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.

Abstract thinking 2

A while back I had a bit of a play with some pictures of libraries, turning them into kaleidoscope images. I said that I'd come back a bit later to see if I could pick out the new reburbishments from the older builds. I struggled a bit, I'll admit. Which turns out to be surprising as when you clump them all together it becomes obvious...

Builds and refurbishments before 2005

Builds and refurbishments after 2005

Coping with Twitter

I'm not yet a convert to Twitter. I've been having a play with paper.li and have converted my Twitter into a daily newspaper. And suddenly, I can not only cope with it, I quite like it. I'm still not convinced as to how this deals with non-business tweets so I've had Albert Shark RN tweet something so that I can see how it fits in, or not.

Besides the fun of having a bit of a play I think there's a serious point here. We need to be careful to provide a variety of user interface formats for our service channels, not just in order to meet the needs of different platforms and delivery mechanisms but also the needs of the different customers. You'd like to think that was a given, wouldn't you? I'm not always convinced of this: the needs of the body corporate can too often force a one-size-fits-all, lowest common denominator type of usability testing. To a large extent this is unavoidable with the core corporate web site as that really is required to be one-size-fits-all. The important thing is to re-use and refocus the content in as many different additional channels as can be practicable.

This website is not endorsed by Google!

The Library 101 Project has produced a lovably geeky 'video experience' with a serious message behind it that's worth a look.

(Caution - a ton and a half of flashing colours and strobing.)

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.

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.

Jiscmail

Remember the old days when you could go to the Jiscmail site to browse the archives on a discussion list, enter the name of the list you want and get there? Instead of trawling through layers of categorisations, or using a search engine that finds a page of "no result" entries.

In the end I had to Google lis-pub-libs.

A shame, the front end to the Jiscmail site looks a ton better, it's just not useful.

LMS musings: customer management

I wanted front-line staff to have the opportunity for a bit of structured brainstorming amongst themselves without (at this stage) being prompted or led by somebody higher up in the food chain. But I also wanted to avoid their feeling left to flounder so I circulated a note to help get them started. The responses to date have been very useful. I wish we were currently able to free them up for a get-together to bounce ideas around more thoroughly, I know it would be very productive.

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Library customers (not only borrowers!) management — brainstorming the business needs

We want you to think about how we would use a new library management system (LMS) to manage our customers, and not just borrowers.

If at all possible, we need to include all our customers in the system and if at all possible we need to have auditable data about all our customer transactions. In reality this isn’t always practicable or desirable but we need to include as many customers as possible.

What we want you to do:

1. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Or some post-it notes if you prefer.
2. The questions are:
1. What information do we need to be able to provide services to our customers?
2. What information do we need to make sure that we’re providing the appropriate services for each customer?
3. What information do we need to make sure that we’re putting the right resources (staff, stock, events or whatever) in the right places to deliver these services?
4. How do we prove that we’re earning our keep and doing it right?
5. How do we prove that we’re meeting the needs of the whole community?
3. Forget about what how we do things now.
4. Think about what we should be doing now and what you think we will need to be doing in the future.
5. Don’t worry about putting the ideas you have into any sort of order, just get the idea noted down while you remember what it was.
6. Once you’ve got your ideas noted down you might want to come back to them and decide whether each one is something:
• We need;
• We want; or
• We would like.

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Before you start, have a look at a few issues that we need to bear in mind…

All systems begin and end with somebody wanting something to happen.

A computer is not a system and a system does not need a computer.

Your business needs are:

• What needs to happen at the beginning?
• How will you know it has happened at the end?
• Don’t get bogged down with the intermediary steps; and definitely don’t get bogged down by “this is what we do now”
• At this stage of the game you’re wanting to know whether the system delivers the end product.

The way that you work with a new LMS will be very different to the way you work with Dynix.

• Different systems will work in different ways. I guarantee that any new library management system will not work like Dynix and will not be “a more modern version of Dynix.” For better and worse it will be very different.
• The technical installation of a new LMS is the easy bit. The hard bit is changing the way you work so that your business processes take advantage of the most efficient and effective ways of using your new system to deliver your services, rather than bodging the new system to mimic existing business processes and compromising the services in the process. This is referred to as process re-engineering. This needs to be a constant process, starting as early as possible during the installation and continuing until you start installing your next management system.

Don’t confuse process and product.

• Do you want that green flashing light because the system’s designed to give you a green flashing light or because you want the system to tell you that something’s just happened? In which case, would something else do the job just as well?

Think about how you as a customer would want to interact with the Library Service.

• The Library Service is not a building, and a building isn’t the Library Service. We can, do, and will increasingly provide library services beyond the walls of the library building.
• When you log onto an e-commerce site like Amazon or Tesco Online; or onto a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter, the system…
• Provides you with information/advertising based on your previous activities;
• Provides you with information/advertising from resources/people you have said you’re interested in; and
• Provides a personal service to you.

So can, and should, your LMS.

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Help sheet
(Only to be used as a last resort if the blank sheet of paper’s getting to be too intimidating!)

Seriously, only use these questions if you desperately need a kick-start to get yourself going. We want as many ideas and perspectives as possible and we don’t want you to feel that you’ve got to follow this structure.

• Who uses the library?
• What are the different needs of different customers?
• What do we want them to do?
• What do we want them not to do?
• What do they do?
• Where?
• When?
• Were we any use to them?
• What else do they do?
• Where?
• When?
• Were we any use to them?
• What information do we need about them?
• How do we keep their custom?
• How do we market our services to our customers?

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.

LMS musings

I'm working up a functional specification for a new LMS, to replace Dynix. I'll miss Dynix when the time comes: what it does it does nicely, unfortunately what it doesn't do is telling on us badly. But time moves on and we need to plan ahead for a system that'll meet our emerging business needs as much as the established ones.

We've got a copy of the UK Core Specification to act as a backbone to our own. The UKCS is precisely what it says on the tin and necessarily a bit basic. Even so, I think there are a couple of omissions in key areas that need tackling:

• Customer management sort of runs through the UKCS but entirely from the point of view of library processes rather than customer focus. We need to be able to use the LMS proactively as a market-research tool just as much as a gateway for delivering services. We also need to be able to provide a personalised service, aggregating an appropriate mix of services, not necessarily all provided by us. Customers in this sense shouldn't only mean individuals, we also need to think about how we provide an appropriate suite of services for groups and communities within the borough.
• Enquiry management doesn't appear at all. Coming from the advice centre and one-stop-shop services as I did it came as a shock to find that dealing with enquiries weren't a key metric. We still don't know, for instance, what proportion of our enquiry desk workload is generated by factors entirely under our control such as signage and display of materials. We also don't have a systematic mechanism for keeping track of FAQs and fugitive facts (we have the tools for the doing of, but that's not the same thing).

I'm currently picking the brains of front-line staff on these and a couple of other areas. I'll also be having a chat with RMBC's Contact Centre to see what their requirements are. We'd want the LMS to be able to work seamlessly with the corporate CRM but the much more important question is: what would they need the LMS to deliver so that they can provide a better service to our customers?