The Good Library Blog

Perhaps, but that's only going to work for books which are in print and easily obtainable. What about older, less popular titles? If your library authority has only retained one copy (fair enough) shouldn't you be able to have it sent to the library which is most convenient for you?

So we need some analysis. Out of, say, the last 100 books that were moved, how many were out of print or difficult to obtain? If the answer is a very small number, why not just make a request by email and post the old copy from one branch to the other. That would be a lot cheaper than operating the expensive systems we do. But to move a £7 paperback that would cost £4 to replace, by half empty van around the streets of London.. if that is the majority of what we are moving, then we are being very wasteful. The rotation process either removes popular books from one library or sends unpopular books to another. For what?

I am not saying I am certain about these things, I am saying that the cost is so great that we ought to know the facts. We need thorough analysis- and there are enough library students capable of doing it fairly quickly.

In our South London authority we do not have an enormously expensive way of transporting these books, it just involves two blokes and a van. In the whole scheme of things I believe that this has relatively little impact on carbon emissions and is extremely speedy. Which authorities are you referring to?

Another Tim Coates mad idea. In an authority with 48 libraries and 7 mobiles stock rotation is working well and will be tweaked with EBSM. "Let me take you in a (half empty) van and drive you through the streets of London". Why London and why is the van half empty? Didn't they plan the routes properly to avoid wastage? You should get out more and visit some libraries outside London.

"Just 2 blokes and a van" x33 London authorities equals "Just 66 blokes and 33 vans" = £1.5m per annum. The total book spend in London is just £10m. Sounds like you that I'm talking about Katie.

Across the country that is "Just 400 blokes and 200 vans" - about £7-10m per annnum, probably. Would make a good increase on the national book fund. Useful

Jack - how much is your overall library budget? how much is your bookfund? how much is the cost of this transport operation? - and how much is the cost of your new subscription to Smart? Remember delivery from your book suppliers costs nothing. How many of the books you transport are not available at the supplier?

If you don't rotate stock you end up with duplication and static collections. What's wrong with moving a popular title to a library that hasn't had it? You get more issues than if it stays in one library.If a book isn't being used, by all means move it to a library where it will be.Buying a copy for every library is unrealistic. Why purchase more copies than you need? So, if a library doesn't move it's stock where does the surplus stock go? How much wastage there?
You're getting too hung up on costs. The questions to ask are "What works for you?" and "What works best for the borrowers?". One man's theory doesn't fit all.

Jack. So I am hung up on costs! Don't you read the papers- we have to find ways to make the best use of public money. Just because that is the way you have been doing things, doesn't mean it is the best way. You are spending my money- and I am trying to find if you could spend it better. Answer my questions-- or tell me which council you are in and I'll answer them for you. Are your book issues going up or down? In the last council I was working, book issues are up by 50%. So how mad was that?

These two chaps and their van don't just do library books, they also move around equipment in the authority area, including for example expensive equipment (such as PA equipment for lectures and evening events for LGBT events recently) which cannot be bought for every library. Therefore they are of practical use, and in all likelihood not fall under the budget of Libraries! So, which library authorities are being wasteful then?

Katie- in London, almost all of them. You will know that only around 5% of the London public libraries budget is spent on books. I am not alone in thinking that the library service in London has wastes a lot of money. That is also the basis of the London Libraries Change Programme. Where I differ from them is that I would like to see the money re-used on quite specific items (more books is one)- where the LLCP is talking about savings only to cut the wasted expenditure. In my view most back office activity in public libraries is a waste of money. That means almost everyone who is not working on the opening rota of a public library.

Does London still have the system by which, among all the libraries, at least one copy of every novel is kept?

As we know, public libraries have lost that priority of being a place where readers have a good chance of finding an out-of-print book. There is a bureaucratic obsession with having shelves of "attractive" books: never mind that the contents might be rubbish, it has a glossy wrapper. Rather like imperialist travellers waving trinkets in front of natives in exchange for valuable minerals.

Christopher-- I'm sure others will correct me but I fear that the answer is sadly that there is no longer such a collection. Indeed many of the wonders of the stacks of the last fifty or more years have been thrown away. I know that Haringey have a wonderful collection of their accumulated treasures, I have been in it and allowed to delve - as they sometimes allow the public to do- but I don't know how many of those are left. There plimsolled and happy experts tiptoe entranced among the terraced shelves. What would be fantastic would be one enormous building - perhaps a Victorian school or one of those hospitals that is no longer suitable for use and has a tree growing from the window, or some building like that which could act as a London repository and be open to perpetual exploration. (I don't think the LLCP thought of that one!) Tim

This sounds like a very odd area to be focusing on. I don't believe any authority rotates paperback fiction. It tends to be a way to ensure small sites can still offer variety especially in more expensive stock areas such as DVDs, spoken word and Large Print where a small number of regular borrowers can quickly get through the existing collection. The expensive van men do not exist for stock rotation but to move stock returned by customers from one library at another i.e. from big library to small local as well as reservations. Loss of stock rotation would make very little difference to the amount shuttled between sites.

Andy-- but the same question applies even more. Wouldn't it be better to buy spend all that money buying new copies, rather than moving stock of any kind between libraries? Why move stock back to where it was borrowed from? Is it really worth moving DVD's? And you have introduce a whole new field which is why are libraries paying so much money for large print and spoken word? Why do they allow those suppliers to operate such punitive terms arrangements? When the national book fund is down to £90m, to spend £10m on driving the stock around the country seems an awful lot of money. And I can tell you the large print publishers drive very big cars. Shock!

If libraries dispense with the their van service, because it is too expensive, they will not be able to:-
a) offer an effecient reservation service
b) allow customers to return their items to any library
c) distribute new stock
d) move special collections around eg Reading Group collections
e) move heavy items eg furniture, display boards etc between locations.

Stock rotation (or circulating stock) ensures that stock works harder ie garners more issues. It does not makes sense to spend money on items of stock if they are only going to get a couple of issues. Small libraries rely on stock rotation to freshen their stock.

By the way, in my last (London) authority it was one van driver and a van.

Dear Ex Librarian. In a London authority like yours, I am challenging the costs:
a. I contend that most reservations are for titles that it would be cheaper to buy a new copy than to maintain a van service. For those books that should not be bought in, they can be sent by post.
b. If books are returned to another branch the original branch can decide whether it wants to purchase another copy or not. That will be cheaper than moving it
c. Library suppliers will distribute new stock at no cost. There is no need for redistribution by van.
d. On the occasions you want to move special collections or large items, there are other ways than keeping your own distribution network. Taxis would probably be cheaper.
New stock would 'garner' more issues than old stock.
As I said at the beginning I may be wrong- but someone needs to do the sums. It is not so hard to do. The cost is a lot more than just the people who drive and their van in each case. There are systems and buildings and overheads that go with all this. And you can see that if 33 London authorities are maintaining these distributution operations, there is a large amount of money at stake. We need some facts.

"a. I contend that most reservations are for titles that it would be cheaper to buy a new copy than to maintain a van service."

I can't see this working on a number of levels. Starting from the other side, I only see it working if you're going on the assumption that only one person at each branch reserves a book. When multiple people at multiple branches reserve a book, your suggestion falls apart.

If branch A has 5 reservations and branch B has 10, and all 15 people read the book at the same rate, would the last five people at branch B have to wait for branch B's book instead of being sent the perfectly good one from branch A?

Or would extra reservations result in duplicate books being ordered for a single branch - which for popular books would result, once the popularity of the title wanes, in the branch being overloaded with books they can't issue and which take up valuable space which other books could occupy.

Indeed, they will have also sucked up money that could've been spent on other books.

I can't see how a library service can provide and efficient and successful reservation service without having a van service to transfer the books. This makes the vans a necessity, a sunk cost, as it were. And if you have this service which runs all the time regardless, it makes sense to make the best use of it, so rotating stock ends up being 'free', as it's making use of the service that already exists to provide reservations.

This isn't to say rotating stock is completely without problems. Rotate it too much and it looks tatty, and won't issue, whereas new copies might. Also rotating stock ends up old and won't issue for that reason. But I don't think your 'answer' to it is the right one.

I think that the budget for purchasing and the decisions as to what is bought should lie with the individual branch library. The manager of that individual library can then receive all the avialable advice from suppier selection agencies etc and make a judgment about how many copies to buy against the reservations for that library. If there are surplus copies in other libraries, he or she can ask for them. It would then be for the other library to decide whether they can be spared. If the manager of the first library has responsibility for satisfying the needs of his own local community with his own budget then the situation is perfectly clear. He can decide the best way to dispose of a surplus of any titles, if one arises. If all the distribution arrangements were closed, those individual library book funds would be a lot bigger. I am just asking that this hypothesis be explored with facts rather than opinion. Nobody, so far, has put forward one useable fact (about the books being moved). That's what we need, Gradgrind

At the present time the situation is too complicated and too expensive, there is too much uinsatisfied demand and the library service has a poor reputation for carrying the titles people want to read when they want them. I am trying to find ways to improve that- the future depends upon doing better.