The Good Library Blog

Let`s hear it for the MLA!

Just think of all the challenges they have to rise to every day -

1. The hours, nay days, spent justifying the £ millions they use running their 'service'.

2. The enormous skill needed to massage those stiff and recalcitrant statistics on poor library performance, so ministers, and the public, will be spared the ghastly truth...

3.The effort of ensuring that they get value for money from those terribly expensive consultants, who are employed to ensure value for money.

4. The ingenuity required to devise all those reports adivising libraries that if they buy books cheaply, they will get cheaper books.

The list is endless - so have a heart, Mr Coates!

Support for the MLA

The splendid initiatives of the MLA are constantly thwarted because thy have no way of enforcing their ideas. Short of an Act of Parliament, this isn't going to happen.
However, they could have a mighty impact if they implement the following:-

Carefully select a suitable consultant (expensive but necessary) who will draw up a league table based on the statistics already supplied to CIPFA and LISU. The table would take account of the investment made in individual library services and what those services actually did with their investment - ranging from Humble Hampshire to Mighty Mertyr Tydfil.

Then, we could applaud those services that are really delivering the goods, while chiefs of those libraries performing less well would have a wonderful weapon to use when appealing to their councillors to prevent further cuts in funding. After all, what councillors will want their services to be exposed for the rubbish they really are?
Of course, there might be a few casualties at the top in some libraries, but it's a price worth paying.

I challenge the MLA to implement this and show us what you're made of.

I remember a consultant's report of last year in which they they drew a graph comparing performance of a library service and the amount of money invested. In fact there were several graphs using different measures of performance. In none of them was their any correlation between funding and improvement whatsoever.

In other words until people learn how to use the money properly, there is no point in a council investing in its libraries.. they are just as likely to get better libraries if they take the money away.

As a professional pedant, I must take issue with Charlie Main over his inclusion of 'Mighty Merthyr Tydfil' in his putative MLA league tables.
On this side of Offa's Dyke, we are free from the chains of the DCMS and all its works - but, alas, we have our own version of the MLA, in the shape of CYMAL (pronounced almost like 'camel' - and we know what the committee convened to design a horse came up with, don't we?).