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July 23, 2006
The Dumchurch letters July 23
Dear Chrysanthemum
In order to address the problem of the budget I described in my letter of July 21 I wanted to start rebuilding the budget from its very base.
I requested that each individual library should for only a week, keep a record every hour of how many visits and how many loans were made. Alongside that we were able with the help of the crew of each library to write down how many staff were present during each of those hours.
In this way it was possible to see that there already some very large variations between the staff present and the staff that were needed simply to deal with the presence of readers in the library. We were also able to discuss how predictable or not were those patterns of reader visits.
From these discussions we made some very sensible and easy changes to the staff rotas for the different libraries. We were also able to see when there were times for doing jobs that did not require presence at the counter of the library and how much time was available for doing those things.
All those discussions took place with the library staff themselves and did not involve the management of the service. In this way the staff were in a position to say to their managers that there are a number of changes to the rota which will be improvements for our customers but which will not affect the cost of running our library.
Just common sense really, but a great deal was learned from the discussion.
Grimsdyke
Posted by Tim Coates at July 23, 2006 9:24 AM