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 This document has been unofficially published on one of the library lists but my copy says "Not for publication" so I won't go into any details of it here.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,

Deck of cards

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

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

Measuring weight with a ruler: MOOCs

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) may have been ridiculously over-hyped and may or may not be game-changers in academia. To be honest I'm not that much fussed by the commentary one way or another, I like them and find them useful.

I have a confession, though: I've never yet finished one.

I'm one of the statistics that people pick up on to demonstrate "the failure" of MOOCs — the apparent high drop-out rate and relatively low number of students getting the appropriate bits of paper at the end of the course.

So why am I a drop out? Not because the courses aren't useful and interesting. The ones I've signed up for over the years have been instructive, informative, challenging and all that. I've read the materials and seen the videos. I've learned new stuff, found ideas I can apply elsewhere, heard interesting discussions and arguments. I've got wanted I wanted from each course, and nearly always a bit more besides. I just haven't felt the need to get the bit of paper at the end. If I want to take an examination, if I want to get a certificate, I'll do so. But I didn't want to and, thank Heaven, I didn't have to. Which suited me fine and thank you very much.

The educational industry's turning institutions into qualification mills concerned with league tables and rankings based on the confusion between quantitative metrication and qualitative outcomes is relatively new in the scheme of things. In part I see MOOCs as redressing the balance slightly: allowing the sharing of academic learning for its own sake rather than as part of a Fordian production line of qualifications.

Using completion figures to demonstrate the apparent failure of MOOCs is a failure of statistics: applying an inappropriate measurement to a situation and deriving an answer to a different question. In this case I'd argue that the value to the student lies in the exchange of knowledge more than in the attainment of qualification, which is a different species of outcome entirely that needs a different type of measurement for meaningful analysis and conclusion.

Similarly, in the library world, we need to be careful with our metrics. I've said it before and I dare say I'll drone on about it on my deathbed: just because a particular set of statistics has been used for years it doesn't mean they're necessarily all that important in assessing value. It could just be that that was the easiest (or even the only) thing that could be measured. The really important thing, always, has to be the value to the person at the receiving end. And that is never measurable by the passive aggregation of throughput stats.

Please don't tell me that at least Benito Mussolini made the libraries run on time

Just a thought…

If we ran public libraries the way that our privatised railways are run, the taxpayer would be spending more for to have to travel ten miles to their nearest library where they'd have to wait an hour for the opportunity to borrow a dog-eared old Harold Robbins paperback that somebody seemed to have used to wipe their bottom.

I can't say this prospect thrills.

Slacking

I'm uncomfortably defensive about days spent working from home. I tell myself that on the plus side I'm not going to spend four hours commuting, the network connection is faster and more reliable, I have access to tools that aren't available at the workplace, yadda yadda yadda... And it's true, I am genuinely more productive than at work. But I do still feel uncomfortably defensive.

For one thing, it's too comfortable. I've been sat sitting on the sofa working on the laptop, a pot of tea to hand, the Hairy Bikers on DVD for background noise (the remaining background noise being provided by a robin, a wren and a charm of goldfinches). This can't possibly be work can it?

Oh, I've done all the usual systems housekeeping work. And reported the (sadly) usual problems. I've run a pile of statistics to test an idea that was worrying me about distribution patterns of reserved stock and written a few web pages but I can't say that I feel that I've been particularly productive today.

Part of the problem is that the world has changed. What have I been doing while I've been slacking?

• I've been eavesdropping on the ALA Virtual Conference (thanks to both Marianne and Stewart!);
• Watched lectures on the potential of the online cognitive surplus; Facebook game business dynamics and making a splash with social media;
• Checked out articles on Mashable and LGITU;
• Tried to get my head round the mechanics of the WriteToReply functions being explained by Tony Hirst. and
• Exchanged concerns with colleagues about the current state of play of one of the library management systems companies.

Nothing extraordinary there. You'll have done as much, probably considerably more. But have another look at that in the context of "work," without the use of a laptop and t'internet.

• Peeking through a window to watch a conference.
• Leaving the office for a day just to see a lecture or two or attend a seminar or meet colleagues from far, far away

In the old days what I'm calling slacking would have been A Hard Day's Work. Time was, so long as you clocked on and clocked off at the right time you were doing your work. It was OK to feel not particularly productive because you'd been In Work All Day and had earned your corn by your very presence. These days, I'm happy to say, the currency is deliverables, not time spent (shouldn't it always have been?). So where does that leave personal professional development? It was never much valued in the 'time served' model, but does it only have a utilitarian value in the 'focus on delivery model?' Dunno. I'd like to hope not; I believe that understanding for the sake of it increases the opportunities for the serendipitous development of solutions. But I'd be hard-pressed to prove it.

And I still think I've been an idle beggar today.

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.

The safe use of new technologies

(Yet another thank-you to Phil Bradley!)

Ofsted has produced a report - "The safe use of new technologies" - in response to the report of the Byron Review, "Safer children in a digital world."
Although it's looking at the use of the internet in schools, this is essential reading for those of us providing internet access in public libraries, if only as an antidote to some of the more hysterical responses to somebody's finding inappropriate content. We can put up as many safety barriers as we like, they're not infallible and no substitute for an e-safety culture. An effective e-safety culture addresses the questions "what do we do when something goes wrong?" and "how do we help the customer safely learn from the experience?"

The section on "Internet safety training for teachers and the wider workforce" applies with equal, or possibly greater, force in public libraries given that our clientele is so very much broader. If a 'one size fits all' approach to e-safety training is inadequate for dealing with the needs of a small customer base of defined age range, known ability and controlled context how more inadequate is it with a wide customer base where none of these factors are limited or defined? And how many of us are even able to provide that inadequate 'one size fits all' training scheme for all our staff? In the local government culture, spending on the technology to try to keep the bogeyman at bay is an acceptable, essential investment; spending on equipping staff to deal with real life is an optional extra.

Demonstrating the Return On Investment: Renew, Refresh, Recycle

With the best will in the world, all of our catalogues will have a few skeletons in the closet. Human beings being human beings there's always the odd book that's been missed by the stock editors. They're not necessarily the liability they seem to be. They shouldn't be on the open shelves as items of current import, to be sure, but there are creative ways of using them, together with a selection of the "respectable" components of your reserve stock to make useful and informative display collections.

Public libraries hold a lot of the national back-catalogue of books. This is generally held to be important as far as fiction is concerned but, aside from a small proportion of 'classic' texts, not non-fiction. After all, out-of-date information is useless, right?

Not necessarily.

Imagine a view of the history of Germany through the eyes of somebody who didn't know that the Berlin Wall was ever to come down. Or go up in the first place. Or that Hitler would rise to power in 1933. Or... Well you get the idea.

It's easy with history, isn't it? What about science? The history of science is littered with the dead bodies of fallen ideas and Laws Of Science. I remember being baffled at university (yonks ago) by the civil war between the cladists and the phylogenetic gradualists (you'll have to look them up) - they were talking about aspects of the same idea, just using different language with all the intemperance of theologians disputing one or other heresy. A generation before it was the geosyncline versus plate tectonics debate. All a bit specialist and arcane, eh? Not really - all the time that the aeroplanes were grounded by the Icelandic volcano our newspapers were filled with diagrams of plate tectonic processes. How would they have been described fifty years ago?

And as for technology... It struck me recently that the world I grew up in as a very small child in the 60s wasn't wholly dissimilar to that of my parents' childhood (excluding powdered egg and the Luftwaffe). The Swinging Sixties didn't much reach our way, save for the Beatles and beehive hairdos. My brother was born into a world of colour television. My sister-in-law can't imagine a world without computers and MTV. Children born today would struggle with the idea of not having a mobile 'phone with a camera and internet access and umpteen thousand channels and applications. And we've still not got those personalised jet packs and robot butlers.

One of the reasons why primary resources are important is that they are uncontaminated by hindsight. Hindsight always has 20:20 vision. We know what happens at the end and that inevitably colours the narrative. History tells us which were the blind alleys, the discarded values, the paradigm shifts. And hindsight always imposes the prejudices and values of today onto the thoughts and actions of yesterday.

There is a case for our provided access to the unsullied product once every so often in "What we used to know" promotions to give us a better understanding of the historical context. It's not always enough to know how we got here, it's sometimes important to understand what happened along the way.

Fun things to do

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

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