Some more stray thoughts about online catalogues

There was an article in today's Guardian about the Dyslexie font which is designed to be bottom-heavy to help people with Dyslexia: the idea is that the asymmetry of the characters makes it harder for them to dance about for the reader. Coincidentally, a conversation I'd had with somebody last weekend had set me thinking about how a library could present appropriate parts of its stock to dyslexic readers.A gallery display of book covers is an obvious format but wouldn't it be nice to have the accompanying text for that section of the catalogue in a Dyslexia-friendly font? I expect it's do-able; it would be interesting to see someone give it a go.

QR and literacy campaigns

Project-Q in the Netherlands is a nice, simple example of the use of QR codes to support a literacy campaign. I know QR codes are old hat and ho-hum to some but as a cheap and easy way to add a few more strings to a bow they're pretty useful and I don't understand why we keep on not using them.

"Not another bloody review!"

Some interesting stuff coming out about the Sieghart Review of English publish library services, including this one in The Bookseller. The general tone of the analysis sounds pretty good and some of the suggestions mentioned would be very encouraging if ever acted upon. We'll wait and see if and when the review gets published.

Words and pictures

November is Picture Book Month, one of very many international initiatives for encouraging reading and literacy. Some of these are set up formally by organisations like CILIP, The Reading Agency and the ALA while others, like this, emerge from informal association and get a momentum of their own.

Picture books are great and even in these austere times we have lots of them in our libraries. The combination of words and pictures helps young readers to associate words with ideas. The pictures encourage "Can you see..." and "I wonder what..."and the "What do you think happens next?" questions that make sharing a story such fun. And the artwork is often brilliant. So I like picture books.

I always puzzled — still do, in fact — about librarians' antipathy to comics. We were brought up reading comics; my dad reckons comics taught him how to read and I was one of those horribly precocious little kids who read "The Bash Street Kids" before I ever saw the cover of a "Janet and John" reader. And yet the only comic you ever saw in the library when I was a kid was "Look and Learn." All those stories with pictures and their captioned narrative links and speech bubbles to tell you who's talking were somehow "not quite the thing." Later on when I started working with and in libraries I saw the same thing. The two biggest selling children's books every year were The Guinness Book of Records and The Beano Book and while we bought the first by the bucket load if anybody ever donated a copy of The Beano Book or any other comic annual it went straight into book sale. One of my friends tried to slip some into one of the collections he was managing and was told very firmly that: "We don't buy annuals." Given that the accession shelves were groaning with expensive yearbooks destined for the reference library he wasn't best chuffed at this.

We do have comics in the library these days but they're either dressed up as "graphic novels" or put somewhere in the 741s amongst the non-fiction. Personally, I think there's a distinct difference between a collection of comic and a graphic novel. It's not necessarily the format or the genre, it's the structure of the storytelling. One's not better than the other, they're just different, albeit very close relations. It's lovely to see graphic novels in libraries and I'm all for the study of graphic arts; I just wish we could also celebrate comics without having to sneak them in by disguise.

Stray thoughts on the library catalogue

This is a frustrating time for me, I admit: we're in the process of recommissioning our OPAC and I can see all sorts of possibilities with the new version but I have to take a few steps back because it's somebody else's baby. A couple of years ago my rôle changed from library systems development to more general corporate systems management and support so it's my job to make sure the system underlying the OPAC works but the development work is somebody else's to do and I have to be careful to get in the way.

I'll jot stuff down on here once in a while just to get ideas out of my system.

Project Gutenberg catalogue records

A belated tip of the hat to Steve Thomas at the University of Adelaide for providing MARC records for Project Gutenberg titles. This is immensely useful and helps us add some real depth to the online elements of our catalogue with very little effort on our part (and nothing but admiration for the colossal amount of effort that people have put in to make this project such an incredibly important, useful and entertaining resource).

Doorbells of despair

Back in the old days, Oh Best Beloved, when your parents were still young and didn't have mortgages, I used to work with council one-stop-shops. At one place I worked the need for a separate customer services service was self-evident as everything about the corporate culture and customer journeys screamed out that it couldn't keep the public far enough away for its own comfort. Its council offices had the nearest I have seen to a moat filled with crocodiles that could be practicable in a 20th Century building.

The most frequent customers were council housing tenants, or hopeful tenants-to-be. The customer experience was painful. They had to:

• Know that they had to go to the council offices for a particular service and not one of nineteen other offices scattered around the town;
• Know which floor to go to;
• Know that when they got out of the lift at that floor they had to turn right and go through the big, wooden, unmarked door;
• Know that once inside the reception room (not a lot bigger than a telephone booth) they had to ring the appropriate door bell for assistance;
• Know which of the six doorbells on the wall to use, which wasn't obvious as they were hand-labelled with the names (or even initials) of the housing teams, not their function.

If you picked the wrong doorbell you were tutted at and left to your own devices to have another guess.

I'd hoped those days were long gone but looking round at public service web sites I begin to wonder. The vogue now is for pages to be stripped down bare save for a small number of icons taking you to the services you are most likely to want.

I have a few issues with the more extreme instances of this:

• Where's the information telling the user who you are and what you do? Not a mission statement (God help us!) but a simple narrative explanation of your function. Don't assume that because you know then so does everyone else.
• Where's the support? What if these icons and labels mean nothing to me? What do I do? Who do I ask for help?
• Who says these are the services I am most likely to want? You don't know me, you don't know what I want.
• Who says these are the services that the average user is most likely to want? Customer insight might be able to tell you which of the existing options the customer is most likely to find and use but that isn't necessarily the same as "want." Is a page popular because it is useful or because it's easily accessible (or least-inaccessible)?
• Beyond the metrics, who determines which services are promoted? Is it the comms team? Is it the web team? Is it the service? Is somebody waiting for the research to demonstrate a demand for resources that have effectively been hidden?

But most of all, whenever I see one of these web sites I have to ask myself: have we really gone back to the customer having to guess which doorbell to ring for attention?

Net neutrality: why worry?

Net neutrality is a topic creating quite a lot of heat at the moment, due to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's taking a look at the topic and scaring people silly in the process with the implication that there'd be the development of a two-tiered internet with them as can pay going down the line at a premium rate and the rest crawling along as best can. (CNET provides as good a summary as any.)

So what? It's a fuss in a foreign land, isn't it?

Sadly not. It'll affect us however much we may imagine or hope that it wouldn't.

So what would be the effect and why should we care?

The way I see it, the nearest practical model for how the post-net neutrality world would look is cable television. Back in the day when cable TV first came out it was full of all sorts of community engagement. There were local and hyperlocal channels; there was space for the esoteric, the informative and the downright baffling. Much of it was done on the cheap and looked it.Then there were years of consolidation and corporate buyings-up and now I could watch NCIS and CSI: Miami simultaneously on six different channels; or endless hours watching folks in nowhere towns somewhere in America shouting at each other for no apparent reason; an interminable churn of mid-Atlantic reality wannabees being vile to one another; and a carousel of Westminster Village news feeds. None of it is local. All of it is peddling the same corporate narrative. News or features about anything within a hundred miles of where I live is limited to the local half-hour news programmes on weekdays and the ten minutes where the skateboarding ducks used to be after the weekend news.

I quite liked the Internet when it was like the Wild West. We can't go back to those days but that doesn't mean it has to become just another adjumct to the Wall Street Journal.

Data sharing between libraries

We're at the stage in the evolution of the AGMA library consortium where we're starting to work through the practical — and legal — implications of shared services.

• Sharing our catalogue data is relatively easy: the data standards are well-established and most the data itself is published in the public domain on library OPAC's, etc. Which doesn't mean that it was all plain sailing and we've not got some more work to do. 

• Sharing borrower data is obviously fraught with all sorts of information governance and data protection issues on top of the problem that there isn't any data standard save that imposed by the structure of our shared LMS and the commonalities we've discussed and agreed on a case-by-case basis.

• Virtually every circulation dataset is a back door into the borrower data.

I've been thinking through some of the questions we need to be asking ourselves on this journey. It's still early days so isn't exhaustive; at this stage I'm trying to work out what we need to worry about at a general level prior to starting work on a risk analysis.

Purpose	Type of Information	Recipients	Data Controller	Notes/queries
Membership information including contact details –voluntary service, customers will be asked if they want to opt in	Customer name, address and contact information, DOB. Disability, ethnicity and other demographic details Family relationship details Lending history	Library staff (including all other authorised Spydus users) of approved Authorities within the scheme	Local Authority (Data Subject’s Local Authority will be the data controller)	Which data is to be shared? Is it all or nothing? If partial, which parts and how managed? Same question applies to who the data is being shared with What would be the position of volunteer-managed community libraries? How do we switch sharing on/off? What happens if a customer changes their mind? How are they “quarantined?” What happens to the data held in loans, charges and reservations? What happens to any outstanding loans, fines and charges? Who owns (and is responsible for) the data?
Loans information	Details of the loan including borrower, item, location and status of loan. Loans history	Library staff Specific customers can see all details of their loan(s) All customers can see some details of the loan(s)	Local Authority (which?)	This is the crucial element to be managed: It is the purpose of the data-sharing agreement It is the bridging element between the personal customer data and nearly all the other data sets There is a hierarchy of viewing permissions If a customer has said “no” to data-sharing, how is the borrower data in the loan, charges and reservation records expressed? If the customer changes their mind about sharing their data, is it automatically redacted from these records? Who owns (and is responsible for) this data? Whose loan policies? Applied from the lending library? Including fines and charges? How do exceptions apply? “Non-default” borrower types and collections
Overdue/pre-overdue notices	Contact details including borrower name, address, telephone and email; loan due dates and items involved	Library staff Specific customer	Local Authority (which?)	Derived from loans data and subject to same questions It would make sense to aggregate these to improve efficiency and save costs (see notes on charges, etc.)
Reservations	Contact details including borrower name, address, telephone and email and items requested	Library staff Specific customer	Local Authority (which?)	All the questions for loans apply for reservations (which are effectively loans-in-waiting) Whose charge régime applies? Would the Data Controller be the “owner” of the customer record, the library that placed the reservation or the library it will be picked up from (if a different library authority)?
Requests	Contact details including borrower name, address, telephone and email and items/articles requested	Library staff Specific customer ILL system (bibliographic and/or article data only)	Local Authority (which?)	In nearly all respects as reservations, just more complicated charges [The operating procedures would probably need modifying in the light of the shared lending environment.] This will need to be revised in the event of a fuller integration with UnityWeb or equivalent third-party systems
Notifications for any reserved items	Contact details including borrower name, address, telephone and email and items requested	Library staff Specific customer	Local Authority (which?)	Derived from reservations/requests data and subject to the same questions It would make sense to aggregate these to improve efficiency and save costs (see notes on charges, etc.)
Charges/fines/fees	Contact details including borrower name, address, telephone and email; details of the transaction that generated the charge	Library staff Specific customer	Local Authority (which?)	Derived from loans and reservations/requests data and subject to the same questions How will these be managed: Payable only where incurred? Payable globally? Impact on traps/alerts (whose parameters apply?) In the event of recovery, who legally owns the charge? In the light of the above, what would be the effect (if any) of aggregated notices?
Catalogue/ discovery records — bibliographic data	Title-level catalogue data	Library staff Library customers and general public	Local Authority (which?)	Bibliographic data – already shared data Don’t forget that there is a link to the borrower record from the review/rating in the bib data in Staff Enquiry Potentially links to more than one Data Subject, so which would be the Data Controller for this catalogue data? Shared responsibility? How? Similar questions are required of other customer-created content such as tags (these are lost in the current versions of Spydus 9) (Not all data are published for the public)
Catalogue/discovery records — holdings/item-level data	Catalogue data, including electronic holdings	Library staff Library customers and general public	Local Authority (Which?)	Holdings data Links to personal data via loans/loan history and status/status history Potentially these link to more than one Data Subject, so which would be this Data Controller for the catalogue data? Logically should be the owner of the holding item (Not all data are published for the public)
Management Information/ Business Intelligence	Reports detailing usage of service, per location	Library Managers	Local Authority (Data Subject’s Local Authority will be the data controller)	Essentially should be summary data, though we’d need to have safeguards against breaches caused by very small sample data Proper safeguards and risk analyses are required before making this data available to third parties
	Demographic breakdowns	Library Managers Designated authorised analysts	Local Authority (Data Subject’s Local Authority will be the data controller)	Most would be summary data, though we’d need to have safeguards against breaches caused by very small sample data Some data (e.g. lists of postcodes) are granular enough to easily identify Data Subjects so safeguards need to be in place on the use and presentation of this data are required before making this data available to third parties
	Marketing databases	Library Managers Designated authorised marketing staff	Local Authority (Data Subject’s Local Authority will be the data controller)	Is the “I agree to receive marketing” (or equivalent) field global or local? The selection of data explicitly must be limited to those customers who have agreed to contact so as to comply with Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. Proper safeguards and risk analyses are required before making this data available to third parties
	Stock management data	Library staff Designated authorised third-party service providers	Local Authority (which?)	Nothing pertaining to Data Subjects should be included in this data. Stock ownership should be straightforward. Stock usage more problematic: Global usage figures recorded against bibliographic/holdings data? Local usage only? How would (if at all?) third-party stock analysis systems like CollectionHQ differentiate between local and extralimital use? In the early days at least there will be pressure to be able to provide evidence that stock is being used “fairly” with local library customers having first dibs for local stock
	Ad hoc data requests	Library Managers Designated authorised third parties	Local Authority (Data Subject’s Local Authority will be the data controller)	Most would be summary data, though we’d need to have safeguards against breaches caused by very small sample data Some data (e.g. lists of postcodes) are granular enough to easily identify Data Subjects so safeguards need to be in place on the use and presentation of this data Proper safeguards and risk analyses are required before making this data available to third parties FoI requests would be subject to the proper exclusions
SIP2 data	Data used for interfacing between Spydus and third-party systems	Library staff Specific customer	Local Authority (Data Subject’s Local Authority will be the data controller)	The particular case at the moment would be where data held in the customer record determines the access or not to third-party systems and services. Would the data be determined globally or locally? Standard use of data fields? Standard coding sets?

I'd be interested to know if/how this analysis sits with the experience of established consortium libraries, especially if I've missed something that could cause us problems.

Library audiences: talking to the other 54%

A couple of months back I had an interesting Twitter conversation with some local government comms folk which got me wondering why so few English public library services have much in the way of child-centred content on their web sites. I asked the very splendid Ian Anstice if he could canvass for examples of good practice on his Public Libraries News site. The good news is that he got some positive responses, including Devon's "The Zone" and Stories from the Web; the bad news is that there are so very few examples. Ian's musings on this point are here.

For me there are a few contributory factors to this famine:

• The web is still seen as largely "something other" to the public library's service offer. At best a way of promoting activities in the library and somewhere to keep the catalogue and the e-books; at worst an abstraction of resources from beleaguered libraries. (There are plenty of exceptions to that rule, thank Heaven!)
• If you're doing it right it's going to take time and people to do it. These are increasingly scarce resources.
• It's difficult to reconcile the needs of a children's page with those of a council's corporate branding, particularly if the brand requires a single monolithic corporate voice.
• It's a complex and sometimes unforgiving audience: what's great for a five year-old may be acceptable to a seven year-old but puerile to a nine year-old and beyond the pale to an eleven year-old.
• There's often a confusion as to whether the audience is the child or the parent. Ironically, the younger the intended audience the older the people you're going to be talking to.

Despite these problems there are still some things that can be done without too much expense and hassle.

Customer-created content

There are easy ways of adding children's voices to your content:

• If your OPAC includes the facility to publish readers' ratings and reviews, actively encourage children's reviews. You might need to do it for them; if so, an ethical solution would be to set up a dummy customer account specifically for posting them.If you have children's reading groups, encourage the groups to post their reviews, too.
• You'll probably already include links to writers' web sites with the rest of their works in your catalogue; why not also include links to appropriate fan sites?
• If your children's reading groups have their own web pages link to them from your site.
• Many OPACs have the facility to build saved lists and incorporate them into URLs to create canned searches. Canvas ideas for reading lists, "top tens" and the like and build them into links in your site. If you can present these as carousel galleries of books covers - yay!!!
• If you have good working relationships with schools and youth workers, get them involved, too.

Changing rooms

If you can't have child-centred pages on your council's web site, can you provide separate versions of your OPAC for children?

• The basic model would just be to have a version of the OPAC that's limited to the children's collections (this is where we're at in Rochdale at the moment).
• A modification of this would be to change the wording for this version's home page and search forms (which could probably do with simplifying anyway). You'll need to be pretty clear about which particular audience(s) you're addressing here. You might want to do a CBeebies/CBBC split.
• If you have a useful working relationship with your comms people and if your corporate brand is either flexible enough to deliver or allows permissible exclusions in particular circumstances, then you could do some interesting work on the stylesheets, etc. to make the look and feel more friendly. This isn't necessarily about using primary colours and Comic Sans (catalogue records look really horrible in Comic Sans, I've tried it). It's usually about: 
• Simplifying elements, or eliminating them altogether. Is the link to the corporate web site useful to a nine year-old?
• Adding pages specifically aimed at your audience. The obvious ones would be your help pages.
• Illustrating ideas and instructions with graphics.
• Perhaps even having its own character-based branding (like Bookstart Bear).

These are just a few potential quick-win options. Given time and resources there's a lot more that could be done but I think there's a danger of ignoring the basics in pursuit of the cutting edge and sexy.

Library competencies

Webjunction has just compiled an update to their Competency Index For The Library Field. It's an interesting read, not least because the table of contents alone provides a challenging checklist: does your local library authority include all these high-level skill sets?

The latest DCMS review

I admit it, I missed the boat. By a long chalk. And so I didn't submit my views to the latest public consultation on public libraries. A combination of too many ideas, too little time and self-discipline and worrying overly-much as to how I'd make any of it fit to the three questions asked by the commissioned group.

I've no illusions that I would have made a ha'penny's difference but here are my workings out, in case anyone can use any of it:

At the outset I would like to wish you the best of luck with this latest review of the public library service in England and the hope that whatever your conclusions they are operationally practicable and support at least a decent-quality library service for our communities. You start with a serious handicap: DCMS announcements of reviews of the English public library service are a seasonal thing like the first cuckoo of Spring or the first M&S advert of Christmas. Each comes and goes and together their total operational impact in the real world has been the square root of jack all. This appalling legacy is going to colour too many of the views you are likely to hear. Including mine, unfortunately. I would love it if you could confound my cynicism.

• There is a crying need for national leadership.
  • Now the Olympic Games are over and done with, what is DCMS for? Over the past decade — aside from the occasional launch of an enquiry into the public library service — the department’s engagement with the service has been not so much arm’s length as running a mile from.
  • The public library service in England is undefined, at best weakly supported and subject to no performance management.
  • Regulatory guidance on the delivery of the service is virtually non-existent.
  • The potential for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the public library service by pooling resources and delivery channels across local geopolitical boundaries is being driven patchily at the local level at the same time as long-standing sharing mechanisms are being abandoned or left to wither on the vine.
  • The English public library service is not an integral part of a national literacy programme, a national digital literacy programme or a national information literacy programme despite the huge amount of good work being locally done in these areas by many, if not most library authorities.
    • DCMS is not demonstrating that it knows or much cares about:
      • How many public library buildings are currently still in use;
      • What other delivery channels are being made available for library services;
      • What services are being delivered by these delivery channels;
      • Whether or not these services adequately reflect the needs of the communities they serve;
      • What resources should be employed to provide these services.
• Nobody knows what the public library service is. Everybody has an opinion, nobody has an empirical measure and there is no bottom-line base level of service that can be expected nationwide.
  • The sad fig-leaf that is the 1964 Act provides a fine-sounding but practically-useless sound bite. The sole practical impact of the Act is that public libraries used to get listed under “Statutory” rather than “Discretionary” when the auditors came round to see how well the local council was doing.
  • There is a view that if a building has had the word “library” stuck on it some time in its lifetime and the doors are still open then all is well in the world.
  • There is another view that so long as a building is open to the public and has some books for loan that it is a public library.
  • There is yet another view that wonders why, so long after Erasmus talked about “libraries without walls” and after nearly two decades of public libraries’ beginning to deliver their services online, English public library services are so often defined by the buildings with the word “library” stuck on them not the services being provided and delivered, often outwith those library walls.
  • Ironically, while there is a long-standing UK standard specifying the base common denominator functions for a library management system there isn’t a similar baseline specification for the service such a system would be supporting.
  • There are no baseline metrics for the public library service. The old public library standards were limited in scope and flawed in definition but they at least required that some attempt at performance management and the accumulation of business intelligence was being made. One would not want the public library service to be defined only by what could be measured (worse still only what could be measured forty years ago!) but any credible argument that the service being delivered is anything more than “the doors are open, end of story” must be supported by robust data. CIPFA returns provide some useful data but this is limited, not always freely available and not at all concerned with outcomes. Benchmark data Should include:
    
    • Traditional transactional and visitor throughputs.
    • Outcomes of programmes of library activity.
    • Demographic engagement and outcomes — a demonstration that the service is serving its communities and not just providing services “for people like us by people like us.”
    • Stock analyses, including data on special collections, reserve stock and specifically-local elements (not just “local studies” collections). This would also include contextual age-related data — a collection of Victorian books in a special collection is a matter of interest, a collection of fifteen-year-old children’s picture books is a matter of concern.
    • Performance at each service point, including buildings, outreach and digital channels. Transactional data at library buildings normalised to numbers per staff hour so that variations from the norm can be readily identified; while there should be some variation in response to the needs of the local community other variations may be cause for concern.
    • Analyses of delivery channels both within and without the library buildings managed by the service.
  • Once benchmark data had been established, openly-reported trend analyses should include:
    • Patterns of change of use;
    • Patterns of replacement of use — this might be as simple as 78’s being replaced in stock by mp3’s or as complex as a community of use migrating from one library to another;
    • Contextual commentary — for instance a note of the impact of the school next door closing; a new motorway cutting off a community from its library; or the involvement in a new programme of activities.

There is a need for the availability and application of librarianship skills at a community level. (This is not a call for a quota of “professionals” in each library authority: this has been tried before and too many of us have experience of working alongside librarians who were doing nothing that the “unqualified” library assistants were doing at least as well.) The librarian is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

• The creation of local, parochial bibliographic metadata is culturally- and economically-beneficial to our communities. This is not limited to the traditional form of local studies collections — though these may be seen as an important component of the Arts Council’s commitment to the accessibility of the nation’s heritage.
  • Small-scale publication — especially self-publication — is easier than ever, particularly in e-book formats. There is a very real danger that much of this material will be permanently excluded from the national bibliography. Librarians, working with local authors and publishers should be tasked with the creation and publication of the appropriate metadata.
  • Many titles have a geolocational context that is not recorded or reflected in the commercially-available metadata. Making this local context available provides a hook for the recreational reader; resources for researchers and for teachers creating reading and learning materials; and support for literature-based community activities and tourism programmes.
• A national audit is urgently needed of those special collections not already dispersed, dissolved or disposed of as a result of austerity measures. In particular it is important to find out how much — or little — of these have been catalogued and published electronically so that a programme of work can be set up to address the oversights.
• Community knowledge bases.
• Grey literature.
• Information literacy.
• Local Freedom of Information libraries.

Engagement with the digital world

• Digital inclusion/digital literacy
• Digital libraries
• Integrating the virtual and physical worlds
• Crowdsourcing literary engagement
• Curating user-created content
• [All that stuff you’ve been arguing for fruitlessly for the past decade]

Staff development and continuous service improvement

• Essential — needs to be resourced and needs a proper framework for all staff
• Need to avoid replicating the errors and missed opportunities of the NOF-funded training programme for supporting the People’s Network — no “magic bullets” like ECDL
• Training needs dovetailing with service development needs
• Anticipating the support needs of communities and customers

Use and management of volunteers

• Complementary to paid staff
• Needs to be fair to the volunteer — what’s in it for them?
• Needs to be fair to the service — what’s in it for them?
• Needs to be fair to the community — what’s in it for them?
• Not an easy management win
  • Greater churn that paid staff — constant need for recruitment and training support
  • Too little good supervision of remote front-line staff at the moment — how would the same managers add supervision of volunteers to their portfolio?
  • Discipline and behaviour (this is true of all staff — not just volunteers — but fewer available sticks and carrots)
  • How to manage reputational damage when things go wrong?