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September 20, 2010
Standard platforms
In the previous entry I talked about National Standard platforms for providing everything that an individual community library needs to offer really high quality local services.
The purpose of these is to eliminate all the costs which are incurred at council level and to allow a council to spend all its available money on the individual library buildings and their staff and stock.
So such a platform might offer supply contracts for all the major suppliers, for library management system suppliers, for web services, RFID, for design contracts, for national catalogues, for distribution for inter library stock movement and so on.
They could include marketing and promotion, impact and performance measures, community communications and publisher promotions.
At the same time library staff could be trained to use these standard platforms however large or small theirn library might be.
If there were two or three across the whole country they would be competitive and efficient. Councils could use several for their different libraries if they wished.
I think we should develop such models commercially and role them out quickly. I believe they would reduce the cost of the service by £200-£300m. They also could remove the need for 'trusts' and would allow councils to remain directly accountable for the quality of their libraries. They could even be used by communities who wanted to run their own libraries or schools, hospitals, prisons, etc
As always I would propose that the national standards would be operated by BIC
Let us call them Perkins Platforms.
copyright: Tim Coates -2010
Posted by Perkins at September 20, 2010 5:50 PM
Comments
But Perkins, take away those central services and there is very little justification for the continually increasing central overheads - whoops - what have I said? Hope I haven't let the cat out of the bag (so to speak)...
Posted by: Martyn at September 20, 2010 6:24 PM