Public library technology requirements

Ken Chad's put together a schematic derived from the initial discussions that have been going on about a new generation of core specification(s) for library management systems. You can see a copy here. The more I think about this the more I think that what we really need is a standard methodology rather than a standard specification. When I get a bit of space and time I need to revisit this thinking.

Work/life balance

There's a lot said and done about work/life balance: we log our times, we do the sums, we moan and groan, but one thing tends to go under-noticed. We view work/life balance in terms of time. This is just half the story. How much energy do you have when you get home? Are you spending your days off catching up with housework, shopping, paying bills and chores in general? Is your day of rest a day of domestic toil? I'd guess that too often this is the case.

Work/life balance needs to be a balance of time and energy or else it's just a phrase.

A national digital platform for public libraries

I'm always a sucker for flattery so it was flattering to be asked to go along to one of the workshops that the Library Task Force has been running to talk around the proposed national digital platform for public libraries. The Society of Chief Librarians had commissioned Bibliocommons to draft a plan of action and we were using the draft as the basis for discussion. This document has been unofficially published on one of the library lists but my copy says "Not for publication" so I won't go into any details of it here. This absolutely wasn't the report to go to the sponsor, it was a work in progress showing some very interesting workings-out.

The discussion was useful, though I've no idea how or where it would progress.

One of the points made by representatives from Bibliocommons was that there is no point in building yet another portal. This is dead sensible: the history of libraries and the internet is littered with the corpses of dead library portals, Some good, some bad, many perfectly competent and a few perfectly splendid and all of them the product of many hours' hard work. How many can you remember? The reasons for their falling are many and various but at the end of the day what had been intended as important local reference materials became so much unsecured grey literature. So no portals is a good idea.

Libraries do have useful points of arrival online: their library catalogues. Even a small authority like Rochdale gets at least four thousand visits every month. Integrating a national digital platform into a busy local interface makes a heap of sense. This is the point at which detractors would point out that Bibliocommons have products that do just that so they're bound to say so aren't they? Which can be countered with the observation that their perspective makes it easy for them to latch onto something that should have been blindingly obvious to anybody. The questions are: how would this be done and where would the necessary investment come from?

There was some troubled discussion of "national." Any discussion of any national public library initiative has to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the fractured state of the national public library service. Even if the end product is free and somebody else is doing all the work, the likelihood is that there wouldn't be 100% coverage across England's public libraries: if it's optional then somebody will opt out. What would be the minimum take up that would enable a minimum viable product? Our workshop group could only flag up the question; we weren't in a position to provide any sensible answer.

For me, the other problem is the integration of the national product with the local interface. No doubt someone somewhere would be prepared to do the necessary for a fee, but where would the money come from and if it were available how would it be apportioned and accounted for? Already we're moving away from "If the end product is free..." How much local expertise could be available to do the work? Let's be honest: generally not that much; which isn't a reflection on the expertise of some very good people thinly-spread out there in libraries but an indictment of the lack of investment and development within too many library authorities. How many library authorities present themselves as "Countyshire Libraries" instead of "Countyshire Library Services," their names and their organisational structures reflecting the traditional custodianship of library buildings rather than services which are often entirely independent of the building. Similarly, if you were to divide the cost of the staff managing and staffing libraries by the number of physical visits to the library you'd probably get a high fraction of a penny; in most library authorities, if you were to divide the cost of the staff managing and supporting virtual library services by the number of virtual visits you'd go a good few decimal places before the answer wasn't zero. So we should be concerned about the local capacity to do much of the necessary development work. And that's before we get to the vexed local corporate branding vs. national initiative branding issue!

So by the end of the workshop I'd come to the conclusion that if it was free and somebody else was doing the work and if take up was adequate to make the product viable then the challenge would be integrating the national platform into the local offer within almost certainly diminishing resources. Which is a tad downbeat but not necessarily insurmountable. It'll be interesting to see if/how this progresses past this exploration stage,

Library Management Systems — a new approach

Ken Chad's published his notes on some of the work being started on moving forward from the UKCS to a new, possibly less monolithic, way of identifying what libraries need from their systems (not necessarily just the "traditional LMS"). You can read them here.

It's early days yet but even at this scoping stage it feels like there are a lot of potential positives to come out of this.

Library technologies on the wish list

Ebook Friendly recently posted its "8 technologies we would love to see" and it's an interesting — and not unrealistic — selection, Although part of me worries about the way that technologies are applied, or not, within public libraries I could see some realisable practical benefits to most of these (3 and 8 if you're wondering about the exceptions).

Of course, funding and support (operational perhaps more than technical) would always be an issue but there are circumstances where the return on the investment could be more than just "nice to have." The ideas for creating digital interfaces for print books are particularly intriguing because I can see in them the basis for a new generation of tools for helping people with visual impairment: as well as the functions available in modern CCTV readers — changes in size, contrast, colour, etc. — it could bring in new options such as changing the font to one of the reader's choice, perhaps one with a heavier base leading. Many of the reader advisory functions could easily be made available in audio format. And could you imagine how useful and empowering it would be for a completely blind person to have a talking bookmark that would be able to walk them through the geography of the shelves directly to the talking book that they want (especially if it could find the book even if it had been mis-shelved!)

Clogs and shawls

Fiction genres are sometimes a bit bewildering, especially when they are very-locally defined. Negotiating the thin-but-lethal minefield that is the boundary between Science Fiction and Fantasy is a tricky thing, as is the argument with the reader as to whether or not that Thriller is really Crime Fiction. But it is the local genres that bemuse…

When I first started working in Rochdale Library Service I bumped into Family Sagas for the first time. I had no idea. I'm not alone, many of my colleagues had the same experience. When my partner came to work for the library service she was told to shelve the family sagas in "that bay over there."

"How do I know which are family sagas? Do they have a sticker on?" 

"No. They have a dirty-faced woman with a shawl and a baby on the cover." 

"How about this one? There's no baby." 

"She's got a dirty face and she looks sad so the baby must have died."

I think the strangest thing about this is that for twenty years you could rely on there being enough new titles with dirty-faced women and babies on the cover to keep that bay stocked up aplenty.

LMS development

I've been invited onto the group Ken Chad's pulling together to have a look at what comes after the UK Core Specification for library management systems, which is a flattering and interesting opportunity to try and put something positive into the library pot. At Rochdale we've no plans to change our LMS any time very soon so you may wondering why I'm bothering to get involved and potentially get some additional homework. The answer is: enlightened self-interest. The suppliers I'm working with have finite development and support resources and I would prefer to have them working on something that would add value for us looking forward rather than addressing scores of variations on the theme of "requirements that libraries have identified as missing from UKCS." 

I'm not going to tell any tales out of school but the first telephone conference meeting this morning felt really positive. The more so given the size, scope and — let's be honest — vagueness of the job in hand. So that bodes well.

If all that comes out of the work of this group is that libraries and suppliers aren't diluting scarce resources with redundant requirement iterations then that would be no bad thing. More than that, it's been interesting to see how quickly the idea of replacing or revising the UK Core Specification for library systems has evolved over the past few months from a change of specification into a change of methodology and this seems to be a group that could pick up on that, with the potential for some very useful medium-term benefits.

Deck of cards

One of the things I'm wiggling round inconsequentially like a loose tooth in the back of my head at the moment is a set of notes and checklists on the general theme of "doing stuff" aimed at somebody without the scars of experience who's got that rabbit-trapped-in-headlights feeling about a piece of work. It would be a hotch-potch of things I've learned over the years at work, things I wish I'd known before I'd done some pieces of work and things I've watched and marvelled as other people worked their magic. Essentially, a basic, interdisciplinary toolkit for somebody struggling to know where to begin.

Thinking about that "trapped" feeling where you can't see where to go next, or the only way is somewhere you don't want to go — particularly creative block and group-think — it occurred to me that there ought to be some tool that could help. Something a bit more proactive than "go and do something else for half an hour" that could combine displacement, suggestion and challenge. And it turns out that there is: the original out-of-the-box thinking. The usefulness of tools like Oblique Strategies and Distant Early Warning isn't in the apparent power of divination so much as the introduction of a random variable that disrupts the state of thought. I'll certainly have a play with that idea.

Figure skating

One of the things that has become horribly apparent over the past couple of years is the abject lack of any evidence-based government data that would lend themselves to a statistical analysis of the decline of the national public library service.

There are no official figures in the public domain for anything that's happening out there: not for visits, or use of libraries or even — God help us! — for the number of publicly-funded public libraries run by local authorities in this country.

This leads to nonsense like the recent claim that there's been an increase in the number of libraries despite all the cuts over the past few years. Anyone wanting to know the number of libraries is better off going to Ian Anstice's Public Libraries News blog than any official government site or press release. All kudos and good karma to Ian for doing the work but this isn't a good state of affairs for a democracy or open government.

One reason often cited for this lack is that the figures are available but only from CIPFA, which charges a hefty fee for their use. And that fee pays for just the figures for one library authority for that year's figures, so pulling together a national picture becomes an expensive business.

Which it would.

If that was the way you were doing it.

But it shouldn't be:

• The presentation and analysis of those statistics are CIPFA's property to do as they will with. Which is fair enough as they've done that work.

• The data that informs CIPFA's statistics are available within each and every library authority in the land and is collected each year — at no small expense to you the taxpayer — by local council staff then copied into a spreadsheet that's parcelled up and sent to CIPFA. 

• There is absolutely no good reason why that data — not CIPFA's subsequent work with that data — can't be put into the public domain to be worked on by decision-makers, lobbyists, "Armchair Auditors" or just people who like playing with numbers. 

The easiest way to do this would be for each local authority to submit a copy of each year's data — perhaps as a CSV file — to a dataset in Data.Gov.uk or similar. This would then be in the public domain and available for proper analysis of services and trends. It wouldn't cost anything very much to actually do: the data's available, it just needs somewhere to go. And it would be a damned site cheaper than having each local authority have to go through the administrative processes required to deal with a Freedom of Information Request asking the same questions as those on the CIPFA spreadsheet. Or even multiple requests for that data. Once it's in the public domain FoI doesn't apply.

So it would be possible to have an official, verifiable benchmark figure for the number of public libraries in this country at the beginning of the financial year and the net loss/gain at the beginning of the following year.

Which could be why it isn't happening.

UKOLN Informatics

Sad to hear of the closure of UKOLN Informatics. This unit set in train and/or encouraged a wide range of digital and e-library (for those of us of a certain age) initiatives over the years, particularly in the late nineties and turn of the millennium. It's a relief to see that some of its progeny have found good homes but a shame that the doors are set to close. Many thanks and good wishes to all concerned.