. We live in a different world now but even in these austere times I think there would be scope for adopting some of this. I shan't be holding my breath, mind.

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LLUK consultation on public library training

We feel that this is potentially a useful opportunity for addressing the training and development needs of public library staff while they try to provide relevant and appropriate services to their customers in a fast-changing world. There are, however, three issues which we feel could compromise, or even completely de-rail, the outcomes of this exercise if they are not addressed:

(1) Currently the only reward system for excellent public librarians is for them to move into generic management. This is perverse as:

·         An excellent librarian is not necessarily a good generic manager;

·         If the United Kingdom is serious about wanting to be a player in the Knowledge Economy then it cannot afford to waste the community-level knowledge management, information literacy and reading development skill sets of the public librarian. Why go to the trouble of sending somebody to library school if they’re going to spend all day doing sickness returns and reporting building repairs?

CILIP's current position on this is unfortunate: it is very keen to promote librarians as professionals but this is the only profession where personal advancement is predicated on the abandoning of professional practice

(2) The limited opportunities for career development of public librarians effectively imposes a glass ceiling on the career development of non-librarians in the public library sector. This has an increasingly difficult effect on the recruitment and retention of staff. There is another undesirable effect: there are excellent managers in all sectors of the economy who are not librarians; if the staff resources of the public library sector includes non-librarians with the potential to be excellent managers we should want to want to develop and keep their skills and abilities rather than stifle or lose them. There needs to be a career development path for non-librarians that rewards the excellent work that many of them do in the public library sector and provides the sector with the opportunity to use their talents.

(3) Public libraries are very front-line-focused, often to the detriment of support and training activities. There is no point in there being an excellent training and development package in place if staff do not have the chance to take up the opportunity. As we saw with the NOF-funded training, the need to cover the needs of the service can turn a major opportunity into a worry for managers and a source of resentment for front-line staff. This is especially true in authorities like Rochdale where scant staff are thinly spread over many service points. If staff can't take up the development opportunities then the exercise becomes at best an irrelevance and at worst a bad joke and an impediment to good staff relations.

It is also worth flagging up a potential abuse of the outcomes of this exercise: there is the danger that any qualification will become another recruitment hurdle rather than a career development opportunity. We already see nationwide that an essential requirement for ECDL is being used as the lazy recruiter's shorthand for "must be able to demonstrate computer literacy and we don't want the bother of working out how to define our needs in any measurable way, nor do we want to provide ECDL training for our staff." ECDL has become the modern equivalent of "must have six O-levels." Anyone with a degree in computing but no ECDL need not apply. One of our members attended a national event on the future of public libraries and was shocked that a workshop on staff training needs became a bunch of chief librarians moaning that not enough people with ECDL apply for jobs in libraries. It is important that qualifications should be recognised as proof of some degree of attainment but it is also important to recognise that there is more than one way to demonstrate most skill sets.

Given LLUK's brief it is unreasonable to expect that it should be able to tackle the root and branch structural issues involved in (1) and (2), especially given CILIP's current support of the status quo. However, we do feel that LLUK can usefully call for the need to retain and reward the public librarian's skill set at a community level. LLUK can also usefully acknowledge the importance of, and seek to exploit, the skill sets, experience and dedication of all public library staff in the informal learning economy. We also feel that any training and development outcomes should reflect the needs of the public library service, not the particular management structures.

Starting from where we are the challenge is to provide career development opportunities for all library staff without making librarians feel that their qualifications are worthless. Luckily, in one key area the obvious training path does precisely that. 

We propose that LLUK put together a qualification for Public Library Management, covering three core elements:

·         The public library service: the philosophy and aims of the service; good practice models for the delivery of Information Literacy, Reader Development and Cultural Identity at strategic and community levels; the statutory basis for the services we provide (not just the Public Library Act!); the government-level matrix management of the public library service, including the challenges and opportunities in the statutory bases of every governmental department; national and international public library NGOs; public library performance measurement; and good practice models for cross-sectorial working with academic organisations and with the voluntary and private sectors.

·         Public administration: local government organisation, philosophy and finance; working with elected members; statutory controls; good practice models for interdepartmental working; local government performance management and development; and effective (and appropriate) lobbying.

·         Management skills: project management; personnel management and development; financial planning and control; performance measurement; resource procurement; writing business plans, funding bids and reports; and good practice models for strategic and tactical planning, operational management and delivery.

This qualification would provide a good grounding for people wishing to move into the management of public library services. The advantage to the librarian would be that they will already have covered parts of this curriculum in their library training and so will start the course with their feet a couple of rungs up the ladder. The advantage to the non-librarian would be that there would be a ladder in the first place. The advantage to the service and, importantly, its customers would be that the people running the service will have had the opportunity for a more robust foundation to their skill set than is often currently the case.

We also suggest that LLUK look at the provision of courses and qualifications addressing front-line skills such as:

·         Customer care, including dealing with enquiries effectively; applying appropriate limits to delivery (not getting out of your depth and how to tell a customer that there are some things the library can't, or won't, do and they can't have everything they want when and how they want it in this life); assertiveness skills; and presentational skills.

·         Activity and event management, including small-scale project planning and management; marketing and promotion; health and safety; addressing the audience; keeping it practical; delivering the event; and reporting back to interested parties.

·         Community development, including how to work with community groups; promoting and providing the library as a venue; and promoting and providing library services outside the library.

·         Computer skills, including training in the use of computers in a public library context (contra the standard ECDL training, where people who are working day in, day out with sophisticated databases in their library management systems are told that they don’t know about databases if they don’t know how to build a flat table in MS Access); how to support public use of computers; e-learning and e-government taxonomies and metadata standards; Web 2.0 tools; etc.

It should be noted that a lot of existing courses already cover these areas. Unfortunately they are provided by very many different organisations and at irregular intervals and it can be a full-time job just tracking down what's available. It is also unfortunate that so many of the courses that are available are provided only at London venues. The cost of overnight stays or exhorbitant rail fares is a barrier to the take up of those courses. It would be useful if some sort of co-ordinated pattern of training held at regional venues could be established.

Making staff available for training is a major issue. One solution would be for DCMS or MLA to fund additional staff cover for this purpose. Experience would suggest that this would be both inadequate and unsustained. An alternative would be for one of the CPA-related public library performance indicators to be a measure of the training time per capita of staff, with due safeguards for what constituted "training time." This would give local authorities a financial incentive to provide training cover for library staff. By happy accident it would also give library managers an argument against freezing or cutting front-line vacancies for budgetary purposes. Or else we could carry on as we are, in which case LLUK is wasting its time.

Library competencies

Webjunction has just compiled an update to their Competency Index For The Library Field. It's an interesting read, not least because the table of contents alone provides a challenging checklist: does your local library authority include all these high-level skill sets?

Aspirational acorns

A friend and colleague was beating herself up the other day for having somehow failed one of her work experience people. The upshot of her argument was that although she could see the potential in this person she hadn't managed to persuade them it was there. Most of the other work experience people she'd had showed a positive change in self-esteem and self-confidence by the end of the programme but with this one girl she wasn't convinced she'd made a difference.

This sounds horribly familiar — it's usually me moaning about potential wasted. Having listened to the argument, and having seen the work experience group on an almost daily basis while they were here, I'm sure that my friend is wrong: there are significant positive messages in this girl's experience with us:

• Somebody took a chance and took her on. From my own experience of unemployment back in the 1980s I know how important this is.


• Somebody was interested in who she was, not what she was.


• Somebody was interested in finding out what she could do, not what she couldn't do.


• And what she could do turned out to be a bit more than she thought she was capable of.

It's easy to ask: "who died and made you God?" but in circumstances like this there is a duty of care and those of us who care want to see things flourish and develop. No, there's been no magic moment of transformation, and perhaps there never will be. But that girl has gone away knowing that someone somewhere has thought that she was worth something more than just what was between her legs and that that something was worth somebody's making a bit of an effort to find it. That knowledge may or may not survive future experience and it may be years or even decades before anything might come of it, but it's there. And that's important.

We're not God, the best that we can do is plant acorns and hope to grow the occasional bit of forest.

There are worse ambitions.

Digital Inclusion workshop

This is the Prezi I did for today's Staff Conference to try and provoke a bit of discussion about digital inclusion.

The main aim is to try to get people to recognise what they're already doing (which is quite a lot really) and to take on board that they're going to be needing to do quite a lot more in future. My being shifted out of the Library Service complicates the dynamic of that bit, of course...

Slacking

I'm uncomfortably defensive about days spent working from home. I tell myself that on the plus side I'm not going to spend four hours commuting, the network connection is faster and more reliable, I have access to tools that aren't available at the workplace, yadda yadda yadda... And it's true, I am genuinely more productive than at work. But I do still feel uncomfortably defensive.

For one thing, it's too comfortable. I've been sat sitting on the sofa working on the laptop, a pot of tea to hand, the Hairy Bikers on DVD for background noise (the remaining background noise being provided by a robin, a wren and a charm of goldfinches). This can't possibly be work can it?

Oh, I've done all the usual systems housekeeping work. And reported the (sadly) usual problems. I've run a pile of statistics to test an idea that was worrying me about distribution patterns of reserved stock and written a few web pages but I can't say that I feel that I've been particularly productive today.

Part of the problem is that the world has changed. What have I been doing while I've been slacking?

• I've been eavesdropping on the ALA Virtual Conference (thanks to both Marianne and Stewart!);
• Watched lectures on the potential of the online cognitive surplus; Facebook game business dynamics and making a splash with social media;
• Checked out articles on Mashable and LGITU;
• Tried to get my head round the mechanics of the WriteToReply functions being explained by Tony Hirst. and
• Exchanged concerns with colleagues about the current state of play of one of the library management systems companies.

Nothing extraordinary there. You'll have done as much, probably considerably more. But have another look at that in the context of "work," without the use of a laptop and t'internet.

• Peeking through a window to watch a conference.
• Leaving the office for a day just to see a lecture or two or attend a seminar or meet colleagues from far, far away

In the old days what I'm calling slacking would have been A Hard Day's Work. Time was, so long as you clocked on and clocked off at the right time you were doing your work. It was OK to feel not particularly productive because you'd been In Work All Day and had earned your corn by your very presence. These days, I'm happy to say, the currency is deliverables, not time spent (shouldn't it always have been?). So where does that leave personal professional development? It was never much valued in the 'time served' model, but does it only have a utilitarian value in the 'focus on delivery model?' Dunno. I'd like to hope not; I believe that understanding for the sake of it increases the opportunities for the serendipitous development of solutions. But I'd be hard-pressed to prove it.

And I still think I've been an idle beggar today.

Just one big serendipity engine(there, I said it!)

Excellent day out at "Liver and Mash," the latest Mashed Libraries event, despite a stinking cold.

For the first half hour I wondered to myself: "what have you been and gone and done?" and I expect there will be photographs of me on the web looking bewildered. But the venue was cosy, the people were nice and we were greeted with bacon butties before we had our coats off. And the ideas suddenly started to click.

The morning session was extremely quick-fire, which meant that the speakers had to rattle their way through a bewildering amount of content in very short order. Which turned out to be great: there was no opportunity to become wearied by a presentation and a lot of very diverse ideas and functions were given an airing. My notes suggest that just under a hundred different services were mentioned before lunch. Of course they weren't done in depth, the whole point of the morning was to be an eye-opener as to the possibilities, and this it did in spades. And some of the most interesting and challenging ideas weren't necessarily technical: I particularly like the idea of the library customer experience being a journey with rewards along the way. That's an idea we must be able to work with somehow: talking about it afterwards I wondered if the same shouldn't also be true of the staff development path. Besides that I've got a long list of resources to investigate and suggest to colleagues.

Post-lunch (cottage pie! it really was a cosy day!), the sessions were more in-depth. I now know enough to know how much I don't know about mapping APIs. I think I've learnt enough to explore a few ideas for mapping libraries and mobile library routes. I'll have to have a play fairly soon while I still remember what I think my notes mean.

It's been a long week. I started it by looking at integration and interoperability issues in Birmingham; spent a day in York looking at LMS developments; a couple of days back at the sausage factory catching up with stuff and collating notes on our customer-facing business needs (we'll draw a veil over the network problems and a couple of human communication issues); then this last day's explosion of ideas... It's going to be a long job to pull the strands together the way I would hope to do.

The safe use of new technologies

(Yet another thank-you to Phil Bradley!)

Ofsted has produced a report - "The safe use of new technologies" - in response to the report of the Byron Review, "Safer children in a digital world."
Although it's looking at the use of the internet in schools, this is essential reading for those of us providing internet access in public libraries, if only as an antidote to some of the more hysterical responses to somebody's finding inappropriate content. We can put up as many safety barriers as we like, they're not infallible and no substitute for an e-safety culture. An effective e-safety culture addresses the questions "what do we do when something goes wrong?" and "how do we help the customer safely learn from the experience?"

The section on "Internet safety training for teachers and the wider workforce" applies with equal, or possibly greater, force in public libraries given that our clientele is so very much broader. If a 'one size fits all' approach to e-safety training is inadequate for dealing with the needs of a small customer base of defined age range, known ability and controlled context how more inadequate is it with a wide customer base where none of these factors are limited or defined? And how many of us are even able to provide that inadequate 'one size fits all' training scheme for all our staff? In the local government culture, spending on the technology to try to keep the bogeyman at bay is an acceptable, essential investment; spending on equipping staff to deal with real life is an optional extra.

Demonstrating the Return On Investment: Make Do & Mend

I recently read an article about funding pressures on libraries and one comment in particular struck me:

"We may be entering an age of austerity where getting the basics right and on budget will be of greater value than leading the pack on innovation."

This is where many of us have been all along. Which is not to say that we are strangers to innovation. We can't afford to be early adopters of expensive experiments but we can be innovative. Innovation thrives on adversity, after all. It just won't often be revolutionary change (let's be honest, anybody looking to the English public library sector for revolutionary change needs their bumps feeling). It can be, and often is, sustained small incremental changes which aren't remotely sexy but deliver the goods.

When times are hard there is a biting incentive for change and, importantly, it is more difficult to go out and buy a magic wand in the hopes that it will make everything all right in the end. Which is good: one of the stultifying factors to progressive development is the argument that something cannot be done because "we haven't got Item X." This may be a computer, some software, access to the internet, somebody with the job of doing something, a bit of training, or whatever. You've been there, you know what I mean. Of course, the truth is that this something can't be done that way because we haven't got Item X. If that something still needs to be done (and it does no harm to ask the question), there are three options:

1. Get Item X;
2. Find a way of doing the necessary without Item X; or
3. Keep your head down and hope that the whole thing will go away.

It's dispiriting to see how often option three comes into play in the public library sector.

As a matter of principle it's important to know what you've got and what it can do, that's simple resource management. When the brown stuff hits the fan this can be the difference between success and failure. How flexible and adaptable are your systems? Systems begin with and end with a human being.

• How knowledgeable is your workforce? — how do you know?
• How 'sharing' is your organisational culture? — go on, be honest, if only with yourself. Why do libraries, of all things, persist in having 'need to know' cultures?
• How flexible is your workforce? — have a serious think about the next question before you answer this one!
• How flexible is your management?

Maximising the effectiveness and efficiencies of what you've already got isn't a new challenge, but it is one we can no longer duck. Small systemic changes can make big differences. But only if they can be applied systemically and bought into by the organisation and its managers both.

Reflective journal processes

There's a nice diagram of the Reflective Diary/Journal Process on the Businessballs site. I'm forever telling people that "experience isn't what happens to you, it's what you do with it" and this diagram provides a useful template for following this through. One of the more dispiriting truths is that too many people's experience of training or development activities stop at stage two of this process: "What did you think of the training?" "Very good/bad" and back to business as usual.

And how many pieces of work do we get involved in that completely ignore the question: "How will I measure and know that I've succeeded in this?" I know I'm a bore about needing to know the success factors but I do feel this is absolutely important. If you don't know how to tell when you're successful you can only know how to fail.

Reading resources on YouTube

Johnsone County Libraries have posted a bunch of videos to aid early literacy on YouTube. These are a lovely way to show what the library can do and can give people tips and ideas for things to do, including finger plays, songs, rhymes, and wordless books.

We've been talking about doing something like this at Rochdale for a while: we do some very good early-years work in our libraries and have been looking at ways of sharing some of the practicalities with wider audiences. We already do some of that with programmes like "What's My Story" but they're quite time-consuming. If we could record some of the activities it's a one-off performance that can be used repeatedly at the convenience of the viewer.

We need to stop talking and start doing something concrete about this.

The Venn Diagram of Social Media

I should have used this diagram in our Web 2.0 workshop.

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.

Staff conference

We had a one-day staff conference on 21st October. As many people as possible got together at the Wheatsheaf Library for a programme of workshops, briefing sessions and keynote speeches about developments in the library service and the wider world. In retrospect there was just too much stuff to fit in but we only get to do it once a year and there's a huge pile of stuff to try to catch up with.

Alison and I were asked to do a workshop on Web 2.0. Given that most of our staff didn't know what the buzzword means the workshop was necessarily an introduction. We also needed to address the obvious and legitimate question: "so what?" If, at the end of the day, all you're doing is wasting your time playing with a new toy, you're wasting your time. Luckily we were helped by the fact that a couple of the briefing sessions were about public perceptions of council services and corporate communcations and marketing. A presentation and workshop asking people to think about perception, message and viral marketing fit in quite neatly.

I've uploaded the presentation to Slideshare.

Conference2009

View more presentations from Rochdale Library Service.

Here are the notes

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Introduction

We didn't want to have you sitting round computers for this workshop as:

• We don't have the time to "show you how to do" Web 2.0 services
• We don't want to anyway: we'd be spending most of our time
• explaining the mechanics of one or two of the hundreds of similar-but-not-quite services that there are out there; and
• complaining about the council's network connections;
• (or else complaining that corporate rules block staff access to some key sites).

We wanted to use this as an opportunity to explain to you the underlying principles that makes so-called "Web 2.0" different to "Web 1.0." The most important of which is:

Web 2.0 is about people sharing news with other human beings.

The important word there is SHARING

There are all sorts of services on the Internet that let you share "news," text, links, messages, pictures, music and/or videos.

• Many of them are free.
• Most of them can share "news" with other services.
• You aren't tied into using any particular one of them
• you can have more than one service on the go;
• if one service doesn't do the job you want to do you can try something else;
• the one you're using today won't necessarily be the one you use tomorrow, or next week, or next year.
• Most of them can "feed" other websites so that information there is automatically updated.
• Most of them can be "fed" by other websites so that they include automatically-updated information.

Web 2.0 is "The Social Web" - people are sharing stuff with other people.

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The Quiz of Quizzes: brand recognition and values

We showed you some pictures and asked you some questions:

• What is this?
• What one word do you associate with it?

It was important that we got the first answer that came into your head. We wanted to see whether or not you recognised the brands in question and we wanted your gut feeling of the value or quality of the brand. This last is often the difference between your thinking about buying something or not even looking twice.

What was the brand?	What were the key words?
a Rolls Royce	Luxury — Posh — Luxurious — Comfort — Wealth — Big — Money — Affluence — Tasteless — Style — Bourgeois — Weddings — Glamour
	Just out of interest: when was the last time you saw an advert. for a Rolls Royce?
a jar of Marmite	Horrible — Yuck — Toast — Hate — Runny — Awful — Distaste — Nasty — Sandwich — Strong — Healthy — Marmite
Marks & Spencer logo	Everything — Quality — Sell — Knickers — Clothes — Respectable — Pricey — Old — Grandma — Mmmm — Happy — Expensive — Underwear
pints of Guinness	Beer — Ireland — Drunk — Ugh! — Food — Creamy — Black — Expensive — Yummy — Drinking — Socialising — Pregnancy — Toilet — Bitter
Google logo	Internet — Search — Web — Ease — Knowledge — Information — Computers — Easy-to-use — Spam — Online — Links — Popular

Companies wanting to sell or promote a product or service put a lot of effort into brand recognition. They want you to know their product and they also want you to automatically think nice things about it.

• Advertising's a tried and trusted way of bringing the brand into public notice.
• They'll sponsor "something nice" — an event, a team, whatever — so that the brand gets a bit of reflected glory.
• Sponsorship is also a way of making people see or hear the brand name or logo.
• Word of mouth is the best advertising: if you can find some way of getting people to talk about your product or service you can start to reach more people than your adverts can.

If the word of mouth advertising is good enough for long enough you might not even have to bother advertising your brand!

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It pays to advertise?

OK, there's a bit of a cheat to this: film studios are very, very, very nervous of putting film clips, or even trailers, onto video-sharing sites and when people upload clips from the film the film companies will contact YouTube to get them removed eventually. So the number of visits for The Pirates of the Caribbean are artificially low. The number of visits to the Derren Brown clip is roughly the industry standard.

Story time guides

This Flickr post provides an easy-to-use, step-by-step set of instructions for a pumpkin-themed storytime. This is cheap, technically easy to do and very, very effective. The instructions have been posted as a sequence of comments, which is a neat way to deliver the goods. There are a good many other examples to find in the Tiger lair photostream.

All respect and credit to Susan for having the wit and imagination to do this!