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August 21, 2008
More astonishing revelations from the public library chat room
A chief librarian writes
"A colleague of mine 'left' a library to work in HQ...In his absence the library he left started to 'perform' really well ..to the delight of the management who lauded his replacement (naive or what)....because Charlie still lived in the area and had a key to the library ..he checked the Browne issue stats. at random for a month, when the library was shut!.
His 'replacement' was, on average, topping up the issues by 200 a day..this in a part time library issuing, in reality, about 600 items a day!!!
When confronted, she justified her action by claiming she was only doing what everybody else did.
I suspect the biggest problem isn't the action, but the stupidity of professional library management who fail to question statistics which are too good to be true. The same Authority, when switching from a 2 week loan to a 3 week loan period , generated a level of sustained usage, which suggested that some locations would not allow their 'issues' to fall, as by and large, that change in parameters should have done. ....
We do need to get away from a philosophy whereby issue statistics are used to create a mythical 'usage' and find a situation which creates meaningful corroboration of what we really achieve, if need be including 'real' evidence of what we lend, visitor counts, stock on loan, user satisfaction....surveying non-users ..lapsed users...lets spend more time finding out what people don't like about us and our services instead of surveying users who all say we are wonderful ...smashing ..great .. Scrap fines and charges and place real value on the underlying value of what we do and achieve..am I naive in thinking that in the last century we had a higher standing in most people's minds?"
Posted by Perkins at August 21, 2008 3:13 PM
Comments
Well maybe in the last century public librarians had a higher standing-- but as you have so eloquently explained it was not deserved. Instead it was based on a general and unpleasant deceit.
Let us hope that someone not only listens to your plea for proper management processes but takes some action urgently to implement what you recommend.
Posted by: perkins at August 21, 2008 9:41 PM
Apart from the bit about scrapping fines, I think that's dead on. When I was a Library Assistant at a southern County Council, a small branch library with a poor reputation but acceptable user stats lost its long time manager and I was sent there, with an excellent new manager, to spruce the place up a bit. We tidied, improved customer customer service, went out into the community to promote kids' literacy schemes, introduced coffee mornings for the old folk - all the right stuff, basically. More people came through the doors. We got great feedback. Then the user stats came out and it looked like our issues had fallen off a cliff. Turns out the old manager had been issuing and returning things to falsify the stats for years, but the Council used it as an excuse to cut back our meagre staffing hours.
Posted by: Patrick at August 22, 2008 10:38 AM