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

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

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

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

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

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

Library task force: "community libraries" toolkit

I can't say that I'm impressed with the notion of replacing public libraries with "community libraries," especially not when the engagement with the community is at the end of an Austerity shotgun.

That being said, one of the jobs to be done by the Library Task Force is a review of the process and the building of guidance — for and against the idea — for those thinking of embarking on the adventure. And they're inviting contributions to this toolkit.

This is the contribution I've added to the discussion:

I think we need to address the brief you've been given, not least because it gives the opportunity to explore some of the practical issues involved in taking public libraries out of the public sector and why there are real fears about it. 

Firstly, a strategic issue: review after review (and Sieghert was no exception) has noted that part of the problem with the public library service is its fragmented nature. That, together with the fact that nigh on everything in English public library land is optional, means that there's little strategic development; limited opportunity for significant economies of scale outside book-buying consortia; and nationwide initiatives depend for their critical mass on a postcode lottery of acceptance. Other important national failures are an absence of KPIs and no definitive asset register — the debates on the future of public libraries have no benchmarking to work from; no consistent trends data; no nation-wide evidence-based analysis of outcomes; and not only do we not have an empirical national picture of what the public library service is and how it's doing, we don't even know how many public libraries there are in England! (by way of contrast, I chose Moldova at random and found the answer in three clicks). Further fragmenting the service to a hyperlocal extent pretty much puts paid to any hopes that any of this could be corrected. 

Secondly, *whose* community? The idea of a single, close-knit, easily-identifiable community sits well with Camberwick Green but is meaningless in dormitory suburbs and mosaic inner cities. Back in Browne Issue days when demographic data was hard to come by it was horribly easy for some public libraries to become by ladies of a certain age for ladies of a certain age. Decades of work dedicated to building the culture that "public libraries are for everybody, not just people like us" risk being a waste of time and effort. How can equality impact assessments be made? How can they be made consistently? If made, what would be done with them? 

How accountable can the organisations running the community libraries be, and to whom? Whatever the shortcomings of elected members at least they can be voted out and are accountable to standards authorities. The model of imposition of community management doesn't allow for the organic growth of management and accountability structures. Grassroots voluntary activity works well when it grows from the ground up, it seldom prospers by parachute implementation and recruitment at bayonet point. 

Who owns the library data? There are intellectual property rights issues regarding the catalogue data. There are information governance issues, particularly data protection issues, regarding the customer data, loans data, the use of online resources and browsing histories within the library. Who are the Information Asset Owners? What are the information risk plans? Where are the data sharing plans? Who's going to be there to stop that person who thinks it would be a jolly good idea to collect all the names and addresses of library users and sell them to junk mail foundries to earn a few bob? 

The culture industry is one of the UK's big earners. A lot of small-scale, small-budget operations won't each have the critical mass needed to be able to afford both enough popular topics and best-sellers required for the bread-and-butter market and also a representative range of niche topics, new authors, locally-relevant stock and experimental guesses at The Next Big Thing. This will be a huge loss of seed-funding to the industry and a huge diminution of opportunity to the communities involved. One of the key drivers of human development is serendipitous discovery; if all that remains to be discovered is what is already known then there'll be a withering effect in both use and effectiveness of these services. 

That's my starter before bedtime. I hope more people add to the discussion.There's plenty more left for somebody to go at.

Herding digital cats

It's interesting that the report on the national digital presence for public libraries finally saw the light of day at the same time that BIC and a lot of library technology supply companies were meeting to progress the Library Communications Framework (LCF).

In their own ways they are each trying to solve the same problem: how to pull together a myriad disparate resources and services, each built to their own specific requirements, into a single user experience without requiring the availability of hundreds of library technologists in the front line of public libraries who probably will never exist.

I think they are both doable, with fair winds and fair spirits prevailing.

My Library By Right

This.

Go and sign the bloody petition already.