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.

Experience isn't what happens to you…

One of the mantras I trot out with alarming regularity is: "Experience isn't what happens to you, it's what you do with it." Experience is one of those nebulous things that everybody sort-of understands but can’t quite nail down consistently. It’s what makes you reach for a pencil instead of a tortoise when you want to write a shopping list or makes you remember to put a rubber glove on before poking round in the back of “that” drawer in the kitchen.

Experience is confused with occurrence. It’s also often confused with wisdom. Experience is the “understanding-level” derivative of occurrence the same way that wisdom is the “understanding-level” derivative of data:

Wisdom	Experience
Knowledge	Repetition
Information	Record
Data	Occurrence

Too often experience is code for “time served,” as in the common person specification: “Must have x years’ experience.”  This is a lazy way of saying: “We want this person to have some idea of what they’re doing from day one.” It’s also wrong-headed: while it’s true that it’s easy enough to assess whether or not somebody’s done that amount of time doing something it isn’t necessarily true that they’ve done it the same way or with the same tools. This lack of applicable context bites even deeper when you think about what those years of “experience” might really be. Some people have 20 years’ worth of repetition of the same working week.

If you ever see "experience" in a person specification don’t be put off if you want the job: think about what might be required that would need “x years’ experience” to do. You might already have done it!

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.

Extending your characters

Every so often I realise that there's sometimes an advantage to being of that vintage who cut their PC teeth on Wordstar and remember having to refer to Windows 2.0 cheat sheets. I was working on a document with a colleague and by a trick of the keyboard a ë appeared on the screen. "How did you do that?" she asked. After a brief explanation it became clear that she had never used tools like the Windows character map or used the keypad to get the extended Latin Character Set. She was dead chuffed, having been frustrated at never being able to type café, rôle or ¾. I we;; remember my own delight a quarter of a century ago at finding I could get a proper em dash (I set the bar low where delight's concerned).

A quick straw poll of the team demonstrated a generational divide. These are the notes I put together.

The Windows Character Map

How you get to have a look at the Character Maps depends on the way the PC's set up.

• You may find it in the Start Menu: Start > Programmes > Accessories
• If not, go to Start > Run and enter the command charmap

At the top of the dialogue box for the Character Map you'll see a pull-down list of the fonts on your PC. Choose the one you're currently working in (or have a look at a few different fonts if you're just exploring).

The main body of the dialogue box is the Map itself. You'll see all the characters listed; you'll also see that at the bottom of the dialogue box there's a code for the character and its name ("U+0021: Exclamation Mark" in the example on the right). If a little box is empty it means that this font doesn't have that character.

How to select and copy a character

1. Look for the character you want
2. Click on it
3. The box containing the character will become bigger. (If you've clicked on the wrong character you can move around using your cursor keys)
4. Click on the "Select" button and you'll see this character appear in the "Characters to copy" box (see right). You can select as many characters as you want.
5. Click on the "Copy" button
6. Go back to your document, paste and the character will appear. You may need to change the size: it'll be 12pt or 13pt when it's pasted.

Character Map really becomes useful when you're looking for characters in Dingbat-type fonts.

————

Using the Alt key to enter the appropriate codes for the characters

Alt plus the numbers on the keypad on the right-hand side of the keyboard gives the following:

128 Ç	129 ü	130 é	131 â	132 ä	133 à
134 å	135 ç	136 ê	137 ë	138 è	139 ï
140 î	141 ì	142 Ä	143 Å	144 É	145 æ
146 Æ	147 ô	148 ö	149 ò	150 û	151 ù
152 ÿ	153 Ö	154 Ü	155 ø	157 Ø	160 á
161 í	162 ó	163 ú	164 ñ	165 Ñ	168 ¿
173 ¡	0162 ¢	0163 £	0165 ¥	0167 §	0169 ©
0174 ®	0176 °	0177 ±	0181 µ	0182 ¶	0183 ·
0188 ¼	0189 ½	0190 ¾	0191 ¿	0150 –	0151 —
0134 †	0135 ‡	0149 •	0133 …	0137 ‰	0128 €
0153 ™	0223 ß

Specification: the importance of purpose

If I were to ask you what you could do with a stick like as not you'd quickly come up with half a dozen entirely practicable ideas. You could use it to prod cans off supermarket shelves or prop up a flower stem, You could poke a wasps' nest or hit a golf ball across the lawn. You could stir concrete or poke holes in doughnuts with it. And so on until bedtime.

But what if I asked you what a stick could do? You'd probably need to think a bit about that. Especially if I asked what a stick could do that wasn't really what you could do with a stick. It could stay where it was or it could rot or, if it were fresh off the tree, it might take root and grow. There aren't many other options as spring immediately to mind.

Like any technology, the usefulness or not of the stick is dependent on the purpose to which it is actually applied. This is why whenever we're looking at any new equipment or application the "What would you want to do with it?" question is infinitely more important than "What does it do?" It may be capable of doing very many splendid things but until somebody actually puts it to work these are only a potential usefulness. And very often the use a technology is put to isn't the one intended by the person who built it (screwdrivers weren't designed for levering the lids off tins of paint, they just happen to be very useful for doing so).

When you're building a specification or statement of user requirements you need to be mindful of the difference between describing what something will be and describing what something will do. Specifications too often describe — and prescribe — processes without describing their preferred outcomes. Which is perverse because if the object isn't to specify a physical object or deploy some sort of brand you want as much freedom of interpretation as possible. In design thinking terms you're defining the problem not building the prototype.

The purpose of specification is to define the problem to be solved. If you use the specification to define the prototype then you could be missing out on better potential solutions. Like Henry Ford might or might not have said: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

Taking the Edward

I think we have an early contender for Brass Neck Of The Year 2016.

Collective strength

It's National Libraries Day. I could  stand at the railings outside what this time last year was my local library, pining for services lost but I'd much rather think of positive things.

National Library Day is the date chosen for the public launch of the Greater Manchester Libraries Consortium.

The consortium's been a work in the wings for the best part of five years, three years in concrete form. The heart of the technical architecture is the library management system: we started sharing the bibliographic data three years ago and this first phase of the shared lending functions was technically live just before Christmas. It's a small but important step: customers can look at an online catalogue shared by the whole consortium — Blackburn, Bolton, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport and Trafford — and reserve an item from any of them.

At this stage you'll need to go to the item's "home" library to pick it up, there's a big piece of work to be done on transit logistics across the consortium but even with this caveat it's an exciting first step and it was good to see not only a big piece in the Manchester Evening News but also a very approving editorial. We don't often get high-profile hugs these days, we should enjoy them when they come along.

Strangely enough, although reservations are easily the most complicated part of the lending library operation this phase has been the easiest to implement because for all intents and purposes each authority's operation is still acting in a stand-alone basis.The next phase will require more of an integration of circulation systems and the scoping work for that is going on at the moment.

Like any decent undertaking like this we've had our fair share of stumbles and oh no moments, and one of the painful consequences of sharing a system across a consortium is the need for a fair bit of coordinating effort to get the ducks in a row ready for routine system upgrades. But there are upsides: we've built up a couple of useful support networks and the benefits have certainly extended beyond the confines of the library management system and the consortium.

And the public have a new extension to their library services and the promise of more to come.

A (very brief) introduction to library management systems for people who've never worked in a library

For one reason or another we're doing quite a lot of knowledge-sharing in our team at the moment. In my case I'm doing a lot of preparation for handing over the support for the library management systems. The first big step in this was a session introducing a "vanilla" LMS and the business that it's trying to support. Given that I'm the only person in our team who's ever worked in a library I thought it important to begin by mapping out the landscape of what our customers are doing so that when we're looking at specific functions there's an operational, rather than just technical, context.

A (very brief) introduction to library management systems from Steven Heywood

Pretty good response to it. We had a useful discussion of where the key support loads are:

• Acquisitions is always disproportionately problematic, even when it's fully-automated. And the road to fully-automating a vendor's EDI stream can be very rocky indeed.
• Given the huge volume of transactional traffic involved in Circulation functions it doesn't generate a lot of support work.
• The workload generated by management information requirements is caused, with a few exceptions, by the ad-hoc nature of the requirements, 
• The end of the financial year is busy but that's largely because that's when changes to parameters such as fines and charges, budgets, etc. need to be made.

Rochdale's part of a consortium but for the purposes of this and the next couple of sessions we're pretending that it's a stand-alone operation so that people can get their heads around the principles of the system. My thinking is that, Acquisitions aside, supporting a stand-alone LMS these days is pretty straight sailing and this is the feedback I got from my colleagues. Moving into consortium working is a lot more tricky and generates a lot of work due to the need to co-ordinate efforts and align both processes and parameters. So one of the sessions I'm planning will involve my walking through the steps we've taken this far — and the systemic work involved — and the roadmap for the immediate future.