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December 21, 2008
Performance Indicator 9
Curious whether the results of Performance Indicator 9 would tell us anything we didn't already know, I compared the figures published for each English Council against the normal annual CIPFA measure of visits per thousand residents.. PI 9, remember, is the one measure central government now uses for public libraries and it tells us the percentage of residents who claim to call into a library during the past year.
If visits per resident were indeed the most appropriate or indeed any or even the best measure of a library service the worst 10 library English library authorities according to PI9 are
Barnsley
Blackpool
Leeds
North East Lincolnshire
North Lincolnshire
Plymouth
Stoke-on-Trent
Sunderland
Wakefield
Wigan
and the worst according to CIPFA would be
Barnsley
Bradford
Cambridgeshire
North Lincolnshire
Rochdale
Salford
Stoke-on-Trent
West Berkshire
Wigan
Wokingham
The best according to PI 9 would be
Barnet
Blackburn with Darwen
Brent
Coventry
Hackney
Harrow
Hounslow
Stockport
Tower Hamlets
Warwickshire
and according to CIPFA would be
Barnet
Blackburn with Darwen
Haringey
Harrow
Hounslow
Manchester
Newham
Richmond upon Thames
Tower Hamlets
Wandsworth
(I have excluded authorities like the Corporation of London where there are anomolous measurements)
In both of these pairs of lists five authorities appear both times. So PI9 really doesn't say that much more than CIPFA already tells us, as intuitively one would have expected. And with the CIPFA figures, many years of consistent measurements show the trends that are occurring: for example, Tower Hamlets is now in the top ten visited library authorities, but three years ago it wasn't.
But as readers of this blog know, visits to libraries are not an indicator of how useful or well used they are at all. In fact, for reading purposes, some of the most visited services are among the least useful. So one wonders about the value of this whole expensive exercise.
But of course, those who undertook it, knew all this before they took up the public money it needed.
If there is money available for research of the kind that is being used in every council to calculate PI9, it would be much better to use it for a smaller national sample to ask people why they use libraries, or why they don't; what they use them for; and why they think libraries are so potentially valuable that they are prepared to pay for them. Then we would have some idea whether libraries were doing the right thing and what they can do to make improvements that the public want to see. Used alongside existing CIPFA data to highlight local variations, that would be useful research.
Posted by Perkins at December 21, 2008 2:47 PM
Comments
I was listening to the Westminster Hour, and this had a section about the things that MPs do without wide recognition - MPs of whom most people may have never heard.
Among these was Claire Curtis-Thomas, who is an engineer, and she has visited Sierra Leone. After the terrible time that country's had, she asked people what they most wanted and fully expected to hear such things as water supplies but what she was told time and again was: books, libraries.
There is scarcely one book per 100 children. People there recognise that books are the means of improving their lives - as they did in England in the nineteenth century, when Councils were slow to provide libraries and Andrew Carnmegie stepped in to provide them.
We are of course more fortunate than the people in Sierra Leone, and at the same time it is so encouraging that, amidst their privations, they have made this eloquent statement of the central part that books play in life.
And well done to Claire Curtis-Thomas for highlighting this.
Posted by: Christopher Hawtree at December 21, 2008 11:41 PM
When I read comments like Christopher's about Sierra Leone, I do feel real hatred for the wittering b******s in the West who downgrade books and puff up their narrow-minded self-importance by waffling on about IT all the time. Life is very hard in many, many parts of the world and, instead of throwing some of these wittering b******s out of the USS Enterprise's shuttlebay in their jim-jams as I suggested a few comments ago, why not dump them in Sierra Leone for a few days? Preferably without water but with a copy of the Conway report and some CIPFA statistics. I wonder how long they would last?
Posted by: James Christie at December 22, 2008 1:25 PM
Hertfordshire County Council commissioned an interesting survey from MORI in 2006. Quoting directly from the report: "What lapsed users would most like to see improved is the selection of books (41%), as well as more convenient/longer opening hours (23%). The full report is available as a pdf download from Stevenage Council at the bottom of this page:
http://tinyurl.com/7loxby
Posted by: Martyn at December 22, 2008 1:47 PM
Martyn, indeed- that is what all MORI or any other local pieces of market research in the whole of the UK always say, when they are conducted. There have been dozens over the years that I have watched. Indeed if you ask MORI what they will say, before they do them, they can tell you! So it costs nothing to know what libraries should actually do.
There was one large county council not far from you who asked MORI to report in this way and when the report came back saying the priorities were better books, longer hours, clean the buildings, the council then decided that the thing they must do first was... replace the library management system!! That took up all the available funds and they then moaned there was nothing for books. etc....
Libraries would have gone the way of Woolworths years ago if the Government didn't bail them out every year.
Posted by: Tim Coates at December 23, 2008 8:58 AM
I think we all agree, Perkins, that central government is very unwise to use “visits” figures, however obtained, to judge library authorities.
CIPFA tables give a parameter that is a far better measure of good library provision, namely: “percentage of residents who are active library-card users”.
This shows that some services are let off the hook by PI9 whilst others are unfairly condemned!
The worst ten councils, where fewer than 15.2% of residents use their libraries (as libraries), turn out to be:
Barnsley
Bracknell Forest
Bradford
Lambeth
Leeds
Liverpool
North Lincolnshire
Stoke-on-Trent
Wakefield
West Berkshire
Five of these are in the worst ten for (CIPFA) visits and, although the other five fall in the bottom half, they might escape admonishment if ONLY judged on visits!
And the best ten (with over 29% of residents using library cards) are:
Gateshead
Harrow
Hounslow
Kingston-upon-Thames
Manchester
Peterborough
Redcar & Cleveland
Rochdale
South Tyneside
Westminster
Of these, only three appear in the “visits” top ten, and two, Rochdale (145th out of 148) and Kingston-upon-Thames (128th) are actually near the bottom of THAT misleading ranking!
Councils already abuse the privilege of running our libraries by turning them into their own information and community centres - and even recycling-bag distribution points! Government should know that to actually give them CREDIT for getting people through the doors for ANY reason will only distract them further from providing proper libraries.
Posted by: No Brain at December 29, 2008 12:07 AM