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.

Herding digital cats

It's interesting that the report on the national digital presence for public libraries finally saw the light of day at the same time that BIC and a lot of library technology supply companies were meeting to progress the Library Communications Framework (LCF).

In their own ways they are each trying to solve the same problem: how to pull together a myriad disparate resources and services, each built to their own specific requirements, into a single user experience without requiring the availability of hundreds of library technologists in the front line of public libraries who probably will never exist.

I think they are both doable, with fair winds and fair spirits prevailing.

Ideas and innovations in public libraries

The very excellent Ian Anstice has added a useful new page to Public Libraries News: a digest of reported "new ideas" in public libraries. Some are brand new and innovative; others are things that some libraries have been doing, unheralded, for yonks. Love them or loathe them, new ideas and innovation have been part of the business of public libraries for over a century and a half. Seeing so many of them stacked up in one place like this is breathtaking: you get some idea of the breadth of services delivered by the national public library service and some of the depth of thought put into developing, improving and supporting those services.

Have a look at the Ideas and innovations in public libraries page here.

As one door closes...

I may have visited my local library for the last time today.

In a couple of weeks' time it will have closed as a public library. The news isn't all entirely bleak: the school that hosts the library and the local housing trust have both recognised the importance of libraries to the community and have stepped in to try and rescue at least some part of the service. So the library will reopen as a "community library" staffed by volunteers with support from the school librarian. It's great that they've recognised the need (and a measure of the way these types of organisations have changed and expanded their remit over the years) and I wish everyone involved the best of luck but I worry about its sustainability, especially with a prolonged period of the austerity experiment stretching out ahead of us.

This sort of thing is happening all over the country: unprecedented cuts in local authority budgets are leading to unprecedented cuts in services. Westminster government's cuts in public sector funding have hit local authorities disproportionately and within each authority the burden of cuts has affected some services more badly than others.Some areas — support for schools, child care services, adult care services and public health services — are ring-fenced by central government decree so receive some degree of protection (but only some degree of protection); the remainder, including statutory services like libraries, have to do as best can with their share of the meagre scraps remaining. And it will get worse as there are fewer and fewer options left for responding to each fresh demand for required savings.

It's easy to say that library managers should do this, that or the other. In some cases this may still be the case. In the past, certainly, a generation of library managers revelled, almost to a masochistic degree, in the challenge of demonstrating that it was business as usual no matter how their budgets were chipped away. Those days are long since gone and are already almost a fading memory. It's much tougher now and there is scant wriggle room or scope for creative budgeting for library managers to be able to present business as usual. And in some cases it's downright impossible…

I hadn't realised it was 15 years since Lostock Library was moved out of its own purpose-built little building next to the bus stop and shunted into a small room in the corner of the school next door. I'm a middle-aged male with no children so I have views about shifting libraries into venues that tend to exclude a significant minority of public library users. And my experience of libraries' moving into schools has been that they tend to become a really useful resource for the school and rather less so for the local adult population. Still, we were better off than some: during the post-millennial boom where many councils, including the one I still work for, were investing in their libraries Trafford Council were making cuts. Two libraries were closed and replaced by what were, in effect, deposit libraries in corners of leisure centres. Ironically, these leisure centres are now also both at serious risk of the chop to save money. When last year, after more than a decade of cuts and hollowings-out, the library service was faced with a cut of one third of its budget it would have been impossible for the service's managers to deliver the existing service and, to be fair to them, they didn't pretend to anyone that it was possible. It was no great surprise when the cuts proposals were made public: the writing was already on the wall for Lostock when the opening hours were changed so that as children were coming out of school the library closed its doors. I went to one of the public consultations about the closure and for all that members of the public complained about the unacceptability of what was being proposed they were under no illusions about the impact of a cut of this magnitude on a service that was already down to the bone. When, at half-past the eleventh hour, the school stepped up to the plate to offer to take over it was seen as a lifeline. It can't be a like-for-like replacement and staff will still be losing their jobs and that is awful but the thinking is that it's not a complete loss and it may be a way of keeping the patient alive until times change and some sort of rescue becomes possible. On the flip side, there'll be a building with the word "Library" on it and the doors will be open sometime so some politicians could present that as being business as usual. It's the community-level version of the prisoner's dilemma and it's being played out nationwide.

I may not be able to be a customer of the new library in any case: the school's closed on Saturdays and it's only odd times like my being on leave today when I could visit during the weekday opening times. I could be wrong: there may be other options in the pipeline that allow more convenient opening hours, I don't know. But in any case, fifty years after my first visit it's almost certainly the last time I'll have visited Lostock's public library.

In the end there is no "In the end"

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

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

So what does get the narrative moving?

"What happens next?"

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

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

The latest DCMS review

I admit it, I missed the boat. By a long chalk. And so I didn't submit my views to the latest public consultation on public libraries. A combination of too many ideas, too little time and self-discipline and worrying overly-much as to how I'd make any of it fit to the three questions asked by the commissioned group.

I've no illusions that I would have made a ha'penny's difference but here are my workings out, in case anyone can use any of it:

At the outset I would like to wish you the best of luck with this latest review of the public library service in England and the hope that whatever your conclusions they are operationally practicable and support at least a decent-quality library service for our communities. You start with a serious handicap: DCMS announcements of reviews of the English public library service are a seasonal thing like the first cuckoo of Spring or the first M&S advert of Christmas. Each comes and goes and together their total operational impact in the real world has been the square root of jack all. This appalling legacy is going to colour too many of the views you are likely to hear. Including mine, unfortunately. I would love it if you could confound my cynicism.

• There is a crying need for national leadership.
  • Now the Olympic Games are over and done with, what is DCMS for? Over the past decade — aside from the occasional launch of an enquiry into the public library service — the department’s engagement with the service has been not so much arm’s length as running a mile from.
  • The public library service in England is undefined, at best weakly supported and subject to no performance management.
  • Regulatory guidance on the delivery of the service is virtually non-existent.
  • The potential for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the public library service by pooling resources and delivery channels across local geopolitical boundaries is being driven patchily at the local level at the same time as long-standing sharing mechanisms are being abandoned or left to wither on the vine.
  • The English public library service is not an integral part of a national literacy programme, a national digital literacy programme or a national information literacy programme despite the huge amount of good work being locally done in these areas by many, if not most library authorities.
    • DCMS is not demonstrating that it knows or much cares about:
      • How many public library buildings are currently still in use;
      • What other delivery channels are being made available for library services;
      • What services are being delivered by these delivery channels;
      • Whether or not these services adequately reflect the needs of the communities they serve;
      • What resources should be employed to provide these services.
• Nobody knows what the public library service is. Everybody has an opinion, nobody has an empirical measure and there is no bottom-line base level of service that can be expected nationwide.
  • The sad fig-leaf that is the 1964 Act provides a fine-sounding but practically-useless sound bite. The sole practical impact of the Act is that public libraries used to get listed under “Statutory” rather than “Discretionary” when the auditors came round to see how well the local council was doing.
  • There is a view that if a building has had the word “library” stuck on it some time in its lifetime and the doors are still open then all is well in the world.
  • There is another view that so long as a building is open to the public and has some books for loan that it is a public library.
  • There is yet another view that wonders why, so long after Erasmus talked about “libraries without walls” and after nearly two decades of public libraries’ beginning to deliver their services online, English public library services are so often defined by the buildings with the word “library” stuck on them not the services being provided and delivered, often outwith those library walls.
  • Ironically, while there is a long-standing UK standard specifying the base common denominator functions for a library management system there isn’t a similar baseline specification for the service such a system would be supporting.
  • There are no baseline metrics for the public library service. The old public library standards were limited in scope and flawed in definition but they at least required that some attempt at performance management and the accumulation of business intelligence was being made. One would not want the public library service to be defined only by what could be measured (worse still only what could be measured forty years ago!) but any credible argument that the service being delivered is anything more than “the doors are open, end of story” must be supported by robust data. CIPFA returns provide some useful data but this is limited, not always freely available and not at all concerned with outcomes. Benchmark data Should include:
    
    • Traditional transactional and visitor throughputs.
    • Outcomes of programmes of library activity.
    • Demographic engagement and outcomes — a demonstration that the service is serving its communities and not just providing services “for people like us by people like us.”
    • Stock analyses, including data on special collections, reserve stock and specifically-local elements (not just “local studies” collections). This would also include contextual age-related data — a collection of Victorian books in a special collection is a matter of interest, a collection of fifteen-year-old children’s picture books is a matter of concern.
    • Performance at each service point, including buildings, outreach and digital channels. Transactional data at library buildings normalised to numbers per staff hour so that variations from the norm can be readily identified; while there should be some variation in response to the needs of the local community other variations may be cause for concern.
    • Analyses of delivery channels both within and without the library buildings managed by the service.
  • Once benchmark data had been established, openly-reported trend analyses should include:
    • Patterns of change of use;
    • Patterns of replacement of use — this might be as simple as 78’s being replaced in stock by mp3’s or as complex as a community of use migrating from one library to another;
    • Contextual commentary — for instance a note of the impact of the school next door closing; a new motorway cutting off a community from its library; or the involvement in a new programme of activities.

There is a need for the availability and application of librarianship skills at a community level. (This is not a call for a quota of “professionals” in each library authority: this has been tried before and too many of us have experience of working alongside librarians who were doing nothing that the “unqualified” library assistants were doing at least as well.) The librarian is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

• The creation of local, parochial bibliographic metadata is culturally- and economically-beneficial to our communities. This is not limited to the traditional form of local studies collections — though these may be seen as an important component of the Arts Council’s commitment to the accessibility of the nation’s heritage.
  • Small-scale publication — especially self-publication — is easier than ever, particularly in e-book formats. There is a very real danger that much of this material will be permanently excluded from the national bibliography. Librarians, working with local authors and publishers should be tasked with the creation and publication of the appropriate metadata.
  • Many titles have a geolocational context that is not recorded or reflected in the commercially-available metadata. Making this local context available provides a hook for the recreational reader; resources for researchers and for teachers creating reading and learning materials; and support for literature-based community activities and tourism programmes.
• A national audit is urgently needed of those special collections not already dispersed, dissolved or disposed of as a result of austerity measures. In particular it is important to find out how much — or little — of these have been catalogued and published electronically so that a programme of work can be set up to address the oversights.
• Community knowledge bases.
• Grey literature.
• Information literacy.
• Local Freedom of Information libraries.

Engagement with the digital world

• Digital inclusion/digital literacy
• Digital libraries
• Integrating the virtual and physical worlds
• Crowdsourcing literary engagement
• Curating user-created content
• [All that stuff you’ve been arguing for fruitlessly for the past decade]

Staff development and continuous service improvement

• Essential — needs to be resourced and needs a proper framework for all staff
• Need to avoid replicating the errors and missed opportunities of the NOF-funded training programme for supporting the People’s Network — no “magic bullets” like ECDL
• Training needs dovetailing with service development needs
• Anticipating the support needs of communities and customers

Use and management of volunteers

• Complementary to paid staff
• Needs to be fair to the volunteer — what’s in it for them?
• Needs to be fair to the service — what’s in it for them?
• Needs to be fair to the community — what’s in it for them?
• Not an easy management win
  • Greater churn that paid staff — constant need for recruitment and training support
  • Too little good supervision of remote front-line staff at the moment — how would the same managers add supervision of volunteers to their portfolio?
  • Discipline and behaviour (this is true of all staff — not just volunteers — but fewer available sticks and carrots)
  • How to manage reputational damage when things go wrong?

Change management: I'm asking you questions because I'm trying to help you get it right

If you were to say to me: "You have to make the following changes to your library management system," my response would be: "Perhaps. But not yet." This isn't me being precious or obstructive; this is me doing my job. There are times when the brown stuff is hitting the fan and you have to do something in a hurry but most of the time it isn't; and even when it is you need to go back and check your workings-out when the fuss has died down.

If you're working in an ITIL environment — and I am — the assumption has to be that you do what the customer asks, so long as it doesn't screw up the integrity of the system that you're managing. So I'd need to ask you a series of questions to make sure that it doesn't. It's important to point out that under ITIL it doesn't matter whether or not the requested change plays Hob with the business; so long as the system remains intact my job would be done. So, for instance, if you were to ask me to set the library loan period to two hours, with a £100 per hour overdue rate I'd be perfectly entitled to raise my eyebrows and ask: "Are you sure?" but the default position is that the change would be made. The customer is always right, within the confines of their rôle and competencies. (I'm not being "neoliberal" here: "customer" in this context has a particular definition.)

That's the principle of the thing. In reality it's a bit more complicated because we want to avoid the dialogue: "It doesn't work." "It does work, it just doesn't do what you wanted it to do." This is a dismal and unproductive conversation which could do serious damage to the working relationship so we make the effort to avoid it. So I'll ask a few more questions:

"What do you want to do?"
It's astonishing how often this question causes a problem. If you don't know what you want to do, how will you know when you've done it? How will you know if the proposed change will address the issue to hand? And if it is the solution to a problem, is it the best solution? You'd be surprised how often the first applied solution to come along becomes accepted as an essential compnent of the process, regardless of the impact on the efficiency or effectiveness of the business. Just because you know how to pick a lock within two minutes just with the aid of a hair pin doesn't mean you'd necessarily want to throw your front door key away.

"Who does this affect and are they OK with it?"
Systems and services don't live in hermetically-sealed bubbles. At least have a think about who's involved and/or do an outline impact analysis on the back of a fag packet. And do make sure that anyone affected by the change knows about it and what it means to them. If the impacts are big and scary enough you may need to sketch out a communication strategy for them.

"What happens if it goes wrong?"
Give the risks a degree of respect. Don't assume nothing could go wrong or they'll come and bite you on the bum. Make sure you know what could happen if it goes wrong; what the impact would be; and that you have a Plan B, a safety net and/or the capacity to go back to where you started from.

"What do you mean by...?"
Make sure you're talking about the same thing with the same meaning. "Better," "Improved" and "Modernise" are words that should be deprecated in this conversation: what do they mean in the working context? For instance, a set of catalogue records may be more complete, with every tag full of data; or may exhibit a purer adherence to current cataloguing standards; or may be Dewey classified to fifteen decimals, but is it actually better? For whom? You may need to sketch out a quality description document for changes to key data or even a quality plan if you're talking about large-scale fundamental changes.

"How will you know if it's worked?"
Because we want to avoid that dark and dismal dialogue, right?

Listening to global voices

Food for thought in one of the TED lectures. In this one, Ethan Zuckerman talks about the need to open up your online world and read the news in languages you don't even know.

He argues that "the web connects the globe, but most of us end up hearing mainly from people just like ourselves." Which is uncomfortably like the problem with some public libraries — "for people like us, by people like us," with everybody else fringed off and assigned their special label to be treated differently. We know that this doesn't have to be so, and there's a lot going on in our libraries to try and knock that sort of attitude on the head. Which is just as well as public libraries are excellently positioned to help foster Zuckerman's "xenophilia" and have excellent reasons for making an active effort to do it.

• Public libraries are — or should be — important serendipity engines within the community. The key purpose of the library is to give the user the keys to the world. This can't be effected if the library only delivers what the specifics that customer asks for. As Arkwright says: "What they come in for is up to themselves. What they go out with is up to us."
• The survival of any public sector service is dependent on not just being important to "people like us." The more "people not like us" that a service engages with, satisfies and delights the better for its chances of survival. Which is why, for all the breast-beating over the years, the prospects for the public library service are better than those for the municipal blacksmith, the lamp-lighter and the knocker-upper.
• Local economic recovery is dependent on entrepreneurship and inward investment. These days the key markets, and the money, are in Asia.
• We need to maximise the chances of serendipitous discovery of opportunities for local entrepreneurs.
• We need to maximise the chances of serendipitous discovery of local opportunities for overseas entrepreneurs.

How to do it?

• We need to make sure that we don't make all our user interface too relevant. At first that sounds counter-productive, we don't want to be wasting our customers' time after all. All I'm saying is that there always needs to be a small but visible proportion of almost randomised, but certainly unexpected, content or activity that can act as a bridge between the user's daily information/cultural commuting route and roads less-travelled. The whole customer experience needs to enable the same scope for serendipitous discovery as a browse of the library bookshelves.
• We need to be open to and promote user-generated content that provides useful bridges. And perhaps even be brave enough to let customers themselves define and share "useful."
• We need to mainstream and actively promote those activities that link us with "people unlike ourselves."
• We need to make sure the we, our content and our community are available. If we're not there we won't be found. Back in the nineties a friend's library service scored quite a few Brownie points because a Japanese company used the library's online community information database to investigate the local social infrastructure, which led to them setting up a factory there.

We should be doing that anyway. It's worth testing whether or not we actually do.

Shared services

There's an overview of shared services on the SCONUL site. Although this is written from an academic perspective there are currently too many different collaborative agendas for public libraries to ignore and there is some to learn here.

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...