A national digital platform for public libraries

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 This document has been unofficially published on one of the library lists but my copy says "Not for publication" so I won't go into any details of it here.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UKOLN Informatics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equality in electronic delivery - thinking about inclusion

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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