Whole team working

I usually try to let the "we are The Professionals" stuff glide by me these days. I find it a pity that The Profession still feels the need to define its strengths by imagining deficiencies in others. All front-line staff in our libraries should be able to deliver the services ascribed to "paid professionals" and quite a lot of people who aren't working in libraries are delivering much of this, though public libraries are ideal for joining all the dots.

Some of those in The Profession could do with taking this cautionary tale to heart...

Signs of the times

Over the past few weeks I've had all sorts of ideas of stuff to post on here. Between work, commuting and the sunny weather... well, you know.

In the mean time, here's Manchester telling people that their new, temporary, City Library is now open on Deansgate.

Public library activity in the areas of health and well-being

Reading Agency and Department of Information Science at Loughborough University have just issued a report — "Public library activity in the areas of health and well-being" — on a study funded by the MLA.

There's a lot to feel encouraged about by this, not least the recognition that public libraries already do a lot of work with their local communities to promote both healthy living and well-being in general. As the authors state:

"Libraries offer neutral, non- stigmatised, non-clinical community space, in a setting that differentiates it from hospital services, delivers the prevention agenda particularly effectively, and has implications for the audiences reached. Partners felt that the combination of these factors creates a unique offer that made the public library a good place to offer health and well-being activity."

Inevitably, though, we continue to suffer because of the diffidence of the public library sector:

"Libraries’ inability to articulate their contribution to the health and well-being agenda is reinforced by their relative invisibility in high level health, well-being and social care policy and strategy."

This needs to change and it is encouraging to see that in many places it is changing and library managers are banging the drum about the contribution that their libraries make. It's important that we factor this into resource planning for public libraries. One of the continuing dangers of the development of self-service and 'tell us once' projects is that they are seen as replacements for front-line library staff instead of liberators of front-line library staff.

"Library staff are viewed as a key resource in terms of their existing roles and functions, since some aspects of health and well-being work build on what library staff do and what they do well."

If we can release front-line staff from purely mechanical tasks then they will have more time to do what they do so well. And it is arguably more cost-effective for the public purse to let (let's be honest: inexpensive) public library staff do their thing than it is to have a raft of projects and programmes, each with their own manager and funding stream.

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.