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November 28, 2006
When "Up" means "Down"
Once again this blog produces an entry that you couldn't possibly make up. For those of us who worry about the public library service, one of the main sources of concern is the constantly falling number of book issues. I, for one, believe that this indicates the decline in the quality of the book collections and that is a cause for very serious anxiety.The service produces relatively few figures and they are always unhelpfully late. Nevertheless every year book "issues" go down by about 10m. This has been the relentless and sorrowful pattern- and it is the figure to which we have tried repeatedly to draw attention.
Imagine my total astonishment when this afternoon I was sent a copy of a note from Mark Wood, the Chair of the MLA in which Mr Wood says "The recent LISU figures, for example, showed book issues up quite considerably while expenditure on books was down" . The note was sent to me to check if what was said could possibly be true!
I cannot express better than one of my other friends- who faced with the same query responded-
"What is Mark Wood on? I hope the ITN accounts get better scrutiny. How on earth can the MLA get to grips with the situation when it can't even read some simple data whose collection and analysis it itself sponsors.
You can reassure Mr Wood his money has been well-spent with LISU; their numbers do not say two different things. Refer him to P36 for book spend: down £700k (-0.8%) last year continuing the ten-year decline of 14.9%. And refer him to P68 for the UK Book Issues numbers: down 10m last year (-3.2%), continuing the long-term decline of 38% over the past ten years.
Unsurprisingly, lending stock is down 18% over ten years, even though the average cost of each book purchased is down by £1.14 (-13%)
Visits were up by a mere 3 million, a further slowing down of the increase post library computerisation, meaning we are not yet back to the visit levels of 1998/9 which itself was well down on previous years.
And while expenditure on books at current prices has declined by £21.3m (-19%) over the past ten years, expenditure on staff in the same period has increased by £73.3m (+18%).
This kind of statistical analysis doesn't require highly paid help, but it does require that people read the source material."
(Mark Wood is not only Chair of MLA, but also Chief Executive of ITN)
The MLA has just decided to close LISU down, so it can produce the figures instead! In fact these figures were first published last January- LISU present them in a form which shows the long term trends. This note of Mark Wood was a considered response to a set of points that had been made to him- so it appears that all year he has been wrongly advised as to the actual performance of the service. This is not unlike the situation in which (also at the end of January) the Minister was wrongly advised that the numbers of books had gone up when it had gone down. The common thread is that both men are advised on these figures by the same team of executives at the MLA. (Mind you if they could read figures themselves it would help)
Posted by Tim Coates at November 28, 2006 5:53 PM