Digital Inclusion workshop

This is the Prezi I did for today's Staff Conference to try and provoke a bit of discussion about digital inclusion.

The main aim is to try to get people to recognise what they're already doing (which is quite a lot really) and to take on board that they're going to be needing to do quite a lot more in future. My being shifted out of the Library Service complicates the dynamic of that bit, of course...

Library Day In The Life

I'm joining in with A Day in the Life of a Library... Like a ton of other people I'm tweeting a few of the goings-on at work (you can follow them here).

It'll be a useful exercise for me anyway, I'm meeting myself catching up just lately and could do with reviewing what/how I do. Not the least because one of the issues being addressed this week is the status or not of my own job (the good news being that I should still have a job somewhere or other this Summer!)

Hey ho.

Rethinking user education materials a bit

Am consciously neglecting this blog: a lot on at work, much of which is pretty grim, and other stuff I need to get to grips with. Let's try and find something positive to say for myself.

A chance online encounter prompted Ian Stringer to ask if he could come and have a chat with me about some work he and his son Paul are doing. It was an opportunity for Paul to have a look at a library management system and have an overview of how we use it. Classic Dynix is absolutely not what you would use as the textbook example of a modern LMS but it does what it does pretty well on the whole for the purposes of illustration. It's a shame that they hadn't come along a few weeks ago when I still had the schematic for the customer interface on the whiteboard. They went away happy. It turned out that this was a useful meeting for me, too. I needed to be reminded that I do actually know a few things.

I'd intended to spend this afternoon drawing pictures of a learning session, or programme of sessions, on the theme "Online reading for people without e-readers." It's an idea I've been kicking round the office for a couple of weeks: the majority of our various how-to-use-the-internet sessions and programmes are geared towards helping people learn how to use the hardware and software and not towards what you might want to do with them, except in a generally cursory fashion. My argument was that a lot of our customers wouldn't see themselves as being in the market for signing up for a Myguide session, say, but could well be interested in finding out more about things that interest them on the web. Signing up for Myguide would then be a way of helping them get more out of an existing interest rather than requiring a new interest in computers. So I was asked to put my typing finger where my mouth is and sketch out the learning paths.

That was the intention. So of course I followed an interesting-looking link a couple of people had flagged up on Twitter and the next thing I knew I'd signed myself up on xtranormal, spent a couple of minutes getting my head round the instructions and within half an hour I had this, admittedly very clunky, bit of user education video about how to renew your library loans. It wouldn't do for most of our audiences, especially in this state, but I can see some mileage in our putting together a few short, snappy "informercials" for younger (or dafter) audiences. Especially as it really is very easy to put together.

This in turn opened up a few more possibilities which, together with my getting my head around Bit.ly's new link bundling tool, means I'll probably need a bigger bit of paper to scribble on. Once I've started to define the shape of the work I'll do a tidier version on Prezi to share the details with colleagues at work.

I'll get it done tonight. There's a pile of crap on the telly.

Books in a box...

A picture of a Lighthouse Keeper's library gave me an idea: we do a lot of outreach work of one type and another and we’re looking at doing a lot more in future.

It occurs to me that the containers we use for delivery don’t actually say “Rochdale Library Service” or that acts as a unifying element to the collections of books, etc. that we’re sending out. It’s probably the wrong year to suggest this but it could be a good idea to have a robust package like this (one dreams of varnished oak!) that could hold a couple of dozen or so books or similar at a time and that could be issued as group items on the system — “Books In A Box.”

The advantages would be:

• There’d be a robust container that carried the Rochdale Library Service brand.
• The package could be designed to hold a set number of items, so it would be obvious to the borrower when something’s missing because there’d be a gap where it ought to be.
• The interior of the doors could include display information about the Library Service and/or the stock in the box. Which means that when it’s not being a package in transit it could be a miniature display cabinet, which would be particularly useful for situations with deposit collections.
• “Spare” boxes could be used as props in displays and at exhibitions and conferences.
• Each box would contain different materials so it should be easy enough to ensure that loans to nurseries, nursing homes, etc. were refreshed — staff would only need to know that the site’s had boxes 1, 4 and 6 so far this year instead of the 72 or so titles that had been loaned in the process.

Periodically, somebody would need to check the state of the stock in the boxes; the prompt for that could be set automatically on the system. And of course there’d be no reason why the site couldn’t borrow additional items to complement the “Books In A Box.”

It seems too obvious for us not to already be doing it. Perhaps I'll spot the snag if I sleep on it.

Speaking in tongues

I was chatting to a friend the other day. He's a lecturer and, like many people in the academic sector, his school was being required to justify its worth to the university in business terms, which was proving difficult. For one thing, it just doesn't seem right philosophically: while the university can, and does, work closely with business should it actually a business itself? For another, those of us over the age of thirty have had so much half-chewed and often misunderstood business-speak spat at us over the years that even the best-conceived and well-founded attempt at setting out a mission statement for our organisations will set off a five-bell alarm on our bullshit meters. But ignoring it and hoping it'll go away isn't an option. These things have a habit of hanging around like a bad smell on the landing and if you don't provide the necessary input somebody else, who may not necessary have your best interests at heart, will. So he was chafing at the question: "given that there are private companies providing similar or the same services as you, what is your unique selling point?"

This sounds horribly familiar.

Since well before the days of Best Value Fundamental Service Reviews public libraries have been facing similar questions. The public sector as a whole has being doing it for a generation. It's sadly inescapable in the consumerist society we find ourselves in today. We can't wish it away, we've tried that and it doesn't wash. People who care about public libraries -- not just librarians -- are stepping up and making the case at a local level and, increasingly, nationally as well. Campaigns like "Voices For The Library" are starting to do a really good job at pulling together the value of public libraries to communities and individuals alike. This is great, but it's only half of the job. It's important, we need to support and share it, but there's something else needing doing.

There is an oft-cried lament: "why is it so-and-so who always gets interviewed or consulted about public libraries and not us?" Well... always being available is one reason. A journalist or researcher desperate for copy within a tight deadline can always find a place for an off-the-peg statement from a convenient source. A politician or chief executive trying to manage the eternal search for the efficiency saving that will deliver more for less is in the market for easy-to-find solutions.

The other, more telling reason, is that the statement will be presented in a vernacular that makes sense to the person who will be using it. Whatever you may think of the worth of the advice being given, these people have got one thing devastatingly right: they are talking to their audience in the language they understand. The advice being presented makes sense to the audience because it references the priorities and terminologies that are part and parcel of their workaday realities. Conflicting advice, if any is being made available, is usually presented in a way that isn't easy to relate to those realities. And so...

So public libraries need to find voices that talk to these audiences. Journalists, politicians and chief executives aren't, for the most part, businessmen but the vernacular that they use is derived from corporate business-speak. We need to be able to communicate our values and our worth in that vernacular. Some would argue that this is selling out. I would argue that this is being professional. You explain to a child how to use the library. You explain to a new borrower how to find the books they want. You explain to a student the importance of information literacy. You explain to a colleague the nuances of a new library system. If you used the same reference points and vocabulary with all those audiences you would fail. But you wouldn't do it, would you? What you would do is explain: "this is what it does, this is why it's useful to you" and you would make sure as best you could that it made sense to them. So why is it any different when we're talking to the movers and shakers and purse-string holders? It isn't. We need to explain that a world without public libraries would be less rich but more expensive. We need to explain the return on investment provided by having professional library staff and the added value provided by the librarians amongst them. We need to explain that public libraries can teach government departments a thing or two about distributed asset management; efficiencies through effective resource sharing and active, personalised online service delivery. We need to ask why our mayors can find a book in a library a thousand miles away but not know what information assets can be found in their town halls.

We need to do these things and more. And this would need to work hand-in-hand with the voices to the community that are already being established. By explaining our worth to both sides of the political (small p) machine there is a chance that the true potential of public libraries could be recognised and exploited for the benefit of future generations.

Oh, and my friend? It took us a few minutes once we took a step back to have a look at the picture properly. The private companies may be doing a serviceable job of teaching people how to use the tools presently to hand to do the work currently required. The job of my friend and his colleagues is to also teach people how and why the tools are designed and made and how they can evolve or be replaced to adapt to changing circumstances. The private companies are equipping students for the next five years; the university is equipping them for the next twenty-five years.

Just the same as public libraries are resources for life, not just for exams and the workplace.

Voices for the library

While I was working in the garden this weekend I was sketching out some ideas for a post suggesting things that librarians could do for themselves to illustrate the real-life impact that public libraries have on real people.

It's nice to have been beaten to it! Good work and well done to all the people involved.

And especially for picking up and running with the fact that it isn't just librarians doing all this. That's a very encouraging sign. I've recommended that my colleagues should drop by this site every so often to remind themselves of the worth of their work. We're also going to try and encourage a few contributions to the site from our neck of the woods.

Oh yes?

It is a basic eternal and unquestionable tenet of public library life that public libraries are in decline. It was all busier and better back in the Golden Age. And like all Golden Age mythologies there is a spark of truth in there. After a hard day's grind, faced with the choice of the Archbishop of Woolwich on the BBC and a kitchen sink drama on ITV the horny-handed son of toil would switch the telly off and read a book from the library. In those long, endless sunny summer days the knee-scabbed child, weary of being told off for playing football in the street, would be glad of an event at the local library and performers would play to packed houses. Now, with so many competition attractions and distractions it is the library's fate to fall into desuetude.

Oh yes?

I'll let you into a secret. We have no evidence as to whether or not we were any busier then than we are now.

Seriously. The only numbers we have that are worth spit are the number of members and the number of items, usually books, issued. That was no more a true reflection of the actual use of the library in 1960 than it is now. All those quiet readers, the scholars, the audiences and the enquirers are all unrecorded.

Oh, but we have visitor count figures, haven't we? We were asked for visitor count figures so we've got them, haven't we? Up to a point. We have no evidence of how many visitors we had in August 2005. Or August 2000. Or August 1995 come to that. None. Like many library authorities, and probably longer than many, our annual visitor figures were derived by manually counting the number of visitors over two slow weeks in Autumn (there was no point doing them during the busy weeks as staff would have been too busy to do the counting) and then multiplying the result by twenty-six. How true or not a reflection of the year's bodily throughput was that? Looking at the seasonal variations in issues and events and anecdotal experience it's unlikely that those figures reflect very much more than two slow weeks in Autumn.

We don't have enquiry statistics. I can't and won't defend our not having enquiry statistics, I'm baffled by it. I won't get started on the subject.

So we have the issue statistics. Overall, these have gone down significantly over the past two decades, though the details are a bit more complicated and worth coming back to later. We know that currently three-quarters of the visits to our libraries do not result in a loan. (We'd like to change that pronto but that's the proportion at the moment.) Has the proportion of visits to loans always been 3:1? We don't know, we have no safe evidence to say. Intuitively one would suspect not: with The People's Network, Bookstart, joint service centres and the like one would suspect not, but I can't prove it. And neither can anyone else. Which is a bit galling because it's significant: if Library X had a proportion of visits to issues of 2.7:1 in 1990 and issues have dropped 10% in the past twenty years they would have been dealing with exactly the same number of customers back then, just doing different things. One obvious different thing is that instead of borrowing the reference library's cast-off ten-year-old encyclopaedia to do their homework children can come in and use one of our computers to look things up in one or other of our online reference services. Or even --horror of horrors! -- log onto them at home with their library barcode.

The other change in use, hinted at earlier, is the relationship between the big libraries and their satellites. Time was, the only way you were going to get to browse a big selection of books was to go into the big town and visit the big library. Time was. Now, you can browse the whole library system's catalogue from the smallest branch, or even from home (or sitting in an airport in Hong Kong while waiting for a delayed flight, or so I'm told). And you can reserve an item (we let you do it for free in our service) and arrange for us to deliver it to the library that's most convenient for you. So instead of going home from work and then having to turn round and go into town to go to the library you can just nip round the corner. Which in lots of respects is great: it's a major convenience for our customers and the first thing they pick up on when we explain how the web catalogue works. So the issue figures for main libraries inevitably decline and the branch libraries' issue figures rise. And we can actually see those trends setting in. But here comes the down side: the small local community branch library is traditionally the one with the limited opening hours. So we actually impede the customer-driven service transformation, and the new age of austerity threatens to make that worse. It would be interesting to see the results of a library authority deciding to chop a few hours off the opening times of a main library and using the staff to extend the opening hours at two or three branch libraries.

The bad news is that decades of wistful mooning over a long-lost Golden Age has come and bitten us on the arse. The good news is that there's never been a better opportunity to try something different and that difference doesn't necessarily have to lose the traditional identity of the community library if we get the opportunity to give it a go.

Facebook manners and you

A neatly instructional little film.

Big picture worries

Many of us need to address some organisational and systemic issues which aren’t very exciting in themselves and that we’ve been sort-of-getting-away-with for a few decades, but which may determine how well (or if) the public library service survives the next few years and which should make us better able to do the exciting things that people want to have happen.

In particular, we need to lessen the public librarian's traditional emphasis on buildings and furniture and focus our (and, more importantly, the public’s) attention onto services and people.

• There’s no point in committing all our resources on the set dressing if we don’t have a good play to put on or the leading man’s talking to himself in the love scene.
• In changing the service in response to cuts and new opportunities we need to be clear which is baby and which is bathwater.

We know there are a lot of challenging questions facing us. Some library services have got some of the answers. Some library services have got some of the questions. Here are a few...

Resource management — we have to be smarter about using the resources we’ve got more effectively and efficiently. We need to know what resources we have in the first place:

• Do you have a reasonable idea of your stock?
• Too many of us effectively ignore the literally millions of free resources on the web and don’t use the resources we pay for particularly effectively. We need to be treating these materials as part of our stock, to be selected, described and promoted the same way as we should be doing with physical resources. At the very least we should be making these available via the Library Catalogue. More than that, we should be using these as part of service development and delivery. It’s axiomatic that we should be using these as reference and information service resources. It should be equally obvious that they’re useful for literacy and reader development and as reading matter in their own right.
• An easy example for us at Rochdale would be tying together the physical resources in the Maskew Collection (a new collection of classic literature funded by a bequest) with out-of-print classics in Project Gutenberg.
• Are we actively using our Reserve Stock? No, but we could and should be. The National Back Catalogue of Books is an important resource that we shouldn't be wasting.
• Do we really know our customers, their use of the library and their needs? We have two decades’ worth of customer usage data. What are the trends in usage and membership and what do they tell us about what is and isn’t working in our libraries?
• Are there differences in trends for different customer groups? The answer is yes. We have some startling variances once we start looking over a ten-year period. Why?
• Are there differences in the rate of change over time? Yes again. Sometimes it’s obviously because of refurbishment or repair of the library, but are there other lessons to be learned? And what are the medium- long-term effects of refurbishments?
• Are trends different in different libraries? Are the patterns of use different? Yes. Why?
• How do usage patterns reflect, or not, the history of events and activities at each library?
• Do any customer usage patterns reflect any stock usage patterns? Is the use of a particular library by a particular customer group inextricably linked to the fortunes of a particular collection?
• Do usage patterns reflect changes of use rather than abandonment? Is the Internet doing the job that was traditionally done by some of our non-fiction stock? (It’s certainly doing the job of a lot of the reference stock.) People can access all our lending stock online, reserve a copy and have it sent over to their most convenient library, instead of having to go into the main library for the most choice — are main libraries becoming repositories rather than main access points?

What are staff capable of and what do they need to fulfil their potential?

• Do we know, or recognise, the skills and experience our staff are bringing to the workplace? Too many public libraries have had a culture of keeping people (especially, but not exclusively, the "para-professionals") in their place. We cannot afford to waste resources we are already paying for.
• Skills audits and a training needs analyses need to be kept up-to-date to reflect a changing world. And the skills audit needs to be shared within the Library Service so that anybody who needs a particular skill can easily find out who’s got it.

A modern library service needs a structured approach to partnership working with the focus of the relationship being the value added to the services and goals of the organisation.

• This should include a practical and practicable partnership strategy, including clear guidelines on determining the ROI of a potential partnership and a model exit strategy.
• For a practical and practicable partnership strategy to be practicable it would need to be available well beforehand to those staff who may be in a position to enter into partnership arrangements!

The modern library service needs to actively engage with ICT instead of treating it as something somehow “other” to the services we provide. It is an inescapable part of our service provision.

• In Rochdale we should be replacing both the PN management system and the LMS in the next year (actually, the intended timescales are scarily short). The hard question facing us is: "What is the Library Service actually planning on doing with them?" We need to be very clear about the reasons for making this investment and the intended return on this investment. And we need to make it clear that these aren't just magic wand solutions. After all, just because you’ve bought a hammer and some wood doesn’t mean the garden shed’s going to build itself.
• It's easy to make the mistake of limiting discussions about the People's Network to traditional reference, learning and business information issues. We also need to have a clear idea of what we want to do with it regarding literacy, reader development and cultural identity.
• The modern library service needs to be looking to deliver real-time online services other than just automated circulation transactions. How will this be done with existing resources?
• “Online” is no longer “on computer,” we need to be delivering services via mobile technology as well. How will this be done with existing resources?

More resource management: when the library service commits itself to doing anything it also needs to commit the appropriate (and, where applicable, named) resources. Obvious? Of course. Uinversally-acknowledged and applied? Nah... So:

• Do we have the resources to deliver on these commitments?
  Are some resources being over-committed? (This ties in with the skills audit.)
• Are we committing resources we don’t actually have in the first place? (This ties in with the training needs matrix.)

As I've said before, we need to be more aggressive and proactive about our marketing. We do stuff, why do we keep it a secret? If it's worth doing it's worth letting people know that you can do it, do do it and could do it again.

• Internal marketing is also important: if staff know what’s going on then they can tell our customers about it. This doesn’t just mean the front-line staff at the particular library — Library A can and should tells its customers what’s going on in other libraries nearby; backstage staff take a lot of ‘phone calls from customers; and all staff talk to friends, relatives and strangers at bus stops.
• Events, activities and projects need to be formally recorded and reviewed afterwards (which doesn’t mean writing a dissertation — Key Notes should do). What worked, what didn’t and why? What resources were used? What key resources didn’t turn out to be available after all? (see above) What can somebody else learn from this experience so that they don’t have to re-invent the wheel? What can we tell the world about it?
• Too much of our publicity depends on people already having come into the library in the first place. We need to have “libraries do neat stuff” notices in church halls, doctors’ waiting room, supermarkets’ community notice boards, etc. If there were still telephone boxes around I’d also suggest little calling cards.
• We also need to use social networking services to deliver timely updates and news about our events and services in a shareable format.

There's a ton and a half of other stuff to worry about, too, but that's enough of a start for one Sunday afternoon.

Treasure trove

Every so often we unearth undiscovered riches.

Moving a pile of disreputable old filing cabinets out of an office the other day we discovered a long-forgotten portfolio. Luckily, we're all dead nosy and had a quick look inside before throwing it away. Just as well: it's a collection of original artwork by children's artists who'd visited our libraries in the 1970s and 1980s. They'd come along, talked to the children and did a few illustrative sketches in the process and somebody had the sense to keep them safe for future use.

I'm just starting taking photographs of them (there aren't many smaller than A3 sized so in-house scanning's not an option for us). I'm putting them onto the Library Service's Flickr account in a set I'm calling "Discovered Treasures." (The ones I've put on so far haven't been digitally remastered so look a bit murky. I'll be putting "before" and "after" versions online eventually.)

Being dead bone idle I want to see more than one outcome for this effort. Having a chat with Ray, our Children's Services Manager, we decided that at the very least we'd want:

• The Flickr set.
• A news item on the web site linking to the Flickr set and to the catalogue records for those authors we still stock.
• Ties-in with other children's library activities and promotions (Ray was already planning on doing something on a pirate theme some time, the John Ryan sketches fit in nicely).
• A properly-curated exhibition of some kind of the sketches.

So it's not all doom and gloom at the coal face.