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July 24, 2007
MLA "Better Books, Better Libraries" - don't do it
My advice to councils would be not to join this initiative for the following reasons, upon which I am happy to elaborate
1. There is a substantial amount of money to be saved in most councils, part of it is from stock supply work but the major part is from arises from the demarcation between professional and non-professional staff which causes over-manning. It also comes from indulgent processes and failure to adopt EDI etc. Councils can and should address these matters without any action by the MLA. The management and librarian structures are the areas to look at. Unfortunately the service can only afford to operate if most of the expenditure is in the library buildings themselves to keep them open and provide access to the public. We cannot afford to employ people in offices, warehouses and distribution centres
2. The discounts and proposed economies of scale in the Better Stock, Better Libraries programme are already available from suppliers. Councils aren't achieving these discounts at present because the specifications for processing are too variable and too complicated. It is individual councils that have to grasp this problem-- the MLA cannot. BIC can provide guidance on standards but the resolution to conform has to come at a senior level in the council and with political leadership- it's no use passing papers around at a conference of librarians. That has never worked.
3. There is no need to create an extra layer of Government owned infrastucture at a cost of £4m-£7m. What is needed is less structure not more and there needs to be clearer accountability for performance.
4. The local government communities White Paper of last autumn suggests that more resource and management control should reside in individual community libraries. Of course that means that it is invdividual libraries that the responsibility for the stock available to the public should reside- not in some distant MLA office in the home counties or Birmingham.
5. The MLA role should be to help councils achieve their own improvements, not to tell them what to do. They are not responsible for the performance of your libraries nor are they accountable to anyone for the actions they recommend. Their current programme is a recipe for the service to become worse.
6. The parts of the programme which are about common catalogues, standard formats and interoperability are right, but they will only be achieved if they are driven by collectives of councils, not by the MLA.
7. Everyone knows that the argument to persuade a council to move funds from efficiency savings to being spent on improvements to the service is a hard one and a local one. When the MLA glibly write "the money saved can be spent on longer opening and better stock" is a bit like saying "if you have a tin can and some petrol you can fly to the moon". It's true, but not a lot of help.
Don't depend on them to do your job for you. They can't and won't. They never achieved it themselves when they were working in councils, so there's no point in thinking they know how to do it for you.
The MLA should go back to the PKF report and make sure it is implemented. They were charged, jointly with the Society of Chief Librarians, with doing this work in 2005- and failed miserably. They need to work out what they need to finish that work, and do it as quickly as possible.
Posted by Perkins at July 24, 2007 2:45 PM