The Good Library Blog

I can see no real reason why any work should be conducted off the library floor. Librarians are uniquely well-placed to meet and talk to their customers - all day every day (assuming they work in one of the 78 librariaes in the UK which are open - otherwise ....)
More librarians should avail themselves of these opportunities, more of the time.
When Tim was running Waterstone's, or running The Book Shed, I am sure he spent as much time as he could in the branches and wanted all of his branch staff to be on the floor dealing with customers. Not lurking in back offices.

According to our cataloguer adding records of new books from suppliers is very simple and only a tiny part of his job. He occasionally needs to amend these records or re-classify existing stock, he also adds new donations and adds records in various Indic and Eastern European languages so that they can be more easily recognised by readers.

I know that he does a lot more that I am unaware of (I have mentioned only those duties which occasionally impact directly upon what I am doing) I am sure that he or any other cataloguer could give you a more detailed account of their daily routine.

We do handle cash and so, yes, staff have to be able to deal with it in private.

We currently support around 50 or 60 reading groups. Most of these are not actually attended by library staff but there is quite a large amount of work involved in making sure that they have the books they want on time, making sure that books are returned so that other groups can borrow them and generally making sure that the whole process runs smoothly. In the case of groups we run directly we also need to ensure that people are aware of the date and time of each meeting prepare discussion questions and do a little background research on the book, groups with children and young people take a lot of preparation because you can't rely upon them to simply talk about the weather if they didn't read the book (and no, we don't get paid for the time we spend reading the books and neither do we get paid for the time we run groups out of “opening” hours). A lot of this requires concentration or a quiet place in which to speak with people and is not ideally done from the public desk.

As for the idea of Book Groups not being a task, which rather depends upon how many you have to attend within a given time. At one point I was running 7 groups (at least 2 of those out of working hours) and most of my spare (non-working) time was spent reading and preparing for them.

Miriam, I'm sure I'm missing something. Is that 50 0r 60 reading groups in one library- or in a number of libraries?

I'm shy to ask, but why do you attend them?

If they are 'outside opening hours' why don't you open the library when they are on?

Is it a lot of cash?- I'm talking about a medium sized shop taking say £10,000- £15,000 per week, for which you need a secure place to count and organise tills etc. One person for a couple of hours a day.

This is all really interesting. We'd love to hear what your cataloguing colleague does. I thought that most books came with a standard catalogue record. Is it neccesary to have a cataloguer as well?

Miriam

Really sorry- I lost one of your comments to this entry- about bookshops and libraries not being the same etc. Please could you send it again? i sent you an email, saying the same. My fault

tim

Sorry, that was a bit unclear.

Our library supports 50-60 book groups; the majority of these only borrow book sets and advertise with us.

Actually facilitating at reading groups on a regular basis is rather staff intensive but the number of people asking us about joining a groups usually far exceeds the number of places that we know of in existing groups and so, in order to help out as many people as possible, we "seed" book groups from the library.

We start off a group in the library with a member of staff facilitating discussion and then, after a few meetings allowing the group to gel we ask if anyone would be comfortable with taking over the running of the group (arranging meetings, borrowing and taking responsibility for book sets, thinking of emergency discussion questions, contacting members, introducing and advertising for new members etc). It can sometimes take a little while but once the group is comfortable enough to run without our direct intervention then we start up another one.

We do have meetings in libraries out of opening hours but because of security issues these require a member of staff to be present. There are also a few groups that require some sort of extra help or supervision, chatterbooks groups, teenage groups; groups aimed at the elderly and a group for visually impaired people for example.

I didn’t mean to imply that I dislike the groups, just that organisation can require some effort (if I hated them I wouldn’t devote my free time to them). Also, i don't want to give the impression that all we do is run reading groups, the majority of our time is taken up with maintaining stock throughout our libraries.

I am not sure how much cash we take in a week. As far as I know it is dealt with one person in each branch on a daily basis.

Not to worry Tim, I will post a rehashed version of that comment in a minute.

Sorry if this makes for a very long reply but here is the gist of my other comment.

Firstly I apologise to Mr Atkins if he has had years of experience working in a library and I am simply misinterpreting his comment.

Libraries and bookshops are obviously different.

Staff in bookshops do not have to spend a great deal of time on in-depth queries (a business or local studies inquiry for example may take many hours of research), they do not have to mend or re-jacket stock, they do not have to rotate stock through several sites. There are other tasks such as reservations and inter-library loans which don’t really have a direct parallel in bookshops.

I imagine that staff in Waterstones don’t do all of their paperwork or arrange and execute publicity events whilst on a public desk. From a practical point of view it is not possible for us to perform every task from an enquiry desk. Many of our “backroom” tasks still involve communication with either groups or individuals so we very rarely have the opportunity to “lurk in back offices”.

Miriam

Thanks again. This isn't a small matter. In all the well conducted studies that I have seen somewhere between 25% and 33% of staff time in public libraries is "off the rota" which means if those people weren't there, it wouldn't affect the ability of the library to open. That cost- across the country is £150-£250 million pounds. So the pursuit of reducing it is worthwhile.

Actually, it is unforgiveable I know, but running a large good bookshop is not so very different from running a medium sized public library. I would say the overlap is about 90%. I've seen both in some detail. And I would have expected almost all the activities you describe to take place in the public area and the staff to be available to help customers if needed. We couldn't afford to exist in any other way. That's the reality.

There are ‘back-room’ or back-office staff and there is management – and I think it is management which should be your target.

Often it is made up of people whose principal activities seem to be arranging and attending meetings in which very little of practical worth is discussed, preparing lengthy, turgid and jargon-filled reports which address all the usual politically correct targets and which few people other than themselves can bring themselves to read, and initiating fatuous initiatives such as the Liverpool ‘mini-gyms’.

Unfortunately, it is this significant proportion of the staff who also control the allocation of the library budget. These are the people who have to be persuaded that a good public library must still be judged on its book stock – not on the number of Internet work stations. But these managers are rarely seen in the library, let alone working in them. They are the equivalent of WW1 generals directing affairs safely away from the front-line. And significantly these are the people who have the ear of the Councillors responsible for running the library service.

Most front-line and ‘back-room’ library workers are devoted to books and want to provide what is so lovingly and eloquently described in all the numerous contributions to the Love Libraries web-site.

There is a malaise within Local Government of which the Library Service is only part. So many jobs are non-jobs and contribute little of practical use.

Tim,

To which activities are you referring? The library ones I mentioned or the bookshop ones?

The most important difference, which is implied but not mentioned in my comment, is that libraries recycle their stock. Time has to be spent maintaining stock which is not necessary in book shops where the stock is all new and is not supposed to return to the shelves. "Off-desk" time, in my experience at least, also includes time taken to tidy and re-shelve stock as well as mending and jacketing it as I mentioned before.

May I ask how these statistics are measured? Are they accross library services as a whole or do they study individual libraries? Also what is classed as "off rota" time? I ask becasue there are certain services, such as Mobile libraries and deliveries to the elderly and housebound which might be difficult to measure in this way.

Miriam

Remember that, just as every day the stock in a library which has been returned has to be re-shelved, the stock in a book shop which has been sold, is replaced by an equivalent amount which arrives from suppliers. It has to be checked, identified, catalogued and shelved every morning- in exactly the same way. Invoices have to be approved and passed and stock has to be correctly entered and identified on the system. Very often that stock is a direct replacement of the titles that were sold, sometimes it is new stock that needs to have a home found for it.

This is part of the daily routine and while it obviously is done "away from the desk" it is done by booksellers who are available to serve at the desk if there is a need.

It is a different kind of re-cycling- but the result should be the same: every day a well presented, clrearly signed full display of stock on all the shelves.

You are right there is no "mending and re-jacketing" - but that work can be timetabled to fit the quiet times of day and can be done by staff in the public area available to help customers.

I think, in the studies i mentioned, mobile library time counted as "on rota" but I'm not sure about home visits. Booksellers also undertake home visits and other outreach projects - they see it as an essential part of their role in the community; however I would insist that work was done by shop staff "on rota" at a time of day they can be spared from the shop. The work is important but should not result in a net need for more staff. They couldn't afford to work in any other way.

I know this is all fine detail - but it is by the pursuit of timetabling work with as much care as possible- that one saves the money that we need for more stock and building care work

I hope I am not beginning to sound as though I am obsessed with shelving books, but I agree that this point is important.

I realise that bookshops have to restock their shelves but they do not need to return books to the shelves throughout the day. We have books returned from different branches, books returned to bookdrops and anything which we did not have time to shelve the previous day to shelve in the mornings. It is also necessary to tidy the shelves, I realise that customers in bookshops will also pick things up and set them down in a completely different area but for us it is very important that each book can be easily located as we obviously do not have as many copies of the same title. Obviously any staff who are dealing with stock on the shelves whether shelving, shelf-tidying or weeding, are already spending time in a public area and they will be approached by library users.

When the library is open we receive a constant stream of returned books to shelve. It is important that these are returned to the shelves as soon as possible because there may be other users wishing to use them and because they quickly pile up behind the desk. Obviously staff can shelve these books during quiet times but these can often be few and far between. It can also be difficult for staff on desk duty to keep an eye on the desk when shelving at the other end of the library or around the corner (and there is only so much that can be done with the layout of a building).

I wonder if we are arguing at cross purposes. It is possible that we both have different ideas of the definition of “off rota”. You say that your staff would be sent out to do outreach work whilst on the rota but surely if they are not available to work on a public desk then they are off rota.

I asked about Mobile Services because the amount of time spent actually serving the public is quite small in comparison to the time taken to select books for individual users, maintain stock and maintain vehicles but these things are all vital to the smooth running of a very valuable service. I am curious as to which members of staff were evaluated. For example, we have several cleaners and one and a half caretakers to maintain our buildings, they are all library staff and they all do a vital job but none of them deal with the public (except when the caretakers are acting in place of security guards).

Miriam

No obsessions at all- or I should say you are right to be obsessed about presenting libraries and their stock as smartly as possible- I don't think we can take this further unless perhaps someone were to offer us a library and a shop which had about the same volume of visitors and then we could really look in detail and compare them. But I suspect that we agree that detailed time planning is important.

But what about the work which is definitely "off rota"? I have caused consternation by suggesting that operations like bibliographic services and over elaborate stock selection processes are no longer neccessary these days, given that the major library suppliers all offer services which efectively replicate- or carry out those functions at much less cost. How do you feel about that?

Personally I have no problem with supplier selection. It saves librarians trawling through long lists of potential titles and it allows us to think of stock in general and practical terms (how many books we need to buy in each subject across a year rather than what it available on each weekly list, maximum and minimum book sizes etc).

There will always be some prep work necessary (for donations, books bought as "emergency replacements", books bought from small local suppliers etc) but most of this can be done by suppliers quite efficiently.

Miriam

Yes, I agree with you. I have learned to see "supplier selection" as confusing two different activities. The first is the "great sift" of publishers' output- and the best people to do this are library suppliers or wholesalers who are targetted by publishers with information about new titles and have to sort it into its piles of relevance. The second is what I call "collection management" which is the tuning of the collection within each library to the very particular needs of its community. And then it includes obtaining special requests.

Collection management is 15% about new titles and 85% about making sure that the core stock of each section of the library is up to date and in good condition.

But I would place the onus of being in charge of "collection management" in each library- and not in the council office. In other words I would put my most experienced staff into individual libraries and let them make use of suppliers recommendations and guidance in the context of their own library. The amount of titles they end up buying is so small (compared to a retailer) that I would want to see that work done "on the library floor" as part of the daily routine. It allows the librarians in individual libraries, then, to be responsive to and responsible completely for looking after the needs of their local community. I would place (most of) the stock fund in the hands of individual libraries and measure their ability to increase issues.

That cuts out all the cost of other activities- and allows one often to double or even treble the stock fund. This takes time and can't be done overnight. But suppliers can help make this transition carefully and gradually and provide the appropriate support. Tim