The Good Library Blog

Dear Tim

Forgive the delay in responding to your request for my ideas about library training – I have been laid low for some days by an attack of partially defrosted crustaceans (indigested by me, I must emphasise, rather than thrown at me), so I haven’t been able to respond to your response until today.

I would list the six essential elements for library training for senior managers in these days of falling stock funds and falling issues as-

1. Learn to protect the interests of your political bosses at all costs, including the quality of the service you offer and the best interests of those who use it. Never let any deficiencies in the really important elements of good library provision (lots of books, convenient opening hours, well-motivated frontline staff) impinge on their peace of mind, or their slumbers.

2. Never, ever, let the harsh realities of commercial life, especially cost-effectiveness, moderate the demands you make on stock suppliers, and the subsequent extra costs of getting books onto the shelves. Insist on your own local variants of stock arrangement, spine labelling, circulation grids and (for Ook’s sake!) approval collections, no matter what the cost.

3. If you really wish to rise to the top of your profession, efficient techniques of self-destruction will be vital: perfect the ability to cut staff and stock, while insisting publicly that your service is being ‘rationalised’, ‘developed’ or, best of all, ‘stream-lined’: above all, remember that the most unpopular ‘stream-lining’ must always afflict libraries in wards whose councillors are not currently members of the authority’s ruling group.

4. As a chief, delegate as many strategic and tactical decisions as possible to your middle-management colleagues: never overrule their judgement, no matter how limited their experience and responsibilities may be.

5. Meetings! Meetings! Meetings! Remember you are a local government officer first, and a librarian second. Resist all attempts to confer with your colleagues by phone and email – those committee rooms must be filled for debates on Health & Safety, Team Building, Financial Control Systems, etc., and YOU must be there, for the meeting, the whole meeting and nothing but the meeting. If your council seems to be relatively undemanding about the number of hours its Heads of Service have to spend in this way, get onto some CILIP committees, or, even better, sign up as an adviser/consultant with the MLA (or its regional equivalent).Manage this effectively, and you may never have time to speak to a library user…

6. Exacerbate the staffing shortages caused by ‘stream-lining’, by sending as many staff as possible on those wonderful CILIP courses, a tick in the box marked ‘Training’ well justifies low staffing levels and frustrated users. Remember too that those same courses are possibly being paid for twice by your authority – once as part of the CILIP membership fees the council may pay on behalf of library employees and again as the actual attendance fees for particular courses, also paid for from the council’s budget – more courses could mean fewer new books!

Endowed with these formidable insights, your rise to the top will be well-nigh meteoric – that is, if there are any public libraries left, by the time you get there…

Many thanks for the offer of a guest blog – if something really meaty turns up, I shall be happy to accept!

Verity

Thank you to Miss Penglais for this. A special bunch of leaks is on its way to you for bringing some cheer to frosty glades of Cricklewood.

The library is in terminal decline, chasing after DVDs, Videos and computers, and so dumping books. Several of our once good libraries, including the central one have had fortunes spent tarting them up, each one creating a worse system. To pay, of course, books are disapearing off the shelves rapidly, a fact being denied on a regular basis. They have lost all sense of priorities and their duty to the public.

Tim, I may be misinterpreting your sense of irony here, but I'm at a loss to see this piece of arithmetic as anything other than fatuous. It implies that a public library service is purely (or even, let's be generous) primarily about lending books. If there are many councillors who have such a narrow view of the public realm, there would be serious cause for concern. But since the printed word is no longer the overwhelmingly predominant medium of communication that it was when the public library movement arose, it's very strange to imply that spending on the service should be judged predominantly in terms of lending books. The word has already got out that libraries fortunately are rather more than that. :-)

Kevin

Thank you for that-- how good to hear from you. Where are you based? Do you know that 75% of library use is for books? Or isn't it like that where you are?

I think these figures show three things. Firstly that costs are rising quickly; secondly that there is a large variation of costs; thirdly that too little emphasis is being placed on the quality of the book collections.

It is quite normal practice to examine the ratio of overall cost to main activity and see what conclusions are drawn.

In my camp (if you excuse the expression) the view is that public library services are experiencing decline in book lending because they are investing too little in books- -not because the public demand is declining. These figures highlight the extent to which that is true particularly in these central London boroughs.

Libraries are not particularly about communication: they are more about reading and much of reading is of books.

"Fatuous" is a strong description for what I certainly believe to be valid obervations. Should we perhaps explore some of these councils in more detail?

I have not read your raw data but the library service does more than just "lend books". Of course our County Councils (and London) needs to do more to make libraries more than simple lending shops. A lot has aready been done but there is more to do.