Fun things to do

Yet another tip of the hat to Phil Bradley, this time for his "25 tools to entertain, educate, enthrall."

And another tip of the hat to him for providing not just a dozen or more applications I hadn't bumped into yet but also a bit of thought as to actually apply them in practice. As always, the tool is only ever as useful as the use to which it is put. A few of these look like they could make up into useful guiding tools for learning resources (staff as much as the public). Something for me to have a seriously long look this summer when I'm not so overwhelmed with work. (He said optimistically!)

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.

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."

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.

Social Media Best Practices for Libraries

Another useful checklist (why do they always have to have ten items?) of tips for social networking for libraries (thanks to Kasia and Michael). The tips are derived from a digital marketing conference; just because it's not "by" libraries or librarians doesn't mean that it can't be usefully applied in libraries. Like so many of these lists it's all dead obvious when you see it written down; deceptively simple until you try to apply them in practice. The sad thing is that I think Tip #10 is the single biggest obstacle for most development work in public libraries.

Presentations that rock

The do's and don'ts of presentations are simple but easy to forget. There's a nice summary of the key points on Marianne's MLxperience blog.

I make no apologies for 'borrowing" this footage of Don MacMillan's PowerPoint presentation.

Demonstrating the Return on Investment: God is watching, give him a good show

By any objective measure a large sum of money is invested in the public library service. We can make a good case for its not being enough, or the wrong kind of investment, but it's still a goodly sum.

The return on that investment can be relatively colossal, whether you measure the impacts in terms of literacy or well-being, supporting economic or community development. But we sort of take it for granted that people know that, don't we? While other services make damned sure that everyone who matters knows every single thing that they do (and every one of them dressed up to the nines as a major success) public libraries tend to pootle along, doing their thing until there's talk of cuts and closures, when suddenly all the positives are wheeled out. In many ways that's too late: to be sure, you may be able to stave off the major cuts in bad times but are you in a position to be able to capitalise on the good times?

• Libraries do a lot of stuff. In practice this is great, but it's difficult to sell "we do a lot of stuff" as a single message without looking and sounding incoherent. So let's not do that. Let's work with small, digestible lumps of news and information that make a single, sensible, positive point.
  


• Little and often is good. The individual message is: "this is something the library does/did and it is A Good Thing." The repeat message is "libraries do good things." Importantly, the message is sustained over time.
  


• "We're not doing anything we can make a fuss about." Bollocks. Take a look around you. Other people's high-profile media events: the festivals; the open days; the big-name events. How many people turned up? And how many people do you get to your events? Have a look round at your local context and be more realistic about what you're able to achieve. Then celebrate what you do achieve!
  


• "That's been and gone. What's the point in putting that on the web?" You've done something. It cost time and money to do it. Why? What did you get for it? More importantly, what did the public get for it? Tell them what you've spent their money on.
  


• "Yes, but it's history, isn't it? What's the point of telling people what we've done?" You and your staff aren't standing round waiting to "stamp out a few books" are you? That's precisely what a lot of people do think you do. Your overall message needs to be: "we do lots of stuff and here's just some of it!" You can't prove that you do lots of good stuff without having a good range readily available to demonstrate the point.
  


• "Yes, but that's just politicking or swank, isn't it?" NO!!!! This is an important part of your catalogue of services. Just as your library catalogue (remember that?) tells your customers what resources may be available for them to use, this collection of news and information items tells your customers and potential customers about the kinds of services and activities that you're delivering, or have delivered, in your libraries. And, importantly, it gives people with money and influence an idea of what you can do given the time and resources.
  


• Spread the word: don't rely on a single channel of communication. If you've got something good to say, say it in a few places. Take the message to your intended (or hoped-for) audience, don't sit back and expect them to hunt you down.

None of this is difficult and none of it is new. We just need to do it.

Abstract thinking

I've been having a play with some photos of our libraries, for no good reason other than I found the effects to be pleasing. As you can see, it's a simple application of a kaleidoscope function. I'm wondering if there's anything to be read into the results.

I'll come back to this in a few weeks, when I've forgotten the running order, to see if I can pick out which have been recent refurbishments and/or relocations.

Equality in electronic delivery - thinking about inclusion

I got to thinking the other day about if/how delivering library services electronically had any positive effect on equality issues. I imposed two conditions on this thinking:

• I've always been wary of the "which groups' needs do we need to be addressing?" approach. Partly because in principle equality should be about everyone. Partly because this usually degenerates into a box-ticking exercise. (A colleague was once told that his library service needed to do more to address the needs of women, retired people and children. "That is the sum total of our customer base," he replied.) Mostly because we need to be addressing the actual needs of the individual customer, not the perceived needs of the group we have shoe-horned them into.


• Adaptive technology doesn't count for this exercise. This isn't to belittle its potential usefulness, it's just a separate issue.

I'm concerned about the impact - or not- our mainstream, vanilla-flavoured services are having. If a customer has to identify themselves as having "special needs" of one sort or another we're already playing from the back foot. With all good intentions we can sometimes be creating a barrier; as I once heard someone say to a council official: "Sometimes I feel like saying to people: 'look, this is about me, not my disability!'" Libraries can, and do, address those special needs very effectively and sensitively, but how far can we can deliver an appropriate service through the usual channels without first having to identify the need as being "special?"

One commonly-perceived negative becomes a potentially-important positive in this context: the electronic delivery mechanism is impersonal. It doesn't notice your height, weight or gender. It doesn't know the colour of your skin or your tone of voice or your accent. Your hair could be green or white or ginger. All those subjective value-loadings that human beings are prone to are not involved in the process. In that respect, at least, there is an equality of offering. Of course, there is no guarantee of equality of delivery - the layout, or language, or choice of service(s) may be excluding factors.

At the moment we provide a fairly basic suite of services:

• A web site with information about services and events
• A web catalogue allowing
• Searches, including a few hundred reading lists with directed searches
• Customers' building their own personal reading lists
• Reserving titles
• Loan renewals
• A bunch of online reference and information resources

We could, and should, do more than this. Especially bearing in mind the interactive potential of these resources and the various web 2.0 resources that are available. I'm frustrated that we don't have more interactive forms on the web site, particularly something as basic as a membership form. There are technical reasons with the corporate content management system that makes it difficult to create forms but this is something we're going to have to find a way of addressing or working round pretty soon.

The online services we do currently provide are available remotely 24 x 7, which means that customers don't have to be able to physically get to a library building during library opening times to receive library services. Which is a great boon for people who are time-poor due to family or caring commitments. And for housebound people.

Some of our housebound customers search the web catalogue, place reservations on the items they want and the items are delivered to them by the housebound library service. They continue to get the personal interaction with the Library Assistant who does the visits but they gain some control over the selection of items in the basket. It's a win:win situation - the customer can make specific choices and the Library Assistant can provide additional reading/listening suggestions based on those choices.

I think there's a lot of scope for doing more work with the reading lists. We could do more to explain the ways that people can build their own reading lists, or use the online reading lists I've already created, to help them with their studies or literacy skills. Or reading lists for people working with people with special needs or who need help with their English literacy.

And we shouldn't forget the online e-book resources we've been using to meet the needs of visually-impaired people wanting to study classic texts. Librivox and Gutenberg have both been useful a few times.

I think I'm barely scratching the surface here, even with the limited services we're providing...

Ten tips for entrepreneurs

Another nugget of gold on The Travelin' Librarian site flagging up a post on the ReadWriteStart channel for first-time entrepreneurs and start-ups. In it, Kevin Rose, Digg's founder, provided ten tips for budding entrepreneurs - you can see the details here. None of it is rocket science, indeed at least a couple are self-evident truths until you take a step back and realise how often they aren't acted on in real life.

I'd argue that they apply significantly to developing a public library service.

1. "Just Build It: You don't need anyone's approval and in fact, you probably won't get it, so don't even try." -- you're working in a bureaucracy; in all probability you're working in one of the more conservative corners of that bureaucracy. Sometimes you've just got to let that genie out of the bottle.
   
2. "Iterate: Build, release and iterate. Make a list of the features you want to create over the next six months and get going" -- definitely!!! Don't imagine you've finished the work. Look at it, review it, ask yourself how it could be made better. If resources allow, do it. If resources don't allow, why did you do it in the first place? Development needs to be sustainable.
   
3. "Hire Your Boss: Make sure you hire people that you would want to work for, who challenge you and you can learn from." -- I think this is the single most challenging idea for an English public library service to take on board. The rigid, top-down hierarchical model of working didn't work all that well in the first place and has become a liability if library services are going to use all their available resources nimbly and effectively.
   
4. "Demand Excellence: Ensure staff are committed to and understand your vision" -- the second sentence is important. Excellence isn't something that is measured after the event, it is something that's signposted to before the event. You demand excellence by delivering vision.
   
5. "Raising Money: The higher your evaluation is, the more equity you have to work with. Beg, borrow and steal. Be creative about finding ways to cut costs." -- more pertinent now than ever! If you can get money, use it. They can't take it off you if you've spent it. Investigate new delivery channels to see if you can do the same or better cheaper (at least one example will be coming up in point 9).
   
6. "Hack the Press" -- make sure that you're getting your message out there. Not just to via "official" channels: chat up anyone and everyone who might be useful.
   
7. "Invest in Advisors" -- not necessarily consultants in the bureaucratic sense. Invest in people who know things that you may find useful. (Including your own staff!) The investment doesn't necessarily have to be in money or stocks: librarians around the world are sharing ideas, advice and news in all sorts of different forums, make sure you're tapping into them. And then make sure that you're also using the same model to tap into networks outside the library arena (be creative about it) - you will be amazed at just how often the answer to a problem is a devolved community knowledgebase with meeting and event management facilities and free internet access. Join in, be positive, be useful; the effort you invest this way can be paid back many times over later on.
   
8. "Connect With the Community" -- any public library service that isn't doing that already should be boarded up.
   
9. "Leverage Your User Base to Spread the Word" -- talk to your customers; tell them what you're doing; then get your customers to be your marketing tool. Time was, we only had word of mouth to work with (but when it works it works very well indeed). Now there are all sorts of new opportunities, many of which are free. Which ties in nicely with point 5. If it costs £x to print out a couple of hundred leaflets which may or may not be actually read could you not use the money one something more concrete that you could tell people about buckshee on Twitter, Facebook, etc.?
   
10. "Analyze Your Traffic: Pay attention to how people are using your site, and then learn and evolve" -- not just your web traffic (though that's important). How does/doesn't your online audience traffic relate to your library's visitors?

I know which ones I have and haven't been doing (and I'm not going to say here which they are!)