In the end there is no "In the end"

Projects and events are finite but, unless you're a journeyman project manager or an events manager, they have to live in the context of the organisation or service that they serve. As such they are episodes in a longer serial narrative rather than stand-alone short stories.

There are a number of ways in which these episodes are embedded in the narrative. The past is part of the backdrop and rationale for the activity. The activity itself is — for good or ill — a landmark in the narrative but this is static. The resources employed and delivered are identified in the business case and in the lessons learned process but these only provide the potential for the future narrative, they don't impel it.

So what does get the narrative moving?

"What happens next?"

• What happens next? = continuous service improvement
• What happens next? = business case for future projects
• What happens next? = sustainable service delivery

If your organisational reaction to a project or event is to push it into the drawer marked "History" you're losing the benefit of experience and you have to wonder why on earth you bothered in the first place. Similarly, if it doesn't evoke a "what happens next?" response perhaps you shouldn't have done it in the first place.

Some more stray thoughts about online catalogues

There was an article in today's Guardian about the Dyslexie font which is designed to be bottom-heavy to help people with Dyslexia: the idea is that the asymmetry of the characters makes it harder for them to dance about for the reader. Coincidentally, a conversation I'd had with somebody last weekend had set me thinking about how a library could present appropriate parts of its stock to dyslexic readers.A gallery display of book covers is an obvious format but wouldn't it be nice to have the accompanying text for that section of the catalogue in a Dyslexia-friendly font? I expect it's do-able; it would be interesting to see someone give it a go.

QR and literacy campaigns

Project-Q in the Netherlands is a nice, simple example of the use of QR codes to support a literacy campaign. I know QR codes are old hat and ho-hum to some but as a cheap and easy way to add a few more strings to a bow they're pretty useful and I don't understand why we keep on not using them.

"Not another bloody review!"

Some interesting stuff coming out about the Sieghart Review of English publish library services, including this one in The Bookseller. The general tone of the analysis sounds pretty good and some of the suggestions mentioned would be very encouraging if ever acted upon. We'll wait and see if and when the review gets published.

Words and pictures

November is Picture Book Month, one of very many international initiatives for encouraging reading and literacy. Some of these are set up formally by organisations like CILIP, The Reading Agency and the ALA while others, like this, emerge from informal association and get a momentum of their own.

Picture books are great and even in these austere times we have lots of them in our libraries. The combination of words and pictures helps young readers to associate words with ideas. The pictures encourage "Can you see..." and "I wonder what..."and the "What do you think happens next?" questions that make sharing a story such fun. And the artwork is often brilliant. So I like picture books.

I always puzzled — still do, in fact — about librarians' antipathy to comics. We were brought up reading comics; my dad reckons comics taught him how to read and I was one of those horribly precocious little kids who read "The Bash Street Kids" before I ever saw the cover of a "Janet and John" reader. And yet the only comic you ever saw in the library when I was a kid was "Look and Learn." All those stories with pictures and their captioned narrative links and speech bubbles to tell you who's talking were somehow "not quite the thing." Later on when I started working with and in libraries I saw the same thing. The two biggest selling children's books every year were The Guinness Book of Records and The Beano Book and while we bought the first by the bucket load if anybody ever donated a copy of The Beano Book or any other comic annual it went straight into book sale. One of my friends tried to slip some into one of the collections he was managing and was told very firmly that: "We don't buy annuals." Given that the accession shelves were groaning with expensive yearbooks destined for the reference library he wasn't best chuffed at this.

We do have comics in the library these days but they're either dressed up as "graphic novels" or put somewhere in the 741s amongst the non-fiction. Personally, I think there's a distinct difference between a collection of comic and a graphic novel. It's not necessarily the format or the genre, it's the structure of the storytelling. One's not better than the other, they're just different, albeit very close relations. It's lovely to see graphic novels in libraries and I'm all for the study of graphic arts; I just wish we could also celebrate comics without having to sneak them in by disguise.

Stray thoughts on the library catalogue

This is a frustrating time for me, I admit: we're in the process of recommissioning our OPAC and I can see all sorts of possibilities with the new version but I have to take a few steps back because it's somebody else's baby. A couple of years ago my rôle changed from library systems development to more general corporate systems management and support so it's my job to make sure the system underlying the OPAC works but the development work is somebody else's to do and I have to be careful to get in the way.

I'll jot stuff down on here once in a while just to get ideas out of my system.

Project Gutenberg catalogue records

A belated tip of the hat to Steve Thomas at the University of Adelaide for providing MARC records for Project Gutenberg titles. This is immensely useful and helps us add some real depth to the online elements of our catalogue with very little effort on our part (and nothing but admiration for the colossal amount of effort that people have put in to make this project such an incredibly important, useful and entertaining resource).

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?

Net neutrality: why worry?

Net neutrality is a topic creating quite a lot of heat at the moment, due to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's taking a look at the topic and scaring people silly in the process with the implication that there'd be the development of a two-tiered internet with them as can pay going down the line at a premium rate and the rest crawling along as best can. (CNET provides as good a summary as any.)

So what? It's a fuss in a foreign land, isn't it?

Sadly not. It'll affect us however much we may imagine or hope that it wouldn't.

So what would be the effect and why should we care?

The way I see it, the nearest practical model for how the post-net neutrality world would look is cable television. Back in the day when cable TV first came out it was full of all sorts of community engagement. There were local and hyperlocal channels; there was space for the esoteric, the informative and the downright baffling. Much of it was done on the cheap and looked it.Then there were years of consolidation and corporate buyings-up and now I could watch NCIS and CSI: Miami simultaneously on six different channels; or endless hours watching folks in nowhere towns somewhere in America shouting at each other for no apparent reason; an interminable churn of mid-Atlantic reality wannabees being vile to one another; and a carousel of Westminster Village news feeds. None of it is local. All of it is peddling the same corporate narrative. News or features about anything within a hundred miles of where I live is limited to the local half-hour news programmes on weekdays and the ten minutes where the skateboarding ducks used to be after the weekend news.

I quite liked the Internet when it was like the Wild West. We can't go back to those days but that doesn't mean it has to become just another adjumct to the Wall Street Journal.

Data sharing between libraries

We're at the stage in the evolution of the AGMA library consortium where we're starting to work through the practical — and legal — implications of shared services.

• Sharing our catalogue data is relatively easy: the data standards are well-established and most the data itself is published in the public domain on library OPAC's, etc. Which doesn't mean that it was all plain sailing and we've not got some more work to do. 

• Sharing borrower data is obviously fraught with all sorts of information governance and data protection issues on top of the problem that there isn't any data standard save that imposed by the structure of our shared LMS and the commonalities we've discussed and agreed on a case-by-case basis.

• Virtually every circulation dataset is a back door into the borrower data.

I've been thinking through some of the questions we need to be asking ourselves on this journey. It's still early days so isn't exhaustive; at this stage I'm trying to work out what we need to worry about at a general level prior to starting work on a risk analysis.

Purpose	Type of Information	Recipients	Data Controller	Notes/queries
Membership information including contact details –voluntary service, customers will be asked if they want to opt in	Customer name, address and contact information, DOB. Disability, ethnicity and other demographic details Family relationship details Lending history	Library staff (including all other authorised Spydus users) of approved Authorities within the scheme	Local Authority (Data Subject’s Local Authority will be the data controller)	Which data is to be shared? Is it all or nothing? If partial, which parts and how managed? Same question applies to who the data is being shared with What would be the position of volunteer-managed community libraries? How do we switch sharing on/off? What happens if a customer changes their mind? How are they “quarantined?” What happens to the data held in loans, charges and reservations? What happens to any outstanding loans, fines and charges? Who owns (and is responsible for) the data?
Loans information	Details of the loan including borrower, item, location and status of loan. Loans history	Library staff Specific customers can see all details of their loan(s) All customers can see some details of the loan(s)	Local Authority (which?)	This is the crucial element to be managed: It is the purpose of the data-sharing agreement It is the bridging element between the personal customer data and nearly all the other data sets There is a hierarchy of viewing permissions If a customer has said “no” to data-sharing, how is the borrower data in the loan, charges and reservation records expressed? If the customer changes their mind about sharing their data, is it automatically redacted from these records? Who owns (and is responsible for) this data? Whose loan policies? Applied from the lending library? Including fines and charges? How do exceptions apply? “Non-default” borrower types and collections
Overdue/pre-overdue notices	Contact details including borrower name, address, telephone and email; loan due dates and items involved	Library staff Specific customer	Local Authority (which?)	Derived from loans data and subject to same questions It would make sense to aggregate these to improve efficiency and save costs (see notes on charges, etc.)
Reservations	Contact details including borrower name, address, telephone and email and items requested	Library staff Specific customer	Local Authority (which?)	All the questions for loans apply for reservations (which are effectively loans-in-waiting) Whose charge régime applies? Would the Data Controller be the “owner” of the customer record, the library that placed the reservation or the library it will be picked up from (if a different library authority)?
Requests	Contact details including borrower name, address, telephone and email and items/articles requested	Library staff Specific customer ILL system (bibliographic and/or article data only)	Local Authority (which?)	In nearly all respects as reservations, just more complicated charges [The operating procedures would probably need modifying in the light of the shared lending environment.] This will need to be revised in the event of a fuller integration with UnityWeb or equivalent third-party systems
Notifications for any reserved items	Contact details including borrower name, address, telephone and email and items requested	Library staff Specific customer	Local Authority (which?)	Derived from reservations/requests data and subject to the same questions It would make sense to aggregate these to improve efficiency and save costs (see notes on charges, etc.)
Charges/fines/fees	Contact details including borrower name, address, telephone and email; details of the transaction that generated the charge	Library staff Specific customer	Local Authority (which?)	Derived from loans and reservations/requests data and subject to the same questions How will these be managed: Payable only where incurred? Payable globally? Impact on traps/alerts (whose parameters apply?) In the event of recovery, who legally owns the charge? In the light of the above, what would be the effect (if any) of aggregated notices?
Catalogue/ discovery records — bibliographic data	Title-level catalogue data	Library staff Library customers and general public	Local Authority (which?)	Bibliographic data – already shared data Don’t forget that there is a link to the borrower record from the review/rating in the bib data in Staff Enquiry Potentially links to more than one Data Subject, so which would be the Data Controller for this catalogue data? Shared responsibility? How? Similar questions are required of other customer-created content such as tags (these are lost in the current versions of Spydus 9) (Not all data are published for the public)
Catalogue/discovery records — holdings/item-level data	Catalogue data, including electronic holdings	Library staff Library customers and general public	Local Authority (Which?)	Holdings data Links to personal data via loans/loan history and status/status history Potentially these link to more than one Data Subject, so which would be this Data Controller for the catalogue data? Logically should be the owner of the holding item (Not all data are published for the public)
Management Information/ Business Intelligence	Reports detailing usage of service, per location	Library Managers	Local Authority (Data Subject’s Local Authority will be the data controller)	Essentially should be summary data, though we’d need to have safeguards against breaches caused by very small sample data Proper safeguards and risk analyses are required before making this data available to third parties
	Demographic breakdowns	Library Managers Designated authorised analysts	Local Authority (Data Subject’s Local Authority will be the data controller)	Most would be summary data, though we’d need to have safeguards against breaches caused by very small sample data Some data (e.g. lists of postcodes) are granular enough to easily identify Data Subjects so safeguards need to be in place on the use and presentation of this data are required before making this data available to third parties
	Marketing databases	Library Managers Designated authorised marketing staff	Local Authority (Data Subject’s Local Authority will be the data controller)	Is the “I agree to receive marketing” (or equivalent) field global or local? The selection of data explicitly must be limited to those customers who have agreed to contact so as to comply with Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. Proper safeguards and risk analyses are required before making this data available to third parties
	Stock management data	Library staff Designated authorised third-party service providers	Local Authority (which?)	Nothing pertaining to Data Subjects should be included in this data. Stock ownership should be straightforward. Stock usage more problematic: Global usage figures recorded against bibliographic/holdings data? Local usage only? How would (if at all?) third-party stock analysis systems like CollectionHQ differentiate between local and extralimital use? In the early days at least there will be pressure to be able to provide evidence that stock is being used “fairly” with local library customers having first dibs for local stock
	Ad hoc data requests	Library Managers Designated authorised third parties	Local Authority (Data Subject’s Local Authority will be the data controller)	Most would be summary data, though we’d need to have safeguards against breaches caused by very small sample data Some data (e.g. lists of postcodes) are granular enough to easily identify Data Subjects so safeguards need to be in place on the use and presentation of this data Proper safeguards and risk analyses are required before making this data available to third parties FoI requests would be subject to the proper exclusions
SIP2 data	Data used for interfacing between Spydus and third-party systems	Library staff Specific customer	Local Authority (Data Subject’s Local Authority will be the data controller)	The particular case at the moment would be where data held in the customer record determines the access or not to third-party systems and services. Would the data be determined globally or locally? Standard use of data fields? Standard coding sets?

I'd be interested to know if/how this analysis sits with the experience of established consortium libraries, especially if I've missed something that could cause us problems.