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February 10, 2010
The supply chain of books to public libraries
I have been saying for a long time that the whole supply chain for books and the catalogue information that accompanies publication needs to be overhauled. It is inefficient, expensive, wasteful, slow and it takes away the energy and excitement that publishers generate, so that public libraries are made dull.
I first said it in an article in the Guardian in 1998 and then in speech to the Library and Information show in the same year.
One of the reasons it is such an important subject is that it is the key to unlocking the back office costs that are wasteful. The effect of sorting out the supply chain will be much greater than improved efficiency of handling books. It gives the opportunity to refocus library management on the service given to the customer, day to day, instead of worrying about process behind the scenes.
For all these reasons I think it is one of the handful of absolutely essential subjects, of which the failure to address, has impeded significantly the improvements needed in public libraries. There are other key topics- budgeting, property management, understanding customer needs, selection of stock and opening hours are also on my list (but not ebooks or electronic changes, which I don't think have been relevant at all so far)
Andrew McIntosh, when he was briefly the minister, listened to me and understood. It was he who, following those conversations, initiated the project called Better Stock, Better Libraries. I desperately wanted to be involved in that work, because I could foresee that put in the wrong hands it would just go around in circles and not face the problems properly. I was excluded by the DCMS and MLA at the time, and the project did indeed go famously around in very expensive circles. It became the Price Waterhouse- MLA fiasco and achieved nothing.
The MLA is obviously the body that should have overseen this project. It needs to be lead properly and it needs to achieve results. However the MLA has never understood the essential nature of the problem. Chris Batt was fixed on the idea that books are history and the internet is what libraries are for- and so the problems of supply of books, were not worth tackling. He seemed to think that it would go away as the book stock diminished. But actually there was no reason why that should be true, and it hasn't happened.
The new MLA, whose first problem was to stop the expenditure on BSBL, have never tried to understand why that was an important project in the first place. Roy Clare appears not to have the experience to know why it should be tackled, or how to tackle it. He has got into position that he resists ideas coming in, certainly from this direction, and so the logs are jammed even more tightly than they ever were. That is a terrible and destructive shame and no one seems to know how to unblock it.
This problem is a cancer- it will destroy the public library service; it very nearly has already. It is quite solvable, but people need to be told what to do. It won't be resolved by consultation. what is needed is what I wrote in The Bookseller this week. These things are now imperative. We must do them.
I am at a loss-- and need someone else to take up this baton. Please.
Posted by Perkins at February 10, 2010 7:46 AM