Libraries and COVID-19

IFLA provides a pretty comprehensive overview of the impact of COVID-19 on libraries and the known factors involved in returning to something like business as usual.

https://www.ifla.org/covid-19-and-libraries

Baby steps out of lockdown.

Resuming business after closing a service — particularly after an unexpected closure — is always more work than the closing was. There are all the consequences of the closure to be tidied up, all the preparations for reopening, all the things that need catching up with before it's business as usual.

And then there's the additional complication where nobody knows if it's necessarily safe to go back to business as usual. And whether or not it will stay safe. It's like working in a building where you can't be sure there's not an unexploded bomb in the cellar or that somebody won't accidentally bring one in with them.

I suspect all returning workforces will have a tricky tension between the popular idea that they've had a rest so should have plenty of energy and the exhausting reality that lockdown will have released a lot of adrenaline over an extended period without the options of fight or flight. The challenge for managers is:

• Not to fall into the trap of making the assumption people have had a rest; 
• Making sure staff don't fall into that trap and start beating on themselves and/or colleagues; 
• And also watching out for their own wellbeing.

The return to business as usual needs to be treated as a managed change process.

• Each step must be specified, planned, and have a rollback plan in case of failure. 
• The physical and mental safety of staff and customers need to be success factors as much as much more than the delivery of intended outcomes. 
• An essential component is transparency: being upfront right from the start that business as usual will be a while coming and that each step taken towards it is dependent on the safety of staff and customers. It's imperative that all stakeholders are told this loud and clear.

There will be a lot of pressure for a sudden abracadabra transformation back to business as usual. It is the responsibility of senior managers and politicians to resist that. (Some will resist the responsibility or even be the loudest voices demanding a swift return to the old status quo. They will be godparents to the local 2nd and 3rd pandemic spikes.)

And then, of course, there's the question of how to manage staff who've worked throughout the lockdown. They'll need a lot of help processing the experience and returning back to normal. That in itself is a significant task and may need support from external agencies. Added to that is the need to manage the relationship between those who worked through the lockdown and those who didn't, the risk of resentments ("We had to work and you didn't," "Why are they getting special treatment?" etc.) needs to be managed out.

All of this is a big management load and I'm not convinced every library service is going to have enough management resource to do this by themselves, especially as many of these issues will apply to the managers as much as the people they are managing. There will need to be a national matrix of support coming in from both library and corporate local government perspectives. I'm hoping that the various national associations, professional organisations, unions and government departments are working on resources to help local managers address both the operational issues involved in the safe resumption of services and, just as importantly, the personnel issues involved in returning back to normal business in times that are very far from normal.

hors de combat

Been to what had been planned to be the last of this year's leaving do's (during which I heard some news suggesting there'll be another this Summer). Leaving do's feel a bit strange: it's nice to see old faces, catch up with the gossip and that, but it's sad to see how tired and stressed out the working remainder are. It was always a bitter joke that the people that retired looked ten years younger than the ones still in work. When I first moved out of libraries into my last team fourteen people struggled to do the work expected of the six who remain (who have also had a few other odds and ends dumped in their laps). At the last library leaving do I looked around and wondered how on earth they're keeping the doors open (it was a constant struggle back when there were twice as many bodies available to shift around at the last minute). I feel well out of it and incredibly sad for the people left behind trying to deliver services with ever-dwindling resources.

I think that goes for English public libraries generally, too. I consciously stepped away from the nightmare about eighteen months ago. Before then I'd been doing odds and ends and then I'd offered to lend a hand to the Library Taskforce. After a while I had to conclude that that had become an expensive hobby that wasn't getting anywhere. This was no fault of the Taskforce, it was the fault of the political realities it has to work in. At that time much of the work that we had been talking about had been stalled for the best part of six months awaiting a ministerial signature to the action plan, a consequence of a change of Prime Minister and a ministerial reshuffle. Ironically, the plan was published the same day I finally decided to send the email thanking them for having me and wishing them luck in the future. Not planned, just one of those nasty coincidences real life throws at us.

My breaking with the Taskforce wasn't a reflection on the action plan, it was a reflection of my sense that I wasn't doing anything useful. Until the plan was authorised we couldn't take any action. We'd spent a few months discussing how to use the library data that the Taskforce had managed to collect so far. Objectively this was nothing much, just a list of all the libraries in England and their current status (open, closed or various flavours of "community" library). In fact, collecting this was like pulling teeth and involved trawling round hundreds of web sites to build a list, then each library authority was sent a list with the note more or less saying: "We think these are all your libraries. Please could you confirm/deny and make any corrections. Thanks." Most authorities responded and any corrections were made to the "definitive" list; when an authority didn't respond the hope had to be that they hadn't found any mistakes. And then we sat around, full of ideas and possibilities but not being able to get anywhere. Which is why I felt I was being useless and eventually quit.

(When this data set was finally released, after the action plan had been authorised, there were howls of anguish about what wan't included. "This is available already from CIPFA statistics," somebody complained, ignorant the fact that the reason why CIPFA stats weren't trawled in the first place is that a large minority of library authorities don't submit the data every year, or in some cases at all. This was what it said on the tin: an attempt to create a definitive list of English public libraries with a model process for keeping it up to date, the base on which to build other national or regional data sets about the libraries, their services, their use and their contexts within their communities.)

There were things in the action plan I could argue with but by and large it provided something to work with, given the working realities of a fatally-fragmented service with no standards for service delivery or performance management set as a small backwater in local government provision that had had its funding halved, with most of what remained buttonholed by adult and children's care services. The underlying problem was (and still is) that there is no way of changing that working reality: on top of the usual inertias and contests between vested interests there were the lingering effects of Localism and — worse, much, much worse — a Brexit that was already occupying most of the time, energies and resources of government with scant room for business as usual let alone a radical rethink of public library policy. So the action plan was inevitably going to disappoint anyone looking for a white knight to charge to the rescue of English public libraries. The complaint was that this was too little, too late. And of course it was: nothing short of a shitload of money and a time machine was going to be any different. And even then, once you'd gone back to the Golden Age of English Public Libraries (which I would argue would be 1996 – 2007) what response would you get? "Oh we're much too busy, besides, they can't cut us we're a statutory service." In my experience the history of English public libraries over the past thirty years is littered with the expectation that somebody will come along to make everything better, just so long as they don't change anything.

Which brings me to the other reason to step away awhile. There's a fine line between many years of experience and a hell of a lot of baggage. For example, when the argument is being made that English public libraries are best placed for bringing information literacy to their communities the reply: "Well, they didn't, did they?" isn't an unfair response but it isn't helpful or useful, especially not in the context of an existential struggle for the future of the service. It's the sort of stuff that might be useful to a post-survival lessons learned or a "How did we get there and how do we stop it happening again?" process but isn't useful now.

So I've withdrawn from the field. Whether or not this is temporary, I don't know. Life happens while you're making other plans. I wish those still engaged the best of luck, with the unhappy knowledge that they will need it.

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.

Archaeology

I'm at the tidying the folders stage of my current job, which is actually the tidying the folders stage of three successive jobs. And being the hoarder that I am I'm bumping into quite a few old memories.

Like the correspondence between myself and other library systems managers as we tried to manage the ambitious project of rolling out a lot of internet-ready public PCs to libraries that weren't networked and weren't laid out for this sort of provision whilst managing inconsistent mixes of conservatism and high (sometimes entirely unrealisable) expectation amongst our management teams. The implementation of the People's Network was easily the single biggest gear shift in English public libraries in the period between the 1964 Act and the current dissolution of the public library service so it was never going to be an easy thing to be able to manage at a local level. And it wasn't. By this stage of the game we had access to email (I know, but it's a long time ago) so we'd share the highs and lows, reassuring each other that we weren't alone in having problems and often coming up with solutions and/or ways of managing stakeholders' perceptions of how things were going and which were the priorities to be really worrying about (something I was ever so grateful for after a meeting that was planned to be about building the business case for the council's investment in the project became a three-hour discussion on the best placement of one desk at a particular library!)

Jocular mentions of the popular board game People's Network-o! became so frequent that in the end we had to have a go at mocking it up. My stab at it is typically over-complicated. A colleague from Yorkshire came up with the most elegant version: a grid of 50 squares, all of which said: "Go back to Start."

That implementation was bloody hard work but ultimately it was worth it. In many ways, even after so long, I think libraries are still only nibbling at the potential they have with the network. Personally, I was slow to realise how important having all libraries as UKOnline centres was going to become; a lot of brilliant and too-often very low-key work has been done on the ground to tackle the digital divide and go a long way towards making digital inclusion more than just a phrase to be included in bid documents. More disappointing has been the general realignment of the traditional reference and information services (though as always there's good work around if you look for it). This is starting to be addressed in some of the SCL's national offers. If the public library service survives the ravages of Austerity we may yet see the full fruition of the network's potential.

Libraries deliver and can deliver better than this

I've had my go at responding to the libraries deliver survey. Here are a few of my thoughts. I've tried to be positive, honest.

The lack of vision as to what is to be provided, by whom and with what resources runs throughout.

The context section of the document's a lot thin. This is the "as is" description of a fragmented public library service but you wouldn't know that by the reading of it, Entirely lacking from this context is the pick 'n' mix selection of service delivery models and services provided; poor (or at best extremely patchy) workforce development; lack of regional or national leadership; and lamentable approach to evidence-based decision and delivery with no KPIs that weren't developed before the 1964 Act,

What libraries can achieve has some notable omissions, Information literacy is a very important omission, especially in the digital age. The traditional strength of the library's providing the gateway to a sense of self and a sense of place is part of its USP. As, indeed, is the fact that the library is one of the increasingly-few places that are still a free and public place to be. 

The ambitions aren't especially ambitious.

• Reading & literacy: should include the systematic impact of everyday reading for pleasure and informal learning (i.e. impact analysis of non-programmed lending library activity); staff development programme for the creation of reading and literacy champions.

• Digital literacy: this is phenomenally weak and describes should have been being delivered in 2011, let alone 2021. Information literacy is an essential and is entirely disregarded here. There also needs to be something here about the use of assistive technologies; UX development; online resource curation and promotion; creating a skilled digital workforce within the public library service and having public library leadership that doesn't see "digital" as a cheap adjunct or alternative to the expensive business of having a load of buildings with the word "library" stuck on them that can all be somebody else's worry entirely. 

• Health & well-being: is co-location really a valid indicator of qualitative improvement in this area? Just because the services share a building doesn't mean they're working collaboratively in the community's interest (and there are too many examples where co-location breeds resource competition between services rather than collaborative cross-sectorial working).

• Economic growth: over the past twenty years I've seen numerous examples of models for evaluating the economic value of the public library service by itself. This is important: libraries by themselves have an impact. These models need to be evaluated and the best national model should be implemented.

• Culture and creativity: there needs to be a recognition of the amount, value and impact of cultural and creative activities in libraries, from reminiscence sessions to knit 'n' natter to full-blown cultural festivals. A revival of outreach activities outside library buildings. And building and supporting local cultures that aren't driven by the Westminster bubble or big corporations, including the acceptance and promotion of local authors in both the library and their catalogues and a locally-delivered national programme for adding local self-published authors' works to the national bibliographic record. Building a vibrant local metadata has been sacrificed on the altar of saving a few quid by buying in all the MARC records and getting shot of anyone who knows how they're built.

• Communities: it's sad that this doesn't include making sure that there are skilled jobs and career paths in libraries available to people living within deprived communities (volunteering doesn't pay the rent); and why nothing on demographies and active support of minority groups?

• Learning: one of the eternal values of the public library is its importance as a resource for informal learning, it's important that the autodidact tradition be included within the ambitions; and again, on the staff side: monkey see, monkey do: there's no point in saying that the library service will do oh so many wonderful things for learning and skills development within the community if it isn't committed to delivering this for the workforce that is supporting those communities.

• Who will be available to deliver all this? With what resources? With what leadership? With what support? Where are the continuous service improvement review and feedback loops?

Even in the world of English public libraries the proposed indicators are more than a tad disappointing.

• Reading and literacy: FFS! If you must use issues as an indicator at all. at least do it per capita per annum. And if we're limiting ourselves to the easily-reportable, what about the no. hours of programmed reading/literacy/storytelling/writing activities per annum and the no. attendees of these activities. Advice from literacy experts on evidence-based qualitative assessment within the community would be instructive to this particular narrative.

• Digital literacy: Why only makerspaces? (and why necessarily makerspaces?) The indicators need to include at the very least: analytics of use of online resources — do they reach intended audiences? can those audiences use these resources?; digital collection development metrics — scope, reach, audience, purpose, use, satisfaction; delivery of programmed digital literacy activities — no. sessions, no. people; delivery of programmed information literacy initiatives — no. sessions, no. people; community-based qualitative assessments as per reading/literacy.

• Co-location is a really crap KPI for the well-being agenda. While we're on the subject of col-location…
• We've flogged co-location to death over the past couple of decades. Co-location with schools and colleges results in well-resourced school and college libraries that exclude much of the local community (not everybody had happy schooldays and schools actively discourage the presence of adults who are not on the payroll).Similarly, there are too many instances where co-location with health centres, councils or business units has just been a few shelving units with books on and a member of staff on the ground (if the library is lucky) to try and fight the library's corner when somebody fancies that bit of space for something or other. 
• There has to be a business case for any location that isn't just about the money, it has to be about delivering the preferred outcomes of the community involved.And if the co-location compromises the delivery of the library service it should be deprecated.

• Economic indicators should include the economic value of the core public library services.

• Culture and well-being: needs to include metrics on creative activities in libraries; creative outreach activities delivered by library services; additions of local context and content to the national bibliography.

• Communities: should include a qualitative analysis of the value of each library to its local community; also a demonstration that the demography of use of each library fairly reflects the demography of its community.

• Learning: should include a measure of the investment in learning and skills programmes for library staff so that they can help develop and support learning and skills programmes for their communities.

Governance and the national structures are the same old same old. My reactions seem strangely familiar:

• The existing fragmented, pick 'n' mix, "everything that's called 'national' is really optional" service delivery model has to be tackled for any of this document's ambitions to be credible.

• The Department that holds the purse strings (DCLG) doesn't have the responsibility; the Department that has the responsibility (DCMS) doesn't control the resources. And *something* has to be compulsorily uniform nationally, because at the moment nothing is, not even the submissions to CIPFA relied on in this report.

• SCL provides little functional national leadership. Until extremely recently CILIP has been more concerned with filling discussion lists every Summer with childish spats than the support and delivery of services in public libraries (to be fair, CILIP's belated conversion to the cause should be welcomed). Neither organisation pays much heed to the support and involvement of the bulk of the public library staff who are not trained librarians but do have a wealth of knowledge and experience that is all too often ignored, disregarded or just plain dismissed.

The section on evidence mapping misses one ever-so essential prerequisite: you can't begin to do this without a comprehensive review of the lack of nationally-applied KPIs of any kind and the lack of any qualitative metrics being applied to these services. Otherwise your mapping exercise is just a distance-between-two-dots exercise, literally drawing lines between libraries on a map and imaging you've addressed the evidence.

There are some astonishing omissions from the skills strategy: 

• Reader development! 
• Information literacy! 
• Library technical skills (somebody's got to be able to create acceptable-quality local content) 
• Project management  
• Operational management 
• Product design and development 
• Service development and delivery 
• Continuous service improvement 
• And validation and certification.

And all this cannot be limited to just those parts of the workforce that went to library school.

I have qualms about "voluntary accreditation" because at the moment everything in the English public library service is optional. It should be a statutory requirement lying within the DCMS and included in the DCMS annual report on its own performance.

Is commissioning proven to be the best model for service delivery to our communities? I'm not convinced that it's the given presented in this document.

Finally, to my mind the Action Plan needs:

1. A time scale for the delivery of a nationally-adopted scheme of KPIs to provide the evidence base for the rest of the action.
2. A time scale for delivery of a national public library staff skills audit and staff development programme addressing the need to deliver on the ambitions of this document
3. A project plan for the funded delivery of actions 1 and 2

I expect you have some views one way or another. Please respond to the survey. I know it's just another survey, but please…

A shedload of library stuff

The news wires and social media feeds were full of public library news today.

Quite properly, Ian Anstice's Public Library News provides the best summary of events.

Upon hearing the first English public libraries consultation of Spring

DCMS have issued a consultation on the "draft Ambition document" "Libraries Deliver: Ambition for Public Libraries in England 2016-2021."

It isn't a bad document and has lots of the right stuff in it. Perhaps I'm just jaded with it all.

Parliamentary Report on Libraries

The House of Commons Library recently published a Report on Public Libraries, an update to the report published five years ago. It's caused a bit of a kerfuffle.

•  Here's the Public Libraries News view of it.

• Here's the Libraries Taskforce's view

• Here's the report itself

See what you think.

My Library By Right

This.

Go and sign the bloody petition already.