Library data part three-and-a-bit: sharing customer data

Having had a quick scamper through the worry list, what customer data could be shared openly?

Let's start with what can't be shared:

• Name
• Full address
• Unique identifier for the data record
• Nearly all combinations of data elements within the record

The first two are obvious Data Protection precautions; the last two are less obvious precautions for the same reason: they make it possible to identify the individual data subject.

Any data extraction for release as open data must specify the required data elements. Required fields need to be selected for extraction rather than having fields not required filtered out post-extraction. This prevents any accidents. Once data's openly out in the wild it's out in the wild.

"Registration location" and "Library/libraries used" (if available) are both safe in themselves as they aren't personal data and will have data sets broad enough not to be able to identify individual data subjects. They could be combined with each other and any one of the following:

• Category (e.g. type of borrower)
• Ethnicity
• Disability
• Gender
• Year of birth/age in years (if only date of birth can be extracted then this data shouldn't be used)

The data extract could be:

       Bedlam Library     Child
       Bedlam Library     Child
       Bedlam Library     Adult
       Bedlam Library     Adult

But not:

       Bedlam Library     Child     Male
       Bedlam Library     Child     Female
       Bedlam Library     Adult     Female
       Bedlam Library     Adult     Male

Any two of these could be combined:

• Category (e.g. type of borrower)
• Ethnicity
• Disability
• Gender
• Year of birth/age in years (if only date of birth can be extracted then this data shouldn't be used)

A postcode dump for the whole library authority could be made available but not combined with any other data because of its very specific nature for identification purposes.

I think that's pretty much it. And I'd still want to run it by an Information Governance expert before going ahead (and for them to check my Privacy Impact Assessment).

Library data part three: dangerous demographics

The data about the people registered with a library is at one and the same time the most potentially useful and the most potentially dangerous. So dangerous, in fact, that when it comes to making this data openly-available the default position must be: Don't. Do. It.

That position will be strongly challenged by many so I'll devote the rest of this post to explaining the dangers and the next one will have a look at the data that might be openly-shareable so long as all the necessary precautions are taken.

Demographic information is immensely useful to a library service. Operationally it's important to see that the service is meeting the needs of all its communities and not just providing a service "for people like us by people like us." It's important to be able to make sure that particular services are reaching their target audiences and that you're not doing anything to put sections of the community off using your services. And it's essential that you have this data for Equality Impact Assessment of policy decisions. So why would you not want to share the data to get a bigger picture?

Generally speaking there are three main concerns:

• Privacy. The library is one of the few safe public places left for the individual. Removing the right to privacy is an information governance issue just as much as an ethical one and both need to be taken very seriously (both are generally given too much lip service and too little analysis and action).
  
  It also compromises the quality of the service being provided: if library customers know that how they as individuals use the library will be made public a good many of them will modify their behaviour and not use the library the way they want or need to. If they don't know this the library will have committed a significant breach of trust. 

• Legality. Does the library have the legal right to share the data? If it is possible to identify individual data subjects then the answer is categorically: No, unless the data subject has explicitly said that their data may be shared.
  
  Anonymising the data so that it is no longer personal data is easier said than done. It isn't a matter of just removing all the names. We'll have a look at this later on.
  
  The agreement has to be an opt-in and the purpose of this data sharing has to be clearly stated. "We want to make your data open so that other, as yet unknown, people can manipulate it to get as yet unknown information and outcomes" would be an open invitation to the Information Commissioners' Office to come and investigate your organisation.

• Safeguarding. This is the most problematic and under-appreciated concern. Anybody knowing whether or not a person even visits a library, let alone uses it, may put that person in actual physical danger. In some controlling relationships a partner may only be allowed out to go to the shops and heaven help them if they do anything else. They may be allowed to take a child to library activities such as story times but not for themselves. An abusive partner discovering that somebody was somewhere they shouldn't be — the wrong end of town or even the wrong town — could be a trigger for violence. The test here isn't: "What is reasonable?" because this isn't about safeguarding people against reasonable action. It's about safeguarding them from action that may be anything but reasonable.
  
  In my head I can hear somebody saying: "If they let us know that they're in an abusive relationship we could put a flag in their record to say their data's not to be shared."
  
  
• This requires the data subject to actively opt out of data sharing.

• Identifying yourself as a person in an abusive relationship is a brave thing to do and not something that should be required to be done at a public service point in a library.

• The library suddenly becomes a less safe place.

• Someone's got to remember to filter out the flagged records before sharing the data.


I don't think any of that is acceptable. (And said so when it was said to me that time).

Anonymising the data requires more than stripping out all the names. The Information Commissioner's Office has a useful checklist (pdf).

In public libraries the combination of nearly any two data elements may be enough to make that data subject identifiable, or at least narrow the number of possibilities down enough to make it statistically probable they could be identified. The combination of "library where registered" and "library used" plus one other datum is usually OK but this needs to be tested with the particular data set, in case of nasty surprises. Other combinations very quickly narrow down to the individual.

A lot depends on the data itself: if the categories used are very general it might be safe to combine it, though it may be so general as to be pretty useless. I really did once work with a library service that thought it was OK to have two ethnic identifiers in the system: blank for "people like us" and "ethnic" for anyone who looked or sounded a bit foreign; I put a block on that the first chance I got; even so it wasn't until we got all the libraries onto the library management system that we finally got right of the last of the old Browne Issue tickets with a red E on them (disturbing symbologies like that make me wonder what librarians were thinking about in the eighties).

• I'd imagine my local library authority will have thousands of white adult males in their database. How many — or few — teenage Bangladeshi females would there be?

• Postcode data very quickly narrows down. There are perhaps ninety people in my postcode area. Twenty-odd adult white males. About four males in their fifties. One white male in his fifties.

• Age data gets very specific very quickly. "Adult" and "Child" is pretty safe but as soon as you start refining that down it becomes problematic. Full date of birth is so specific it 's a red flag. 

So we would need to be very careful about what data — and what combination of data — is made available. In a library consortium setting this should be governed by formal data sharing protocols that had been passed by each authority's information governance experts and given the OK by whoever is responsible for the authority's information risk so all the data of all the people who have actively agreed to their data's being shared can be made available to the appropriate staff for the appropriate purpose within the consortium. That's a very specific remit for a very specific purpose for the use of a very specific group of people, with checks and balances and sanctions for abuse.

Which is exactly not the case with the open release of data, so different rules need to apply and need to be applied proactively (the genie doesn't go back into the bottle if you find you've made a mistake). Hence the greater need for precaution.

Library data part two: what do we know about the stock?

In principle stock data is much the least problematic data set held by libraries when it comes to trying to map it and potentially share it across local authority boundaries or make the data openly-available. There are good reasons for this:

• Every English public library service has a catalogue of resources
• There has been decades' worth of data-sharing for the purposes of interlibrary loans including, but not limited to, the UnityUK database
• There are long-established standards for title-level bibliographic data
• The outsourcing of most bibliographic metadata, limits the number of original sources of data and so imposes some consistency

Added to this can be the data mapping work involved in setting up an interface with the evidence-based stock management system CollectionHQ and the increased use of library management systems in consortium settings. Both of these get library systems people thinking about the way their data maps against external frameworks,

Technically, data about virtual stock holdings can be treated the same way as physical stock holdings. Culturally, there is some variation in approach between library services.

For the purposes of this post we'll assume that all stock has been catalogued and the records held in the library management system. In reality this will be true of most, if not all, lending library stock and a high proportion of whatever reference library stock there is these days. Many local studies collections and special collections are still playing catch-up

Title-level bibliographic data

All the bibliographic records come from the same place so this is standard data and would be easy to share and compare, right? Well… up to a point, Lord Copper.

• Not all library authorities are buying in MARC records.
• Of those that do, not all of them are retrospectively updating their old records so they'll have a mix of bought-in MARC records and locally-sourced records which may or may not be good MARC records in the first place and which certainly have variations in the mapping details.
• Those that did do a retrospective update may have hit a few glitches. Like the library authority that had an LMS that had ISBN as a required field and so had to put dummy data in this field which turned out to be the valid ISBNs of extremely different titles to the ones they actually had. (This wasn't Rochdale, though it did cause us some collateral damage.)
• There may be local additions to commercial MARC records, for instance local context-specific subject headings and notes.
• Commercial MARC records may not be available for some very local or special collection materials so these will need to be locally-sourced.

Taking these into factors into consideration this would be much the most the most reliably uniform component of a national core data set for libraries if any such were ever developed. The data available would be either:

• A full MARC record + the unique identifier for this bib record in this LMS (this is required to act as a link between the title-level data and the item-level data); or
• A non-MARC record including:
  • Title
  • Author
  • Publisher
  • Publication date
  • ISBN/ISSN or other appropriate control number, if available
  • Class number
  • Unique identifier for this bib record
  (I think there's a limit to the amount of non-MARC data that should be admissible.)

For the purposes of this game RDA-compliant records can be assumed to be ordinary MARC21 records (there's a heap of potential MARC mapping issues involved in any national sharing exercise which we won't go into here). I can see the need for the use of FRBR by public libraries but I don't see it happening any time soon so it's not considered here.

Item-level holdings data

The library catalogue includes holdings data as well as bibliographic data so that, too, could be part of a national data set. The detail and format of this data can vary between LMSs and from one library authority to another:

• Some, but not all, item records may have at least some of their data held in MARC 876 — 878 tag format
• The traditional concept of a "collection" may be described in different fields according to the LMS or the local policy. Usually it would be labelled as one or other of item type, item category or collection.

Which data to include? Or rather, which would be most likely to be consistently-recorded? My guess:

• Unique identifier (usually a barcode)
• Location
• Key linking to the appropriate bibliographic record
• Item type/item category/collection label best approximating to the traditional concept of "collection"
• Cost/value
• Use, which would generally mean the number of issues
• Current status of the item

After that the variations start to kick in big time.

There are a few devils in the detail, for instance:

• There is no standard set of "collections," though there is a de facto standard set of higher-level item types:
  • Adult Fiction
  • Adult Non-Fiction
  • Children's Fiction
  • Children's Non-Fiction
  • Reference
  • Audiovisual
  • Everything else
  The item type/item category/ collection for each library authority would need to be mapped against a standard schedule of “Item types.” For instance, when I used to pull out stock data for CIPFA returns I didn't have the appropriate categories available in fields in the item records; so in Dynix I had a dictionary item set up to do the necessary in Recall and with Spydus I set up a formula field in a Crystal Report, in both cases it involved a formula including sixty-odd "If… Then… Else…" statements.
• Are those already used for CIPFA adequate or would a new suite need to be developed and agreed?
• Would this translation be done at the library output stage or the data aggregation stage?
  For CIPFA our translation was done at output, for CollectionHQ it was done at data aggregation stage according to previously-defined mapping.
• Cost could be the actual acquired cost including discount; the supplier's list price at time of purchase, without discount; or the default replacement cost for that type of item applied by the LMS.
• Use count data may be tricky:
• It could be for the lifetime of the item or just from the time that data was added to this particular LMS if the legacy data was lost during the migration from one system to another. 
• Some LMSs record both "current use" (e.g. reset at the beginning of the financial year) and total use. You need to be able to identify one from the other.
• The use of loanable e-books/e-audiobooks may not be available as this depends on the integration of the LMS with the supplier’s management system.
• Curated web pages would be treated as reference stock and not have a use count.
• Some LMSs allow the recording of reference use as in-house use.
• Item status is always interesting:
• Does this status mean the item is actually in stock?
• Is the item available?
• Has the item gone walkies/been withdrawn?
• Again, this would have to be a mapping exercise, similar to the one we did for CollectionHQ

So what have we got?

Overall, then, we could say that every public library could put their hand to a fair bit of title-level data that's reasonably consistent in both structure and content; and some item-level data that wouldn't be difficult to be structurally consistent but would need a bit of work to map the content to a consistent level.

Library data part one: variations on a theme

Over the Summer I've been doing a bit of work for the Public Libraries Taskforce and that set me thinking about the data that public library services hold. Each one holds a shedload of data about its resources, its customers and its performance, but each one holds a slightly different shedload to its neighbours. Why would that be?

Technical reasons

• There are surprisingly few standard data structures in play in public libraries
• Different management systems hold data in different ways
• Even if the data has the same structure a different suite of descriptive labels may be in use

Human reasons

• An organisation might not feel the need to record the data at all
• The quality — or not — of the data may not be a priority so elements may be missing
• Naming conventions, etc. may change over time without retroactive conversion, leading to internal inconsistency
• The data may still be on bits of paper

Having said that there are some key data that are generally common to all, though variable in detail. I'll have a look at those over the next few posts.

Disheartening the visitor

For a long time — nearly twenty years — I had a very clear candidate for Worst Entrance To A Public Library Ever, though thankfully that particular entrance barely survived the millennium. I've now found one that's worse. No names, no pack drill, it wouldn't be fair to the staff who I know are trying their best in very trying circumstances.

The other day I popped into this library. I've been meaning to go and have a nosy for a while. Up to a few years ago this town had a reasonably busy little library, nothing special, in a simple brick two-story box of a building. The shopping area of the town got redeveloped quite extensively, one of the casualties being the old library. It was the replacement I'd been meaning to visit.

The good news is that the building's well-signed in the shopping area and made easy to find because there's a lot of colourful and useful library posters in the window. The first bit of bad news is that it's on the first floor above a supermarket so you can't idly walk past, see the library in use and be tempted in. But the posters and notices in the window try to draw you in.

Sadly, once you are drawn in you're in a small lobby with just enough room to wheel a buggy round to a lift or else take the escalator directly in front of you. Everything is grey: pale grey walls, mid grey ceiling, dark grey carpet, steel grey lift doors and escalator. It's all a bit soulless. Nothing much invites you to go up the escalator: it rises up into a dark grey shadow with no knowing that anything's up there, least of all a library. All in all pretty nasty.

Once you get upstairs it's slightly better, though that's despite the design of the library not because of it. The colour scheme is followed again, relentlessly, with grey metal shelving and an extensive network of exposed pipes in the ceiling space also painted mid-grey, the building designer obviously being a big fan of warehouse shopping chic. Or else one of the Borg. The overall effect was softened as far as possible by posters and displays but there wasn't physically a lot of scope for making it a much more human environment. Which was a shame as there were good things going on in there including a very enthusiastic rhythm and rhyme session going on in the enclosure that was the children's library. Lots of colourful books on the shelves may have helped a bit but this is a local authority that was closing libraries and cutting book funds back when the rest of us were refurbishing and replenishing so the staff didn't have many resources to play with there.

Generally speaking this is just the worst of a trend I've seen over the past few years, new library builds by architects and designers who see the library space as being like an office or else just a room with a few shelves of books in it. For all the consultations that go on it's evident that the designers haven't made any effort to understand how the business of the library is run:

• The need to invite the visitor in, ease them back out again and leave them wanting to come back soon; 
• The different lines of flow for different kinds of use and different kinds of customer;
• The ease of navigation so that somebody standing in the entrance knows immediately where they need to go;
• The essential requirement of lines of sight for staff so that they can provide unobtrusive supervision and support;
• The capability for change in response to early experience of use (like some landscape designers who only hard pave paths after a few months so that paths follow the "cow lines" established by the people using the space) and to allow for development of delivery of the services on offer;
• Most of all, the acknowledgement that the library space is a human space so people have to feel comfortable in it.

None of this costs anything except a bit of effort and a willingness to understand the desired outcomes that are being designed for, Sadly…

Don't blame technology for bad management attitudes

Once upon a time, back when the millennium bug was a thing — or we thought it was — the Director of Recreation & Community Services as was told me to put together a roadmap of the IT developments the library service should be undertaking if money wasn't a big issue. We didn't have the money  and there wasn't any immediate prospect of having it but it would give him a sense of where we wanted to be and the opportunities we'd like to grab if they came along. The results included the usual suspects: we desperately needed to get all the libraries networked and onto the library management system and staff on enquiry desks needed access to the internet as well as the library catalogue, and internet access for the public would be good. I also said that we needed to invest in self-service circulation.

I'm now going to say something heretical, please bear with me. There is no intrinsic value in stamping a due date in a book. There, I've said it. The value in a staff-mediated issue/checkout transaction is:

• The borrower gets to borrow an item
• The loan is recorded
• There's the human interaction, which may be the only one some people get that day
• The library staff get the opportunity to provide information about other library resources and services ("We've got that author's new book on order," "Did you know we've started having toddlers' tales sessions on Wednesday afternoons?" etc., etc.)

The value of the return/checkin transaction is similar.

To my mind the high-value parts of any transaction are the ones you need to put your resources into. Anything that takes resources away from the high-value areas needs to be designed out.

In those days our busiest library was issuing between four and five thousand items every Saturday. More to the point, six Library Assistants were issuing between four and five thousand items every Saturday. And returning a similar number, which creates a lot more work as something needs to be done with all that incoming  stock. A lot of the time the queues at the counter were awful with staff and customers both having a stressful experience. Consequently the value of the issue transaction was compromised — the loan was effected and recorded but there was no time for the human stuff: both the staff and the customers felt under pressure to get the transaction over and done with as quickly as possible. Some customers even gave up and didn't bother: they wanted to become borrowers and our process stopped it happening. If someone desperately needed that human interaction they were badly short-changed. At the returns desk it was even worse: some borrowers lost patience and just left items on the corner of the counter and in the confusion these sometimes got back onto the shelves without the return having been recorded. The rest of the week there were other, smaller, stress points and other events and activities in the library added to the mix. By this stage we'd successfully made the case for some more Library Assistant hours but there's a limit to the number of bodies and workstations you that can physically fit behind even the huge counter that was in this library.

So I argued that we needed to include some self-service issue/return functionality to try and ease the burden a bit. Some people just want to be in and out, they want to borrow an item or return it and they're not much fussed about anything else. Some people would have privacy or safeguarding issues that could be addressed by allowing them to self-issue a book. Giving these people the self-service option would address their needs and also reduce the queue, allowing more time for the people who did need the human stuff at the counter. The director, whose background was adult and community education, was enthusiastic about the idea: "You mean that we could get the library staff off that production line at the counter so that instead of stamping books they could be doing something more interesting like helping people to find things and getting them interested in something new?" Yes, we could have.

Some years, and a couple of directors, later we were in a position to credibly rattle the begging bowl to fund self-service circulation. The world had changed somewhat. Library managers nationwide had picked up the idea that this functionality was a way of saving money on staffing and particularly cutting Library Assistant hours. Although I got cross when my library managers saw self-service as an opportunity to cut staffing costs I couldn't really blame them as individuals: they were coming late to a game that already had this established narrative. It was a massive pity but there we were. We weren't alone. And as Austerity took its toll self-service circulation became one of the quick fixes — I know of one library authority that cut staffing hours on the basis that kiosks were going to be installed at a couple of libraries and the next year cut the hours further because the self same kiosks had been installed. So self-service kiosks replaced staff instead of freeing them up to do other, more important, things.

The point to this story is that the technology wasn't to blame. Technology is never neutral — design must have an end in view — but the way that it is used and the consequent outcomes are largely down to human decision. In this case the opportunity to enrich the very many parts of the public library service that aren't the issue and return of books was passed over because neither the staff nor the service were being valued by "Professionals" in managerial positions. It wasn't a decision forced on them by outside forces, it was one they came to themselves collectively at the turn of the millennium and which they then transmitted to the people who hold the purse strings. Which makes it deuced hard for people now arguing the case that public libraries have never been only about issue counts: if front-line staff can be replaced by one-trick-pony kiosks all that other stuff can't have been all that important could it? Well, yes it was and yes it is and it's scandalous that enabling technology's been abused in this way.

Library authorities are repeating this mistake with technologies such as Open+. Open+ is a good way of extending the use of a building and some of its resources. Many of the running costs of a building are incurred whether or not that building's in use: the fabric of the building deteriorates regardless and the lights may be out but you'll need the heating on sometimes unless you fancy having a lot of burst pipes in Winter. So it makes sense to maximise the return on this investment in running costs by maximising the building's availability for use. Especially if that use is currently particularly limited: if you have a building and it only has a useful life of ten or twenty hours a week then this is a huge waste. In these cases using a technology like Open+ makes sense: it allows access to the building as a community venue or a quiet study space and you could make stock available for self issue/return, thus extending the reach of part of the library service. What it doesn't do is replace the shedload of other stuff that gets delivered — or should be delivered — by the library service in that building. It isn't a replacement for a library service, it just extends some people's access to some of those parts of that service that can be passively delivered.

Anything else is yet another abuse of library technology.

What do visitor counts tell us?

Why did I get into a bate about visitor figures the other day? It's largely because of the spate of recent reports and commentaries about the decline of the public library service based on these numbers. I think there is an over reliance on what is, after all, pretty rubbish data.

Visitor counts are not measures of use. They are an approximation of — sometimes a wild stab at — the number of people who entered a building. If you were to tell me that visitor counts have declined by 30% over a given period I'd take your word for it. Personal experience and observation suggests that fewer people are in some (not all) of the libraries I visit than there used to be so you may be right. And the closing of libraries and nibbling away at opening hours over the past quarter of a century won't have helped any. But I'd be extremely sceptical that you had any forensic evidence to back up your percentage.

Does it actually matter that there are fewer visits? If I can sit in my living room and reserve a book then go and visit the library to pick it up I have immediately cut down the number of visits by at least 50%. But the library has delivered the same service, and much more conveniently for me. While I'm in the library I can still avail myself of all its other services and indulge in a bit of serendipitous discovery amongst the shelves but I am not compelled to an earlier visit with the sole purpose of queuing up at the counter to ask for a reservation to be placed.

Ah but issue figures are going down as well… And? Public libraries never only issued books. Literally an infinitely greater number of people use the public PCs in the library than they did in 1964. Do we have fifty years' worth of attendance figures for story times and author visits? Do we have decades-worth of comparative data of use for quiet study? Or any and all of the other stuff? How do we know that libraries aren't having fewer but richer visits?

But we're delivering less of a service… Are you capable of delivering a better quality of service now? Did you overstretch yourselves in the past and sometimes end up shortchanging your customer service? Were you giving one minute of your time to people who needed five? Were people put off asking for help because they saw that you were busy? High throughput isn't always a measure of high quality.

But visits are down… Do we have annual totals for the number of people who walked through the door, saw the length of the queue at the counter and thought: "I'll come back later?" No, we don't.

Which is why I got in a bit of a bate about it.

Please can we stop pretending library visitor counts are performance data?

From an operations management perspective there is some use for library visitor count data:

• It's useful to have an idea of when your peak throughputs occur so that you can deploy resources accordingly.

• When you're designing new library spaces it's good to have a rough ballpark figure of throughputs for designing in capacity and customer flows.

• It's good for morale to be able to acknowledge and celebrate when you've safely handled a significant number of visitors.

From a service management perspective there is one use for library visitor count data:

• It's a salutary reminder of how little you know of your customers if the only available data are about loans and PC sessions.

Otherwise, they're not a lot of use. You see, the thing about visitor counts is that most of them are poor data and from a service delivery perspective all of them are meaningless.

Why are so many visitor counts poor data?

We'll assume that everyone's acting in good faith and nobody's playing the numbers.

If you've got an automated visitor count system and you're running your library as a stand-alone service you have the best chance of having good visitor count data. A lot depends on the way the count is done; the positioning of the counter; and the frequency of data sampling and verification.

• A badly-placed counter can miss visitors — a head count could miss all the children, for instance, or the customer flows could by-pass the counter completely. 

• Beam-interrupt counters that try to count the number of legs and divide by two have their issues. Back when we installed them at Rochdale we'd heard the urban myth about what happens when you walk past with a ladder. Having enquiring minds we tried it with a seven-rung stepladder and discovered that there was some truth in the story so long as the ladder was being carried horizontally by two toddlers, so we didn't worry about that too much. We did worry that one toddler with little legs = one interrupt = half a visitor. And that a child running into a library didn't get counted (children run into good libraries because they're exciting). People with walking sticks or wheelchairs seemed to be inconsistently recorded. So the figures were only really useful to us as rough ballpark figures.

• Things happen, so there need to be ongoing checks on the reliability of the equipment, the data and the procedures for collection and collation.

If you've got an automated visitor count system in a shared-service building it's a bit more complicated.

• The visitor count is potentially useful for the operational management of the building but not really for the library service. 

• Do you include or exclude the people who came in to renew their taxi licence or claim housing benefit or have an appointment with the nurse in the clinic? 
• If you include them how is this data useful for the management of the library service? 
• If you exclude them how do you capture the visitors who come in for a taxi licence/HB enquiry/clinical appointment then take advantage of the fact there's a library in the same building? 

• How do you exclude the people coming in for meetings with other services? 

• How do you exclude the passage of staff from the other services? 

It gets messy quickly.

And then there are manual counts…

What's wrong with manual counts? Well:

• There's the timing of them. It's unlikely that you'll have the resources to do the count all day every day. If you have, you'll find a lot of other things for them to be doing at the same time. (If you *do* have a FTE devoted exclusively to counting visitors you need your bumps feeling.) The data will be a sample. It's easier to do the sampling during the hours when the library's relatively are quiet, but what would invalidate the sample. So there will inevitably be stresses of distraction and confusion.

Then there's the seasonal variations. And do you want to base your annual count on that week when you've arranged for the workmen to come in to fix the heating? And so on.

You could take the sensible view that you're not going to extrapolate the figures, you're just going to do a year-on-year comparison of counts conducted the same way at the same point in the calendar every year. Which is useful if the figures are purely for internal use or published as trends rather than absolute data.

If that absolute data's used to compare and contrast with another library authority it becomes a lot less useful as you're comparing apples with pears:

• The methodology may be different. 
• There may be good local reasons for differences in the  seasonal variation — half term holidays at schools being obvious examples. 
• There  may be differences in the library calendar — the reading festival may be that week, or it could be the breathing space after last week's reading festival. Back in the nineties our managers were concerned that visitor counts could be distorted by events in the library so, ironically, the two weeks of the visitor count were the only ones with no events in the library, no class visits, no author visits, etc.

• Then there's the counting. A manual visitor count is easy when the library's quiet. When it's busy you're too busy dealing with your customers to count the visitors. You can try and do a catch-up later but that's always going to be an approximation based on memory and chance observation. And your finger may slip on the clicker you're using for the count. Or you could be one of those people who sometimes have four bars in their five-bar gates.

So there are issues with the visitor count data.

Why is this data meaningless?

A person has come into the building. And…? The visitor to the buildings isn't necessarily a user of the library or a customer of the service, any more than the chap who gets off the train at Waverley Station is necessarily a Scotsman.

There were forty visitors to the library

• Three people borrowed some books
• Three people used the computers
• One came to read the electricity meter
• One came to sort out the radiator that hasn’t been working
• One came to deliver a parcel
• One came to use the loo
• A drunk came in to make a row and throw his shoe through the window
• A policeman came in to take a statement about it
• A building manager came in to inspect the damage
• A joiner came in to board up the window
• A glazier came in to replace the window
• A cat ran in, pursued by:
• A dog, pursued by:
• The dog’s owner, pursued by:
• Three children who followed to see the fun
• We don’t know what the rest did.

A visitor comes into the library.

• What did they do? 
• What did you do? 
• Was it any good? 
• Where the right resources available at the right time for the right people? 
• Did the visitor engage with the service at all? 

The visitor count tells you none of this. So how can it be any sort of reflection of the performance of your service? You can't use data about people you don't know have engaged with your service to measure its performance because the only information you have is about the people, you don't have any about the service delivery.

Attendance figures are important to sporting venues because attendance generates income. They don't determine the trophies that team collect in the course of a season. Nor do you see schools with banners proclaiming: "According to OFSTED more people walked through our front door than any other primary school in Loamshire!"

Visitor counts are not performance data. Performance is about the delivery of outcomes, not throughputs.

How many?

I've started doing some work with the Libraries Taskforce. I'd been to one of their workshops and it was pretty apparent that potentially there should be a lot of work needing doing by the less than a handful of people involved and it wasn't easy to see how they'd be able to do it on their own. I've got some time now that I've retired from Rochdale Council so I asked them if they needed a hand with anything and they said yes please. So I'm lending a hand with the work strand that's hoping to develop a core data set for English public libraries that can be openly-available for both public use and operational analysis. It's a voluntary effort on my part; it's something I'm interested in and have been impatient about and it's a piece of work that should have some very useful outcomes.

Whenever you start talking about English public libraries data the elephant in the room very quickly makes its presence known. Before we can talk credibly about anything very much there is one inescapable question desperately needing an answer:

Just how many English public libraries are there anyway?

There is no definitive answer. There is no definitive list. There are at least half a dozen well-founded, properly researched lists. They each give a different answer and when you start comparing them you find differences in the detail. There are perfectly valid reasons for this:

• Each had been devised and researched for its own purposes without reference to what had gone before. Each started from scratch and each had a differently-patchy response from library authorities when questionnaires were posted.

• This data's not easy to keep up to date at a national level — especially these days! So some libraries will have closed, a few will have opened, some will have moved and some will have been renamed. 

• It wasn't always clear just how old the lists were. Some had been compiled as part of some wider project and there wouldn't necessarily have been the resource available to do any updating anyway.

So the decision was made to tackle this head on so that it could be settled once and for all so that the world could move on and they were a few weeks into this work when I signed on. Very broadly, here's the process:

• Julia from the Taskforce, who has infinitely more patience than me, trawled every English local authority's web site for the details of their public libraries.

• Between us we scoured the other lists and added any libraries we found in there that we couldn't find in Julia's list.

• We then went through this amended list to see if we could identify any points of confusion, for instance where "Trumpton Central Library" has moved from one place to another or where "Greendale Library" has become "The Mrs Goggins Memorial Information and Learning Hub."

• The Taskforce has sent each library authority a list of what we think are their libraries asking them to check to see whether or not these details are correct.

• The results will be collated and the data published by the Taskforce.

Ten years ago this would have been pretty straightforward. These days the picture is complicated by the various forms of "community library" that have sprung up over the past few years. These run the gamut from "this library is part of the statutory provision though it is staffed by volunteers some of the time" all the way to "we wish them well on their venture but they're nothing to do with us." So where a public library has become a "community library" of one sort or another that needs ro be indicated in the data.

Will this list be 100% correct? Probably not at first, this is a human venture after all. But even if it's only 98% correct in the first instance it should be treated as the definite article. It will then need to be corrected and updated as a matter of course; if that's devolved to the individual library authorities the work becomes manageable and the data becomes authoritative.

Why should anyone bother?

What's in it for anyone to keep their bit of this list up to date and details correct? In my opinion:

• It's basic information that should as a matter of principle be available to the public.

• In the past year alone, this question has tied up time and effort that could have been more usefully-occupied. All those enquiries, and FoI requests, and debates about data that could just be openly-available and signposted whenever the question arose.

• It is essential to the credibility of any English public library statistics. If the number of libraries is suspect then how trustworthy are any of the statistics being bandied around? If the simplest quantitative evidence — the number of libraries — is iffy then how much faith can be placed in quantitative or qualitative evidence that's more exacting to collect?
  
  For instance, counting the number of libraries within a local authority boundary if you're responsible for supporting or managing them is a piece of piss. Reliably counting the number of visitors to any one of those libraries most definitely isn't — I have 80% confidence in the numbers coming out of any automated system (not necessarily due to technical issues) and to my mind if you're relying on manual counts you may as well be burning chicken feathers. So when I hear that visits to English public libraries have dropped by a significant percentage over a given number of years I may be prepared to accept this in the light of a wider narrative, personal observation and anecdotal evidence but I have no empirical reason to know that this is the case. 

That's why.

Visible security

A long, long time ago, back when we first put the People's Network into Rochdale's libraries, I got worried about the physical security of all the kit we were putting out there. A few months before we'd had a break-in at Langley Library (back when it was in a stand-alone building next to the bus stop): somebody had drilled through a wall panel into the stock room and pinched a couple of the "homework" PCs we had in the children's library. So I worried about it a bit.

To my mind there's two types of security:

• Rendering something for all intents and purposes non-existent to anybody who isn't authorised to know about it.

• Something in your face that says: "We both know there's something here but it would be a pain in the arse for you to try and have away with it.

In a library context where we were wanting everyone to know there were PCs for public use invisibility wasn't an option so we needed something conspicuous to put off the scallies and sneak thieves.

Somebody, I can't remember who, pointed me in the direction of a chap called Peter Radcliffe, trading locally as Nexus Computers who sold computer safes. At the time Peter was selling metal computer safes. There was nothing subtle about these: they were made of plate metal and the fittings used to fix them to the furniture were uncompromisingly industrial. They did the job brilliantly. Only one thing bothered me.

Back in those days computers came in three colours: "white" (beige), grey (beige) and beige (grey). Dead boring. About this time Rochdale was in the early stages of a complete refurbishment of nearly all its libraries. The aim was to make them lighter, brighter and more colourful and I wasn't much keen on installing a lot of battleship grey boxes into this bright new landscape. So I asked Peter if they were available in any other colours. He came back with a paint sheet from the metal-bashing shop he was working with.

"I'll have that," I said.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. In gloss finish."
"You're mental!"
"Can you do it?"
"The customer is always right. We can do it if you really want it. Are you really sure? Really?"
"Yes, please."

The colour? It was

Signal Violet

And so it came to be.

I got a bit of stick about it. Not least because I hadn't spent any time whatever consulting anyone about it (ordinarily I'd accept a good shin-kicking for that but I only had four months to do a complete implementation of the People's Network from scratch across the whole borough and we had just had the one and only planning meeting where we had spent three hours watching a debate about the position of a chair in a particular library). But I stuck to my guns. Still do, in fact:

• This was aggressively-visible security.

• It fitted in with the bright, colourful feel of the libraries.

• They were an easy visual cue. We hadn't consciously gone in for any branding at that stage but it provided a consistent, obvious "Here be computers" message to the libraries' customers.

If I had my time again would I make that same decision? Dead right I would. And Peter still thinks I was barmy.

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.

---

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.

Learning from experience

When you're doing any sort of serious developmental work, whether it's solving a problem or exploiting a new opportunity, you have to start by defining your preferred outcome then look at all the possible options for getting you there. One of the things that constantly dismayed me when working in public libraries was just how limited "all the possible" usually was, and that these limitations were often imposed as a matter of principle rather than practice. Often summed up with a look of complacent contentment and the mantra: "Ah well, you see, they don't work the same as libraries." I still bump into this thinking quite regularly on the lists and social media, often as a dogmatic statement along the lines of "Libraries have got nothing to learn from…" This is, of course, the veriest nonsense: libraries can learn a great deal from other business operations, if only the reasons why adopting a particular policy or process would be a bad idea in a public library context (and that aren't "Ah well, you see, they don't work the same as libraries.")

The other reason why it is nonsense is that although a business operation may be very different to yours some of the operational functionality requirements may be very similar, or the same. There's no particular philosophical or ethical difference between opening the public doors to a library first thing in the morning and opening the public doors of a shop, for instance.

The exciting thing about not imposing any constraints on where ideas can come from is that you can often find alternatives to the organisation's "default setting" that are cheaper and more effective to apply.

The responsibilities in my last job included a transport management system called Tranman. Very generally speaking it was used to manage the council's fleet of vehicles and the jobs done in the vehicle workshop. Some of the jobs done in the workshop were part of the routine maintenance work included in the service level agreements with the council departments using the vehicles. A lot weren't: repairs necessitated by accidents or driver abuse were chargeable extras and the workshop also did a lot of private repair work, services and MOTs as part of the operation's income generation. Extremely different to the business operation and purpose of the public libraries I was also supporting.

They had a problem. A lot of the jobs were taking ages to complete and invoice on the system because they were missing information about the parts that were issued to them. Even worse, some jobs had been completed and invoiced without including the rechargeable costs of the parts. This was playing hob with their cash flow and making the accountants cross. So we had a look at it and basically the situation was:

• There was a manual process involving somebody trying to catch up with a pile of paperwork at the end of the month
• There was a technical solution which could automate the stock issue but wasn't being used

What was needed was for the parts to be issued to the jobs in as close to real time as possible and that wasn't going to be done manually from the paperwork.

We had a long, hard look at the technical solution. None of us were big fans. It was hard work to get set up and running and, frankly, was over-engineered for its purpose. On paper it looked great:

• A piece of software on the stores manager's PC generated barcoded labels for each part, the barcode including the appropriate part number and bin, together with a human-readable description.
• The parts bins were labelled up accordingly.
• When a part was to be issued to a job the store man entered the job number into a PDA, read the appropriate barcode and entered the number of items being issued.
• The PDA was then plugged into a console attached to the store manager's PC and the data uploaded into Tranman.

In reality it wasn't so hot:

• The barcoded labels soon got scruffy and unusable.
• We could make the barcodes on the labels as big as we wanted but the descriptive text was always tiny and difficult to read, especially in some of the darker corners of the store room.
• The keys on the PDA were very small (6mm across), which was difficult enough for me with my never-done-a-stroke-of-hard-labour-in-his-life delicate fingers and not a lot of fun for workers who'd spent years bashing their finger ends on bits of metal on cold Winter's days. The incidence of input error was high.
• Uploading the data was a bit hit and miss at first: it took quite a while for us to iron out the problems and making sure the solutions were properly packaged into the virtual application. (I for one was praying nothing happened to that PC as I wasn't confident we wouldn't have at least a few of these problems again with a new deployment of the software.)
• It wasn't easy to see where and when something went wrong. The lack of transparency meant that you couldn't do any quality control to make sure that the right parts actually were being issued to the right job.

Something had to be done. 

We looked at various somethings: we spent far too long trying to sort out better barcode labels; then we had a fruitless quest for a more user-friendly PDA that could do the job. Over the next few months, in between a pile of other pieces of work we were doing with this system, we tweaked this process as best we could but in the end it felt more like we were working through levels in an arcade game rather than getting anywhere with improving the process and addressing the cash flow problem. By this stage I was thoroughly fed up and went and had a sulk in my tent. On reflection it was apparent that all we had been doing was following the same ploughed rut over and over again. 

We'd let our problem-solving be dictated by the "solution" rather than either the problem or the desired outcome.

So I looked again. And wondered why the issuing of parts to a job in a vehicle workshop was very much different to the issuing of library books to a borrower…

The solution I came up with was cheap, not especially elegant but did the job and could be seen to do the job. There were two elements:

• A standard barcode reader, same as you'd see in a shop or library
• A folder containing sheets of labels including all the information needing to be entered into the job record:
• The description of the part in a large, readable font
• The part number as a barcode (using the "3 of 9" font)
• The bin number as a barcode
• The store location as a barcode

The process was:

• The request comes in for the part for the job
• The stores man gets the part then opens the job record in Tranman
• The part number, bin number and location are input by reading the barcodes from the appropriate sheet
• The only manual input is the number of parts
• The parts are issued to the workshop

For out-of-hours working the process was:

• The request for the part is recorded on a paper job sheet
• The fitter working on the job gets the part
• Next working day the stores man issues the part in Tranman as above

Getting a working test sheet turned out to be a bit of a problem because initially I was doing it in MS Word and the formatting it imposed was disabling the begin and end codes of the barcode (an asterisk *). Jacking it in and doing the job in Wordpad gave us some test sheets we could use to demonstrate proof of concept. I used Crystal Reports for the final print out of all the parts.

Sadly, this is as far as I got with it by the time I was leaving. We'd checked that each step should work as expected but we'd not given the process much hammer and inevitably there'd be some snagging to do. One thing I'd have liked to have done, given the time, would be to modify the Crystal Report so that the first few pages were limited to the high-volume items, to save the stores men having to routinely wade through so many pages.

So that's how I applied a bit of standard public library functionality to a problem in a completely other environment.

So what are the takeaways from this?

• Don't mistake differences in business operation with differences in operational functionality. In this case, issuing an item in real time is issuing an item in real time.

• If your problem-solving energies are being devoted to the solution perhaps you've got the wrong solution.

• To solve a problem you have to know what problem you're solving and the outcome you desire of the solution.

A rose is a rose is a rose…

On Tuesday afternoon me and Rochdale Borough Council go our separate ways. Strangely enough, of all the things I should be thinking about the one I keep coming back to is: "How should I describe myself on Linkedin?"

For a while (at least the four weeks I've promised myself) I'm not going to be in a job and have a job title. "Resting," while dead accurate doesn't really cut it, so I'm having a think. Besides which, I've long since been irritated by the way we all define ourselves by our jobs: when we're introduced to each other with the routine: "And what do you do?" We never boast of the many very splendid things we're capable of: we give a job title or rôle. That's a pity. Even in an employment context this tells so very little of us. So I decided to pick up the "And what do you do?" question and find a different answer.

Casting round amongst family and friends wasn't helpful, though I'll admit to being quite taken with "Provender of finely-wrought artisan drivel" and "Keen amateur idle beggar."

Thinking about my own experiences and the rôles I've assumed or had thrust upon me there are a few consistent strands:

• Identifying and documenting operational processes and procedures
• Helping lines of business find new ways of doing things that add value to the operation
• Helping operations and people accept and adapt to change
• Identifying and delivering ways of measuring continuous service improvement

Bearing this in mind I bounced a lot of descriptive phrases round in my head. Many sounded like the worst kinds of Management Speak. Many were either too vague or too narrow. A lot of them felt too much like I was parking my bike on somebody else's lawn. It boiled down to two in the end. And I'm still havering between them: one feels vague and one feels like I'm trespassing. One is the working assumption of many of the people I've said cheerio to over the past month. The other is the rôle I've taken on repeatedly over the past twenty-seven years and the one I've tended to feel has been the most productive and worthwhile.

I've a few more days for havering. Who knows, it might end up being Keen Amateur Idle Beggar after all!

Taskforce workshop: assessments

In Friday's workshop a few of us got talking about the idea of "voluntary assessments" raised in the Ambitions document. These weren't really defined so it was difficult to know quite which was the best approach for this topic.

There was some concern that any assessment would just be another stick to beat libraries with, like issue figures and visitor counts have become. Equally, would they become another set of targets to be gamed? Both are extremely valid concerns.

I think it's essential that public libraries have a solid suite of KPIs — not for comparison with so-called "peers" in a way that takes no heed of communities or contexts but for comparison with past performance and identifying strengths and weaknesses in the operation. But the "voluntary assessments" *shouldn't* be about KPIs: there are a couple of other useful functions they could perform.

One way would be to direct the stick upwards, towards the DCMS. It's vanishingly unlikely to happen but it could be that one of the Department's own performance narratives, published in its annual report, could include an assessment of the health of the national public library service derived from local returns. 

• I don't like expenditure as a measure of performance (any bloody fool can spend money) but given that the audience for such a thing would be a political one that largely measures achievement by expenditure one of the assessment measures could be expenditure per capita population, which could be broken down into: investment in buildings; investment in skilled staff; investment in stock; and investment in community activities. (Did you spot the gear-shift there?) 
• DCMS would — finally! — have to be able to report a definitive number of public libraries in the country, and any changes and trends. 
• It would be interesting to see a national picture of:
• The number of staffed library open hours
• The number of library open hours manned by volunteers
• The number of unsupervised library open hours
• The number of "daytime" (9am — 5pm) hours libraries are closed and left fallow
• And so on. I won't go into more detail because it's so unlikely to happen it's hardly worth the wishing for.

Another, possibly more plausible, function would use the assessment as a feedback mechanism for continuous service improvement (absolutely not a set of targets!). They would be used to evaluate rather than monitor the performance of the service and help direct local decision-making. 

• The assessment criteria could be deliberately aspirational and impossible to achieve: the assessment would evaluate the direction of travel of the service and the impact on resources, staff and the needs of the communities that the service serves. 
• Comparisons would be with past performance rather than against "peers," which would remove any unwelcome competitive friction between organisations that should be working collaboratively, 
• This would also mean that it would be harder to game the figures and it would be harder to coast on past glories as assessments would be reporting the direction of travel towards the impossible goal rather than the successful negotiation of an arbitrary obstacle.
• For example, one of the "impossible goals" could be 100% of the local population's being active members of the library (however that would be defined). Last year Library Service A could have attained 56% active membership and this year 58% while Library Service B managed 69% and 60%. Crude peer-to-peer analysis would suggest that Library Service B is performing better but A is actually making a better fist of continuous service improvement — it's the rate and direction of performance, not the absolute figures, that are the measure of how the service is being managed and resourced; they'll all have different baseline starting points.

There is a problem with this idea: while it works well in many organisations and is pretty standard performance management fare I don't think our political environment is adult enough not to try and turn this into a badly-fitting set of targets and league tables. It would be nice to be shown to be wrong, though.

Having a say

I went to Friday's Library Taskforce workshop in Machester Central Library on Friday.The aim of the workshop was to get feedback on the Ambitions document and suggest practical detail that should go into the action plan for it. I was interested so I signed up and was accepted in my rôle of "interested member of the public." It was an interesting few hours, here's a few thoughts on it.

Something that concerned a few of us was the rôle of the Taskforce itself. You don't have to go very far into discussions about English public libraries before you'll hear somebody say: "The Taskforce should do…" And that's a problem. The Taskforce is no magic wand, it has a finite life and actually it's just that scant handful of people who were going round sticking bits of paper on the wall in the library on Friday. It has the same rôle as a business analyst: it can facilitate and stimulate discussion, it can identify work to be done but it's down to other agencies to get on and get things done.

A recurring theme in the workshop was the need for a skilled workforce to deliver library services. A decade ago this would have been couched in terms of CPD for "professionals," here the conversation concerned all library staff. And not just the "we need people with digital skills" thing: there was a recognition that there's a swathe of skills that need developing and supporting, including having properly-trained library managers who can manage operations, services, programmes and projects. This is a welcome contrast to the ongoing narrative of staff losses, closures and farming out the work to volunteers. It's good that the Taskforce is talking up the need for a skilled staff. Translating that into action will be a stern challenge!

Another recurring theme was the tension between local authority control and opportunities for cost-sharing and delivering services to communities that aren't defined by geopolitical boundaries. Even when we look at delivering "bigger" we still seem to be bound by lines on ancient maps: local metropolitan authorities don't often think of working across the Pennine border.

Evidently there'd already been some feedback about the thinness of the digital strand of the document: there were a few more ideas pinned to the wall for us to respond to than I'd been expecting. This suggests that somebody's listening. Actually, I've been consistently getting the impression that the Taskforce members are listening to people. And they're trying to have conversations with people aside from chiefs and politicians. I think the workshops could have been better publicised away from the usual channels to try and get more library customers into the mix because I think it would have proved very useful.

A few of us thought that "income generation" is a tricky topic. It's important that libraries try to maximise their income (good services don't pay their bills in daydreams) but the phrase "income generation" is unfortunately a bit loaded. It's important that libraries stay that safe, trusted place where nobody's asking you what's in your wallet and that shouldn't be compromised. And whenever libraries are told to be more commercially-minded it's conveniently forgotten that local authorities don't work in a commercial environment. The twelve- month budget lifetime isn't anything any commercial operation would be able to live with: the mad March spend it or lose it would be ludicrous in that context. There was a lot said about that! The other problem, of course is that as soon as you say that you're going to generate some income some clever body will impose an income target. Income targets work this way: you make a business case for spending £100 to set up a business selling apples from a barrow; you're told: great, go ahead and by the way we're going to assume that you're going to make a £50 profit so we'll take that off you now; and you're left with enough money to buy either the barrow or the apples but not both and your business plan fails. There's no real money to be had selling off odd scraps of thing or hiring out rooms or buildings. There is potentially funding out there for programmes, projects and activities that are entirely compatible with the traditional aims and purposes of public libraries and I think this is what is meant by "income generation" in this context. I think it would be more useful for the Taskforce to be talking about "maximising the take-up of funding opportunities" instead.

We've until 3rd June to contribute to the discussion. If you haven't already, please do so.

Ambitions 1998

Another bit of archaeology. In 1998 — back when we had only five libraries networked and on the library management system and before the reality of The People's Network — I was asked why the library service didn't have an IT strategy so I drafted one. This is some of the working-out.

Rochdale Library Service

Information/Communications Strategy — suggested bullet points

1         Factors informing the strategy

a)       Operational needs

i)        Lending

·         Stock management & control

—  Making stock work harder

—  Audit requirements

·         Borrower management & control

—  Accessibility to library services across the Borough

—  Fines/charges control

—  Market analysis

·         Reservations management & control

—  Reaching performance targets

—  Managing costs of interlibrary loans

ii)      Reference

·         Increasing access to electronic information resources

—  Access to new forms of material

—  Access to wider ranges of material

—  Making existing materials more widely available

—  Increasing the accessibility of Council information

iii)    Access to Library information

·         Access to the Library Catalogue

·         Access to local history materials

—  Digital formats

…  Documents

…  Pictures

—  Indexing

…  Local history collections

…  Local newspapers

·         Accessibility

—  Within libraries

—  Mobile library provision

—  Meeting special needs

—  Telematic access

iv)    Management information

·         Stock management information

—  Stock use analysis

—  Stock age analysis

·         Statutory statistical requirements

—  CIPFA

—  Audit Commission

·         Performance indicator measurement

—  Local

—  National

·         Financial information & control

—  Stock ordering management

—  Book fund analysis

—  Budget monitoring

v)      Administrative requirements

·         Word–processing

·         Contact management — shared resources

—  Council telephone numbers

—  Emergency numbers

—  Professional contacts

—  Suppliers

·         Bibliographical information (all formats)

—  Records for requests

—  Approvals

—  Bibliographical records

b)      Staffing/support issues

i)        Training

·         Designing systems to minimise training needs

·         Commitment to empowering staff — enabling local problem–solving

·         Resources for delivery

—  Staff time

—  Cover for staff being trained

—  Trainers

—  Opportunity and resources for preparation

ii)      Support

·         Ownership issues

—  Enabling local problem–solving

…  Spreading skills widely

…  Agreeing what can be expected of staff locally

—  Support structures within the Library Service

…  Professional Librarians taking responsibility for library systems

…  Other staff

—  Third–party support

…  Within the Council

…  Suppliers

…  Cost implications

·         Providing support at the front line

—  For staff

—  For the public

c)       External pressures

i)        National issues

·         New Library: People’s Network

·         National Grid for Learning

·         Audit Commission: Due for Renewal

·         Information for All

ii)      International perspectives

·         European information issues

—  Information 2000

—  IRISA–LAPSA & successor organisations

·         Internet access

d)      Technological possibilities

i)        Dynix library system

·         OPACs

—  Graphical interfaces

—  Web PACs

—  OPACs for special needs (e.g. Libris Envisage)

—  Off–line PACs (“OffPACs”)

·         Cash management

·         Acquisitions

—  Order management

—  Supplier performance monitoring

·         Community Resources

—  Community organisations

—  Events

—  Newspaper indices

·         Internet publishing

ii)      PC–based systems

·         Word–processing

·         Spreadsheets

·         Custom databases

·         SQL–compliant systems

·         Electronic reference materials

·         Tutorial materials

·         Web browsers

·         Windows NT networks

·         Intranet systems

iii)    Unix–based systems

·         Electoral roll

·         Corporate financial data

iv)    Self–service opportunities

·         Reservations

—  OPACs

—  Web–based telematic systems

·         Circulation

e)       Restraints

i)        Funding for projects

·         Capital funding

·         Revenue funding for maintenance, etc.

·         Staffing costs

ii)      Expertise

·         Within the Library Service

·         Within the Council

—  Knowledge of library systems

—  Networking

iii)    Staff time

iv)    Support issues (see above)

v)      Corporate policies

2         Suggested outcomes

a)       Dynix Library System

i)        Aim to stay with Dynix for the period of this strategy provided the development and support of the system meets the needs of the Library Service.

·         Join forces with other Dynix users to lobby for enhancements to the system to meet outstanding needs

·         Keep a watching brief as to the development of the product as a graphical system based on PCs 

·         Pending proper reassurance on the life expectancy of the Dynix system, add remaining libraries to the system

—  Circulation

—  OPACs

·         Implement procedures to automate parts of the stock editing system

—  Transfers of some fiction collections

—  Flagging up “tired” or “under–used” stock

—  Collection inventory systems

·         Implement the Acquisitions module — automating the order process; book fund monitoring; supplier performance monitoring

·         Developing the use of Community Resources

—  Making the Community Organisations database available

…  On OPAC

…  On Council intranet via WebPAC technology

…  On World–Wide Web via WebPAC technology

—  Making local newspaper indices (currently in card format) available on OPAC

…  Could be made available on the World–Wide Web and Council intranet via WebPAC technology

·         Investigating the effectiveness & viability of the Dynix Cash Management system

·         Develop new OPAC functions

—  Kids’ Catalogue

—  Graphical interfaces

—  Publishing the Library Catalogue on the World Wide Web, including allowing “WebPAC” access to search for particular items

…  Requires web access to the processor housing the library system

 Allows the possibility of allowing self–service reservation via the WWW

·         Telephone access

—  Investigate the effectiveness and viability of potential options

…  Automated telephone renewals

…  Automated telephoned messages — overdues/charges/reservations notices

ii)      Where possible, create interfaces between the Dynix Library System and PC–based software

·         Management information

—  Collating data between Dynix and proprietary software (e.g. for spreadsheet analysis)

…  This would require a third piece of software to act as an interface between the two

—  Investigating the effectiveness & viability of the Dynix “Executive Information System” — data warehousing/reporting system

·         Catalogue information

—  Envisage — OPACs for visually–impaired

—  Off–line copies of the Catalogue on CD–ROM (using the data conversions already taking place for Envisage)

…  Replacing microfiche at off–line libraries

…  Replacing microfiches as “back up” at on–line libraries

…  Could be available on laptop on Mobile Library

…  Could be available on laptop on Housebound Service

·         Using WWW technology (especially Java) to enable telematic delivery of library services (available from Dynix release 162E)

—  Access to the Library Catalogue

…  Potentially including placing reservations

—  Access to library information

…  Community Organisations

…  Events

…  Newspaper indices

—  Constraints

…  Requires a change in Council policy on web access to networked data

…  Requires web access to the processor housing the library system

b)      Workstation access to other information systems

i)        PC–based information

·         Access to PC–based electronic references

—  Networked electronic references based on a Windows NT server

…  Allows resources to be shared between libraries

…  Expensive references kept secure centrally

…  CD–ROMs cached to hard disk to improve speed of access

…  Using existing networks where feasible

…  Networking dependent on licensing regimes — some material may not be networked; some networked licences may be prohibitively expensive

…  May be able to derive use statistics for individual references

…  Potential for differential access — different reference materials for different client groups

—  Intranet connection with the rest of the Council

…  Council information

…  Statutory papers/minutes

…  email

·         Library intranet

—  Staff manuals in hypertext format

—  Staff notices

—  Staff training materials

—  Contact information

—  Shared bookmarks for WWW

ii)      The Internet (more probably, just the WWW)

·         Staff workstations

—  Including email

—  Access to appropriate lists

·         Public workstations

—  See below

iii)    Other systems

·         Reference Enquiry Desk workstations access to Electoral Roll

·         Administrative/management systems

Financial systems

 Suppliers database

c)       PC–based services to the public

i)        Extension of Open for Learning facilities

ii)      Maintenance of text–reading and Brailling facilities

iii)    Word–processing facilities

·         Support?

·         Cost of consumables?

iv)    Computers Don’t Bite and successors

d)      Public Internet access

i)        Controlled access

·         ?Timed out by software on PC

·         ?Time booked and issued to “borrower”

·         Use of Net Nanny et al. To prevent inappropriate access

·         ?Users registered, including disclaimers

—  Promise not to look for illegal/immoral materials (how defined?)

—  Promise not to hack machines

—  Accept responsibility for own actions

—  Agree that Library Service not responsible for anything the customer does during their time on the Internet

—  Accept that service may be withdrawn from the customer if they break the rules

·         Costs

—  To Library Service

…  Service provider subscriptions

…  Line costs

—  To the customer

…  ?How to be as inclusive as possible

…  ?How nominal is a nominal charge

…  ?Charge period — session or season

e)       Local history collections

i)        Access to the Local History Catalogue

·         Staff at Heywood and Middleton need access to the Catalogue at Rochdale

…  Cost

…  Training load

…  Is there OPAC access?

—  Why not Dynix at Local Studies?

…  Cost

…  Training load

—  Why not both in both places?

…  Compatibility?

…  The Library Catalogue on Dynix will be searchable from a Web browser with 162E. If both catalogues Z39.50 compliant, both could be searched from a Web browser (as per draft Telematics strategy)

·         Practical issues

—  Large cataloguing task

—  May require some modification of the Dynix Catalogue record to include additional MARC fields (e.g. additional media fields; URL tags; image data)

—  Would need to look at how other libraries/museums approach the job

ii)      Digitising local history materials

·         Security of primary materials

·         Making materials more widely accessible

—  PAC–style picture catalogues

—  Intranet/WWW access

·         Pictures

—  Scanned into JPEG format

—  Catalogued

…  ?Dynix (how catalogued?)

…  ?Proprietary database system

—  PAC access

…  ?Dynix

…  ?Proprietary system

—  Electronic watermarking for copyright purposes

·         Documents

—  Copyright issues

—  Imaging

…  Investigate routes taken corporately through Document Imaging Working Group

—  Transcription

…  Investigate effectiveness/viability of scanning and OCR (optical character recognition) systems

f)        Office applications at main libraries

i)        Word–processing facilities — MS Word

ii)      Use of MS Word and MS PowerPoint for DTP/notices

iii)    MS Excel for spreadsheet analyses

iv)    MS Access for local databases (created by Systems Manager for local use — e.g. for enquiry desk statistics)