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.

Telling the story

We have good people working in our libraries, should we choose to use them. Not a day goes by without something really good happening for somebody in one, other or all of our libraries. There are things we can do better, to be sure, we're only human after all, but we mustn't ignore the good that we do. If we don't value that good, why should anybody else?

Most of our customers think that we are A Good Thing. This is a double-edged sword: are we really that good or are we just delighting the few at the expense of the many? Well... Place Surveys tell us that we are by far the most popular of the council's services. When you look at the overall results this is damning with faint praise but we must be doing something right even so, otherwise we wouldn't even be that popular. We know we have to change with the times and the different needs of different customers. In doing so we need to be careful to know which is baby and which is bathwater. Let's make sure that we recognise what we're doing right, learn from it and keep on doing it at least as well, if not better.

If the services we're providing are all that good (and they very often are), 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. That isn't just publicising events and activities before the day, though that's important too. We need to make sure that once the job's done it isn't consigned to oblivion. It isn't done and dusted when the chairs are put away, there's work to be done.

Review the event. How did it go? Were the results as planned? Was the actual audience the intended audience? If not, what went right/wrong? What do you learn from the event? What can somebody else learn from the event? How? (Why re-invent the wheel?) Share the experience.

Share the news. Tell people it's happening. Tell people it happened. You did something. We do lots of somethings in libraries. How many people really know that? (Here's a clue, at a recent meeting of Chief Leisure Officers in one of the English regions the question "what do libraries do these days?" wasn't rhetorical).

Celebrate the event. We're crap at this. We need to be better.

Be realistic. We seem to think that if we don't get a football crowd turning up at the library it's a failure. Elsewhere in the world around us there are people doing events once, twice a year that were attended by a dozen people or so and feted as major achievements. Once or twice a year. We're doing that every other week in our libraries and accepting the label "declining." Footfall and visitor counts are important measures but tell but a fraction of the story. Having a load of stray bodies in the library for an event isn't necessarily a sustainable option. If those people have a miserable time of it because the venue was cramped or overcrowded or they are otherwise not delighted then that's worse than not having them visit in the first place: "the potential customer" becomes "the doesn't fancy come back here again." Delivering something brilliant for a sufficiency of visitors who want to come back to the library even when there's not an event going on is a result. Over a year twelve repeat customers visiting once a month is a better return than one hundred coming to the event and not coming back. The event is the hook to draw in the potential customers. Once they're in the library it's our job to persuade them to come back even when they're not an event going on. There's more chance of doing that when we're interacting with customers rather than just controlling crowds.

Tell the world. I've repeated myself. So should you. You had the event. it was a success (it was a great success). Let the world and his dog know it was a great success.

We do services as well as events. What applies to events applies to services. We're doing lots of really neat stuff on a day-to-day basis. So tell the world about this, too.

Did I say tell the world?

Telling the world isn't about just slapping a photo and a bit of copy somewhere and waiting for the world to find it. Any more than marketing an event is just putting a notice up in the library. Here's why not if you don't believe me.

Photos are good. A picture tells a thousand words. Summed up as "libraries do neat stuff."

We need to make sure that people bump into photos of people enjoying themselves in the library. And keep bumping into pictures of people enjoying themselves in the library in odd places that might not be "library" places. Picture of people enjoying themselves in the library? Perhaps the library is an enjoyable place to visit? Perhaps they'll come and visit the library to see what other neat stuff we do.

And we'll tell them.

And we'll tell them to tell their friends.

And we'll tell them about the neat stuff going on in our other libraries. And they can tell their friends that, too.

The important, the most important, thing is that we cannot assume that people will know what we do. And we cannot afford for the off-chance that they pop in to find out. There is no place for assumption and blind hope in a time of uncertainty. We need to tell people what we do. And keep on telling them.

If we wait to be asked they might not come and ask us. And they might just assume that we just stand around waiting to stamp out a few books, in between going "shhh!!!"

Managing in a storm

The single worst thing a manager can say is: "I assumed..."

It isn't the job of managers to assume. It is their job to ensure.

• To ensure that the people who are tasked to do the work know what is expected of them.


• To ensure that the people who are tasked to do the work know how to do what is expected of them.


• To ensure that the resources required to deliver the work are available when they are needed.


• To ensure that there are ways of means of making sure that the work is being delivered.


• To ensure that there are ways of means of determining when the work has been done.


• To ensure that there is a review process so that if the work needs to be done again it can be done to at least the same standard, if not better and more efficiently.

No assumes there.

Every one of these points requires effective communication between the manager and the staff. Effective communication isn't just telling somebody something, or sending them an email, and then walking away expecting things to be done the way you want them. Communication is a game for more than one player. You need to listen. You need to ask. You need to check. Does the other person understand what you want? Do you understand what they mean when they're responding? Are you sure you know all the answers or have they got a better idea? Are you having an argument because they don't understand you, you don't understand them, or that you were talking out of the seat of your pants in the first place (oh come on, be honest, we all do sometimes).

Don't assume that questions and challenges are a bad thing: if your point of view doesn't stand up to internal scrutiny like as not it won't survive an outsider's inquisition. A tested proposition is a safer proposition.

So a good manager ensures that there is a conversation. And ensures a common goal. And ensures a fighting chance of success.

And a bad manager assumes that success will just come to them and that it's somebody else's fault if it doesn't happen.

Twit

OK, I have to admit it.

I'm not remotely comfortable with Twitter yet, but it is extremely useful. Not least because of the generous people tweeting updates from events and activities they're involved in. A tip of the hat to all of them.

It's nice when something works

We've been doing customer surveuys using one of CRT's Viewpoint workstations for a while now. They're pretty robust and largely trouble-free, which is always a welcome set of attributes. I find creating a survey a bit of a faff but not so much as to be off-putting.

What's really good is the analysis and reporting tools. Within half an hour of uploading the data I've got access to a very straightforward mass of meaningful statistics that can be easily exported to a spreadsheet for tarting up.

Particularly nice is that all the iffy stuff gets quarantined. If it's obvious that somebody's just been hitting keys or inputting a pre-disposed set of answers the responses get put to one side for you to check up on. We knew this latest survey had been nobbled by somebody with an axe to grind, so I'd set myself up to go through the data to see if I could identify the offending responses on the days involved. Much to my delight, I found that they'd all already been shunted over to the Quarantine folder (on account of their being twelve very similar responses in the space of ten minutes). I'm suitably impressed.

Looking through the responses to open-ended questions is always an education. It shouldn't surprise me that youngsters see it as the opportunity to post love grafitti on the screen ("Charlotte loves Lewis TLFE"). Looking at this set I'm going to suggest to the Branch Assistant that she should have a word in Nathan's ear: if he doesn't borrow lots more books we'll tell Caitlyn about Bridie and Bridie about Caitlyn.

Secret to Successful New Product Innovation: Keep the Boss Out of It

Interesting report by Nielson presented the other day here. The basic question is: why are some organisations better at innovation than others? The result of their study looks provocative at first:

"One secret appears to lie in the degree of senior management involvement in the creative process."

I'm happy to stop the ball rolling there and enjoy the point-scoring, but I think there's a much more important point made in this report:

“New product development success comes down to two important principles - - managing ideas lightly while managing the process precisely,”

This is important. Successful innovation is the intelligent application of creative thought.

• Creativity is about making new connections and doing something with them.
• Intelligent application is about persuading the creative process to do something useful with them.

You'll notice the active verbs involved here.

Library services aren't alone in the public sector in tending to manage ideas precisely while managing processes lightly, if at all. It's a habit we could usefully unlearn. Library service managers who organise and unclench can optimise the potential of both their workforce and their service. The ones who don't will struggle.

Is your library making milkshake mistakes?

A useful heads-up on The Unquiet Librarian's site (thanks again to Marianne for the link).

It's a variation on the "can't see the wood for the trees" problem where the purpose of a development activity has become ill-defined. In this case the key question for the developer is: "are we wanting to improve [however defined] the product or are we wanting to improve its sales?" If the former, then the behaviour of the product is paramount. If the latter, then the behaviour of the [potential] customer is paramount.

It doesn't matter how excellent your product is if the customer can't, or won't, use it or afford it. A 'good enough' product that doesn't require the customer's having to radically modify their usual behaviours is always going to have something going for it.

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.

Slacking

I'm uncomfortably defensive about days spent working from home. I tell myself that on the plus side I'm not going to spend four hours commuting, the network connection is faster and more reliable, I have access to tools that aren't available at the workplace, yadda yadda yadda... And it's true, I am genuinely more productive than at work. But I do still feel uncomfortably defensive.

For one thing, it's too comfortable. I've been sat sitting on the sofa working on the laptop, a pot of tea to hand, the Hairy Bikers on DVD for background noise (the remaining background noise being provided by a robin, a wren and a charm of goldfinches). This can't possibly be work can it?

Oh, I've done all the usual systems housekeeping work. And reported the (sadly) usual problems. I've run a pile of statistics to test an idea that was worrying me about distribution patterns of reserved stock and written a few web pages but I can't say that I feel that I've been particularly productive today.

Part of the problem is that the world has changed. What have I been doing while I've been slacking?

• I've been eavesdropping on the ALA Virtual Conference (thanks to both Marianne and Stewart!);
• Watched lectures on the potential of the online cognitive surplus; Facebook game business dynamics and making a splash with social media;
• Checked out articles on Mashable and LGITU;
• Tried to get my head round the mechanics of the WriteToReply functions being explained by Tony Hirst. and
• Exchanged concerns with colleagues about the current state of play of one of the library management systems companies.

Nothing extraordinary there. You'll have done as much, probably considerably more. But have another look at that in the context of "work," without the use of a laptop and t'internet.

• Peeking through a window to watch a conference.
• Leaving the office for a day just to see a lecture or two or attend a seminar or meet colleagues from far, far away

In the old days what I'm calling slacking would have been A Hard Day's Work. Time was, so long as you clocked on and clocked off at the right time you were doing your work. It was OK to feel not particularly productive because you'd been In Work All Day and had earned your corn by your very presence. These days, I'm happy to say, the currency is deliverables, not time spent (shouldn't it always have been?). So where does that leave personal professional development? It was never much valued in the 'time served' model, but does it only have a utilitarian value in the 'focus on delivery model?' Dunno. I'd like to hope not; I believe that understanding for the sake of it increases the opportunities for the serendipitous development of solutions. But I'd be hard-pressed to prove it.

And I still think I've been an idle beggar today.

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.

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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?

Fun things to do

Yet another tip of the hat to Phil Bradley, this time for his "25 tools to entertain, educate, enthrall."

And another tip of the hat to him for providing not just a dozen or more applications I hadn't bumped into yet but also a bit of thought as to actually apply them in practice. As always, the tool is only ever as useful as the use to which it is put. A few of these look like they could make up into useful guiding tools for learning resources (staff as much as the public). Something for me to have a seriously long look this summer when I'm not so overwhelmed with work. (He said optimistically!)

Driving Change, Creating Experience & Moving Forward

A very nice presentation on Michael Stephens' "Tame The Web" site. I particularly like the slides which show some unflinchingly unflattering perspectives of libraries from the customer's point of view. (It's been one of those months!) It's reassuring that I'm not entirely on my own in worrying about some of the bad habits of libraries.

There are a lot of slides in this presentation, but that's OK, I promise you, because each one's quick and punchy and leads you swiftly on to the next. And the journey's worthwhile:

• The strength of a library, particularly a public library, is its potential for being inclusive of a community and its being a trusted knowledge base within that community.
• The survival of libraries depends on its active engagement with the community and, perhaps more crucially, the active engagement of a critical mass of individual customers and stakeholders.

There are a lot of very easy, affordable, friendly and fun ways of turning the passive customer or potential customer into an active user and participant without losing sight of the core business of the libary. Quite a few are included here in a nicely-digestible form.

Self-service - the "how not to do it" workshop

My bank's changed it's self-service paying-in system. In doing so it has provided an object lesson in how not to design and deliver a self-service solution.

Up to a couple of months ago it was dead simple:

• Go to the bank.
• Pick up an envelope.
• Put the details of the payments-in on the slip attached.
• Put your slip and cheque(s) in the envelope.
• Seal envelope.
• Put envelope in the box provided.
• Go away and get on with your life.

From the customer's point of view this was good:

• No queueing
• The transaction took a minute or two tops.

From the bank's point of view it was bad:

• Anybody who wanted could could fill in spurious details on the receipt slip and claim that the transaction had taken place as described.
• Employees of the bank had to manually retrieve the slips and cheques then effect the transaction.

The balance of power lying with the bank, not the customer, the system had to change. So we now have these self-service machines to use. Which means that you now:

• Queue to use the machine
• Log in with your bank card and PIN
• Stare at a menu providing a choice of options, most of which are not appropriate to the function. Paying in is the second from the bottom on the right.
• Feed the slip and the first cheque into the machine.
• Get a member of staff to help you work out why the papers were accepted the first couple of times of trying.
• Wait for a scanned copy of the cheque and slip is printed as a receipt.
• Repeat the above for each cheque being presented.

These days I queue up and pay in with the cashiers.

"Do you know that you could do this with the self-service machine?"

"Yes, that's why I queued up to be served by a cashier."

"Why's that?"

"Three people have used the machine since I came in. I'd still be fourth in the queue waiting my turn."

Demonstrating the Return On Investment: Make Do & Mend

I recently read an article about funding pressures on libraries and one comment in particular struck me:

"We may be entering an age of austerity where getting the basics right and on budget will be of greater value than leading the pack on innovation."

This is where many of us have been all along. Which is not to say that we are strangers to innovation. We can't afford to be early adopters of expensive experiments but we can be innovative. Innovation thrives on adversity, after all. It just won't often be revolutionary change (let's be honest, anybody looking to the English public library sector for revolutionary change needs their bumps feeling). It can be, and often is, sustained small incremental changes which aren't remotely sexy but deliver the goods.

When times are hard there is a biting incentive for change and, importantly, it is more difficult to go out and buy a magic wand in the hopes that it will make everything all right in the end. Which is good: one of the stultifying factors to progressive development is the argument that something cannot be done because "we haven't got Item X." This may be a computer, some software, access to the internet, somebody with the job of doing something, a bit of training, or whatever. You've been there, you know what I mean. Of course, the truth is that this something can't be done that way because we haven't got Item X. If that something still needs to be done (and it does no harm to ask the question), there are three options:

1. Get Item X;
2. Find a way of doing the necessary without Item X; or
3. Keep your head down and hope that the whole thing will go away.

It's dispiriting to see how often option three comes into play in the public library sector.

As a matter of principle it's important to know what you've got and what it can do, that's simple resource management. When the brown stuff hits the fan this can be the difference between success and failure. How flexible and adaptable are your systems? Systems begin with and end with a human being.

• How knowledgeable is your workforce? — how do you know?
• How 'sharing' is your organisational culture? — go on, be honest, if only with yourself. Why do libraries, of all things, persist in having 'need to know' cultures?
• How flexible is your workforce? — have a serious think about the next question before you answer this one!
• How flexible is your management?

Maximising the effectiveness and efficiencies of what you've already got isn't a new challenge, but it is one we can no longer duck. Small systemic changes can make big differences. But only if they can be applied systemically and bought into by the organisation and its managers both.

Social Media Best Practices for Libraries

Another useful checklist (why do they always have to have ten items?) of tips for social networking for libraries (thanks to Kasia and Michael). The tips are derived from a digital marketing conference; just because it's not "by" libraries or librarians doesn't mean that it can't be usefully applied in libraries. Like so many of these lists it's all dead obvious when you see it written down; deceptively simple until you try to apply them in practice. The sad thing is that I think Tip #10 is the single biggest obstacle for most development work in public libraries.

Presentations that rock

The do's and don'ts of presentations are simple but easy to forget. There's a nice summary of the key points on Marianne's MLxperience blog.

I make no apologies for 'borrowing" this footage of Don MacMillan's PowerPoint presentation.

Demonstrating the Return on Investment: God is watching, give him a good show

By any objective measure a large sum of money is invested in the public library service. We can make a good case for its not being enough, or the wrong kind of investment, but it's still a goodly sum.

The return on that investment can be relatively colossal, whether you measure the impacts in terms of literacy or well-being, supporting economic or community development. But we sort of take it for granted that people know that, don't we? While other services make damned sure that everyone who matters knows every single thing that they do (and every one of them dressed up to the nines as a major success) public libraries tend to pootle along, doing their thing until there's talk of cuts and closures, when suddenly all the positives are wheeled out. In many ways that's too late: to be sure, you may be able to stave off the major cuts in bad times but are you in a position to be able to capitalise on the good times?

• Libraries do a lot of stuff. In practice this is great, but it's difficult to sell "we do a lot of stuff" as a single message without looking and sounding incoherent. So let's not do that. Let's work with small, digestible lumps of news and information that make a single, sensible, positive point.
  


• Little and often is good. The individual message is: "this is something the library does/did and it is A Good Thing." The repeat message is "libraries do good things." Importantly, the message is sustained over time.
  


• "We're not doing anything we can make a fuss about." Bollocks. Take a look around you. Other people's high-profile media events: the festivals; the open days; the big-name events. How many people turned up? And how many people do you get to your events? Have a look round at your local context and be more realistic about what you're able to achieve. Then celebrate what you do achieve!
  


• "That's been and gone. What's the point in putting that on the web?" You've done something. It cost time and money to do it. Why? What did you get for it? More importantly, what did the public get for it? Tell them what you've spent their money on.
  


• "Yes, but it's history, isn't it? What's the point of telling people what we've done?" You and your staff aren't standing round waiting to "stamp out a few books" are you? That's precisely what a lot of people do think you do. Your overall message needs to be: "we do lots of stuff and here's just some of it!" You can't prove that you do lots of good stuff without having a good range readily available to demonstrate the point.
  


• "Yes, but that's just politicking or swank, isn't it?" NO!!!! This is an important part of your catalogue of services. Just as your library catalogue (remember that?) tells your customers what resources may be available for them to use, this collection of news and information items tells your customers and potential customers about the kinds of services and activities that you're delivering, or have delivered, in your libraries. And, importantly, it gives people with money and influence an idea of what you can do given the time and resources.
  


• Spread the word: don't rely on a single channel of communication. If you've got something good to say, say it in a few places. Take the message to your intended (or hoped-for) audience, don't sit back and expect them to hunt you down.

None of this is difficult and none of it is new. We just need to do it.

Abstract thinking

I've been having a play with some photos of our libraries, for no good reason other than I found the effects to be pleasing. As you can see, it's a simple application of a kaleidoscope function. I'm wondering if there's anything to be read into the results.

I'll come back to this in a few weeks, when I've forgotten the running order, to see if I can pick out which have been recent refurbishments and/or relocations.

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...

Ten tips for entrepreneurs

Another nugget of gold on The Travelin' Librarian site flagging up a post on the ReadWriteStart channel for first-time entrepreneurs and start-ups. In it, Kevin Rose, Digg's founder, provided ten tips for budding entrepreneurs - you can see the details here. None of it is rocket science, indeed at least a couple are self-evident truths until you take a step back and realise how often they aren't acted on in real life.

I'd argue that they apply significantly to developing a public library service.

1. "Just Build It: You don't need anyone's approval and in fact, you probably won't get it, so don't even try." -- you're working in a bureaucracy; in all probability you're working in one of the more conservative corners of that bureaucracy. Sometimes you've just got to let that genie out of the bottle.
   
2. "Iterate: Build, release and iterate. Make a list of the features you want to create over the next six months and get going" -- definitely!!! Don't imagine you've finished the work. Look at it, review it, ask yourself how it could be made better. If resources allow, do it. If resources don't allow, why did you do it in the first place? Development needs to be sustainable.
   
3. "Hire Your Boss: Make sure you hire people that you would want to work for, who challenge you and you can learn from." -- I think this is the single most challenging idea for an English public library service to take on board. The rigid, top-down hierarchical model of working didn't work all that well in the first place and has become a liability if library services are going to use all their available resources nimbly and effectively.
   
4. "Demand Excellence: Ensure staff are committed to and understand your vision" -- the second sentence is important. Excellence isn't something that is measured after the event, it is something that's signposted to before the event. You demand excellence by delivering vision.
   
5. "Raising Money: The higher your evaluation is, the more equity you have to work with. Beg, borrow and steal. Be creative about finding ways to cut costs." -- more pertinent now than ever! If you can get money, use it. They can't take it off you if you've spent it. Investigate new delivery channels to see if you can do the same or better cheaper (at least one example will be coming up in point 9).
   
6. "Hack the Press" -- make sure that you're getting your message out there. Not just to via "official" channels: chat up anyone and everyone who might be useful.
   
7. "Invest in Advisors" -- not necessarily consultants in the bureaucratic sense. Invest in people who know things that you may find useful. (Including your own staff!) The investment doesn't necessarily have to be in money or stocks: librarians around the world are sharing ideas, advice and news in all sorts of different forums, make sure you're tapping into them. And then make sure that you're also using the same model to tap into networks outside the library arena (be creative about it) - you will be amazed at just how often the answer to a problem is a devolved community knowledgebase with meeting and event management facilities and free internet access. Join in, be positive, be useful; the effort you invest this way can be paid back many times over later on.
   
8. "Connect With the Community" -- any public library service that isn't doing that already should be boarded up.
   
9. "Leverage Your User Base to Spread the Word" -- talk to your customers; tell them what you're doing; then get your customers to be your marketing tool. Time was, we only had word of mouth to work with (but when it works it works very well indeed). Now there are all sorts of new opportunities, many of which are free. Which ties in nicely with point 5. If it costs £x to print out a couple of hundred leaflets which may or may not be actually read could you not use the money one something more concrete that you could tell people about buckshee on Twitter, Facebook, etc.?
   
10. "Analyze Your Traffic: Pay attention to how people are using your site, and then learn and evolve" -- not just your web traffic (though that's important). How does/doesn't your online audience traffic relate to your library's visitors?

I know which ones I have and haven't been doing (and I'm not going to say here which they are!)

Libraries working with vulnerable people

This is an interesting blog about work being done in Dundee Libraries. There are some good stories of relatively-low cost, high impact work here. Almost as heartening as the services that are being provided here is the fact that somebody's recording and celebrating them.

A lot of libraries, including Rochdale's, are doing similar types of activities to a greater or lesser extent. I'll encourage the people in our Special Services Team to have a look at this blog, for both the reasons stated above. It would be good if they could share experiences. It was nice to see how they do reminiscence work. Special Services work with "reminiscence packs," which tend to include more objects than books or other reading materials (very often they'll take along some books or audio items along to complement and support the reminiscence packs). The Library Service also does occasional one-off reminiscence events. The last one, I think, was this:

Do you remember the times when washday was always on a Monday?

Fourteen people came along to our morning of washday reminiscences at Castleton Library on Friday 16 January. This was an opportunity to swap memories of living, working and shopping in Castleton, Middleton and Rochdale. We used the "Women's Work" reminiscence pack to prompt discussion, support by materials from the local studies collections in Middleton Library and the Local Studies Collection in Touchstones. It was also very useful to be able to link this with the "Shop" exhibition in the Heritage Gallery at Touchstones.

My conscience is pricked: I need to do a proper page about the reminiscence packs on our web site.