The Good Library Blog

A Blog that highlights much that is true, but within it are some arguments that seem not to hold water.

One of the points emphasised by campaigners is that public libraries' have value for the whole population, including those who are marginalised by society. Eric Pickles, however, regularly and frequently expresses his contempt for the vulnerable in the most unpleasant terms. Expecting this dyed-in-the-wool 'Big Society' advocate to be interested in restoring a decent library service to the country is equivalent to expecting one of the world's more vulgar dictators to stop massacring the innocents and advocate peace and lurve. It just won't happen.

Moving right along .... to Ed Vaizey :

Let us not confuse the 'man' with his 'role'. The offices of Secretary of State and Culture Minister (the 'role') *require* oversight of the public library service under the 1964 Act. The fact that Vaizey and Hunt's shared ideology inhibits them from exercising their statutory powers is entirely another matter. There is no excuse for letting these individuals off any hooks. Hang them up on the hooks, I say, and may they wriggle off them if they can.

(I doubt I'll get a "Shirley is, as usual, absolutely right" response from Perkins -- but it is a view and all views welcome, I expect.)

Shirley

Somewhere along the line someone has to do something that actually works instead of forever shouting 'something must be done'

We are about to go into the next budget round and the people who will actually determine what happens are the leaders of the councils.

They are not well informed or briefed about the values of libraries - and the practical management issues that could be brought to bear. At present all they hear are local people saying 'it's not fair, you don't understand, you are evil' and their finance managers saying 'there is no money'

Unless somebody explains a route through the marsh, they will close a lot more libraries this year. ... and that isn't going to be Ed Vaizey, because he doesn't understand, has no experience and has no advice to help him ..

The 1964 Act doesn't just say that the Minister should superintend, it also requires councils to run good library services --- that is the point I am trying to make... and they don't know how

Also, Shirley, I wrote this because someone coming new to the issue - a new campaigner or a journalist, perhaps - might assume there is some national structure to the library service, and that Ed Vaizey is somehow, the boss, the ceo of it all

He isn't -- that's the point. The ceo's of the library service are the leaders of each local council. There is no national hierarchy or structure; local councils do not answer to ministers in the DCMS. If the Minister wishes to play a part to intervene in the actions of a council, he (or she, when Margaret Hodge, or the other women ministers when labour were in power) has to create a legal argument for doing so and be prepared to make a case to intervene.

The point about librarians not being involved in the decision making about the library service is what I understand happened to the second proposal in Oxfordshire. The only bit I think the librarians were involved in was clagging onto the cuts to library managers having a volunteer coordinator which presumably came via the misguided CILIP policy on job substitution. Looking at the Oxfordshire numbers alone the librarians (not the library managers in libraries) are an ever dwindling species and their numbers have dropped since 04-05. I'm sure some campaigners don't agree with me but despite this still having a 7.9 million library service with a 1.4 million management and professional spend is still too top heavy, adding into this the 3.1 million internal recharge (a lot higher than similar sized shire authorities) and you are looking at a library service that no-one could call efficient with a straight face. I often wonder if anyone in power ever looks at the gigabytes of data that is submitted to CIPFA to see who is actually providing the best service, there are obviously quantitative measures to compare but also lots of data on customer satisfaction. In opposition the moron Vaizey was quoted as saying something along the lines of: “running a library service is simple, we just have to get on with it without the endless reviews”. CILIP, LGA, The arse council, the MLA are all (were) wasting public money on pointless initiatives, hand wringing and have failed to promote and protect the library service. At the top the Ministers (of whatever party) tend to be ideological idiots and what works doesn’t really matter, just lots of ideology, spin and pointless guff. If some real leadership was shown, the service could be improved across the country, protecting the libraries, saving money and making the service efficient and comprehensive for ALL. It won’t happen though, we will just get unmanaged, incompetent decline with lots of money wasted on expensive and pointless initiatives, conferences and reviews.

But is it not a fact that offending councils have mostly determined not to invite anyone to "explain a route through the marsh" ? They are digging in, extracting the peat and giving their 'library closure teams' medals (e.g. Brent) as the service sinks further down into the mire. In Surrey, the Council announces that its plans will result in no cost savings, but it will continue willy nilly with them. Vaizey and Hunt have not intervened in Surrey which is implementing a two-tier service for no good reason -- and it is *not* too late to do so.

We are too complacent about the very people we, the public, are paying to do a job. Unless Ed Vaizey has undergone a lobotomy, he understands perfectly well all that being effective in his office implies and has more experience with the Libraries brief than most others. *Only* his intervention or that of Hunt can impress upon councillors and officers that they cannot get away with their worst excesses.

So, I cannot conclude that Vaizey and Hunt are innocent dolts or that the worst councillors and chief librarians are, in general, desperate innocents vainly seeking guidance ... "Aaaw, bless" is not the response to their conduct that springs to mind.

For councils, the threat of being taken to Law is the only means that will move them from the destructive positions they have taken. Vaizey and Hunt have the obligation, and *must* be pressed, to invoke it.

Usually my comments do not get through to thegoodlibraryguide, however...

Strategic I define in terms of plans at the community and society level, the responsibility of the director level of an organisation - while managers implement the vision for the organisation of the directors.

Strategic plans for the public libraries it seems to me are developed both nationally and locally in terms of i) the 1964 Act itself being a strategic plan for the libraries (mainly the society context), while local administration will also develop plans for libraries strategically at the community level.

The organisation chart (at the top) in my own experience comprises something along the lines of a council cabinet (comprising councillors), directors employed by the council, and a head of service (directly responsible for the libraries).

It has been a constant motif in the back of my mind since working in libraries that the value of our libraries is not communicated to local councillors so that they can factor this into their strategic plans (I'm sure a brief survey would prove this conclusively).¶

Is it reasonable to expect that anyone with 'director' in his council job title should have a responsibility for strategic planning to whom the cabinet can look for expert advice? The problem is that directors responsible for libraries often have responsibility as well for culture more broadly, leisure, sport, etc.¶

How much responsibility does the chief exec. of the service itself have for strategic planning - I would have to ask the personnel dept. for the answer to that question myself, but most certainly a head of a service unit (archives, community libraries, etc.) should be able to report upwards on operations strategy options, while the head of service themselves should be able to justify their decisions for the for the service tactically. The director levels of the council I would hope would be in constant communications with all the levels of the organisation mentioned above for their professional advice and knowledge of the communities the libraries serve.¶

My expectation is for the above (I am by no means particularly an expert on local government, only as a layperson with a level of postgraduate education). The problem why all this does not work I would ask is the level to which local thieves can operate within council services, both within the service itself (confidence operators successfully operating as public servants), but also on the streets (the former do very much operate in concert with thieves operating in our local communities). We are by no means a fully developed democracy in which people can live truly freely yet!¶

Tactically, towards remedying this situation, and that came to mind as a consequence of being a recent news item, options would include:¶

'Safe havens' to be offered to bullied teenagers¶
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jun/07/safe-havens-bullied-teenagers¶

Which abstracting out brings into question the need for of a plan at the strategic level for improving council services through talented and professional staff and the environment they need to be able to work in (which appears to be the need in libraries at the moment if we accept that strategic planning is lacking - a long period of stability as a service is now at an end due to technological, society, etc. factors, an d their value requiring a reassessment of that of their origins 150 years ago, etc.). A more skilled management staff is needed to provide that vision.¶

The bottom line I think in the end is that concillors will primarily be thinking in terms of what they have to do to get re-elected, anything else is an added extra - if no one is calling for better strategic management of the public libraries then unless someone can convince them it might be an election results booster (at a minimum a free lunch of some sort - ethics is not a primary motivator here), they will not otherwise have the time to put into it.¶

Gareth

If ever you post a comment and I miss it, please send me an email - I never deliberately block anything at all.

I confess I am often very slow to post comments and that is because for some reason this site is blitzed constantly with huge amounts of irrelevant spam which I have to go through to find commments from genuine sources.

It is partly because of our host's Chinese connections- which is what I think makes this unusual -- but I am grateful without limit to what has been done to support this blog and will put up with any difficulties that may bring

Hi Perkins, I seem to be getting through again, although the above ramble I'm not too sure justifies it (if nothing else I think there are a few facets to the issue there; apols to the relevant people for assuming a council director is a 'him'). The public libraries it seems to me have in the past been managed quite well in the longer term, so maybe all will be well in the end. Though having said that the recent turn of events with the current government is somewhat unprecedented leaving people and in no uncertain terms feeling very insecure and nervous, while wondering what on earth is going on.

Regarding spam, you could ask your hosts to add a captcha phrase to the submit button, ref.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

These can sometimes be infuriating to get right, but with a reload option a second or third guess usually works. Failing that requiring people to create an account before posting a comment should reduce spam, which can be done quite quickly nowadays with sites often using options to login with twitter/facebook/google etc. accounts (typically the first post of a new registration is moderated, but after that the user left to post freely).

Gareth - Very good, but I'm afraid I don't agree with your observation that the public library service was 'managed quite well' until the current government took over.

I have been watching it in fairly close detail since 1997 and at that point it was already in horrible but needless decline. That most certainly continued all through the years of the Labour Government, in which it became worse and worse- at the same time as absorbing huge and rising sums of money

As Trevor says, in his earlier comment, - if only people looked at the CIPFA figures and compared them year by year (as I do) - the disaster is there for all to see. The public library service has been a complete shambles for an awfully long time

I was actually thinking more longer term - the libraries are in themselves a thoroughly competent creation, which is credit to the librarians themselves and their skills. When IT first arrived in our workplaces the libraries implemented the new systems (remember the green screen catalogues, the introduction of the barcoded cards). The Internet was met with the People's Network - librarians were pushing to get as many people online as possible out of a sense of duty long before any government initiatives. Nowadays I am able log in online if I choose and see a list of the library books I have read back to the days of the introduction of computerised systems.

Regarding political factors, the impression from retiring library staff that I have spoken to (locally) has been one of the current governing partly has left the libraries in a much worse state over the years than other governments, with recent decades being all time low points. Having said that I am somewhat perplexed at Brent, also Wirral where the Charteris inquiry was held, here it was the Conservatives lobbying for the libraries - libraries as a political pawn rather than ideological?

And yes, they are in a shambles in many ways, issues and footfall are down (though campaigners do argue the truth of the statistics here), they will eventually modernise, they will learn the lessons from their current predicament (hopefully!). Hopefully also politicians will see the value of _the_ key cultural institution of our society in the information age that we live -- not watching them rendered an artifact of the past (of historical interest only) without understanding fully what they are and what their value is (and from which a long term plan should follow). And if that assessment does not equate to we need better libraries, not closed libraries, I would be very very surprised.

I'll try and post something more coherent later, and I'll admit I'm just falling into the (not particularly surprising) trap of now considering chief librarians, ministers, Ed Vaizey and CILIP (ie any woolly-minded cretin who just farts out jargon) as creatures so wet and pathetic they make men of straw seem like steel. In general, society has lost its spine and all such jerks can do is snipe at people who criticise them. I'll also just throw out the point that the profession as such is worthless if a bunch of volunteers can replace them - which I understand they can and are. I heard quite a few examples in my time of so-called "information professionals" who just plain went up their own arses overcomplicating perfectly straightforward systems (RSAMD was one classic) by trying to be too clever. It's a rather vicious thought, but it might be worthwhile just letting the whole system collapse because there are such people in't and starting over!

I'm going to argue with James Christie here. The quite strong emotion that a policy of financial catharsis was what our local councils were due and needed for their own good was something that a lot of people with less than happy experiences of their local council were feeling when it first became apparent as to the depth of the local authority cuts.

It would though have the opposite effect. If you are going to raise the level of service provided by councils this is not a strategy that would do it by any counts. If I were to say for example to raise an organisation you need a more highly skilled and trained staff (more experienced, knowledgeable, a more motivated staff with a more finely tuned intellect -- which most certainly and as a critical success factor has to include management as a starting point). Indiscriminately making staff redundant is not a strategy for organisation development, there is no reason to expect that skilled staff would be the end result of redundancies (the opposite could in fact be the result).

I have voiced the same on this website several years ago, the topic also arose recently with this news story:

"A Labour MP has told the House of Commons that UK businesses need better management rather than deregulation."
BBC Democracy Live, 24 May 2012
http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/newsid_9723000/9723171.stm

(The point I think Barry Sheerman MP is making here is that with a higher standard of management regulation would not be needed - management conduct would be less likely to fall below our values in terms of our standards - as a civilized Western nation as well as individually.)

A note on volunteers also - we have yet to see how the cookie will crumble here, but no, a volunteer does not replace a librarian or paraprofessional by any means -- that is a very bad mistake to fall into believing, and most certainly not in the Internet age we live in. If the theory is we apply new technologies until all the possibilities for those technologies have been have been exhausted, then given the technological advances in recent years and that those technologies fall right in the middle of the field of information and libraries, there is a great deal of work to be done. The fruit is as yet not ripe, it will though take librarians to make the harvest if we want it (I could wax lyrical on this subject, unfortunately though I am not paid to write research papers on public libraries - I have to eat).

Gareth - I will leave you to the mercy of James (he doesn't have much) ... but what on earth is a 'paraprofessional' - if librarians with degrees are so superior about people who work in libraries without degrees, how can they expect any kind of respect from the rest of us. All the people who work and are paid for working in libraries should, in my view, be regarded as professional librarians. Of course some are more experienced than others, but that is true everywhere. The demarcation between 'professional' and 'paraprofessional' among librarians is almost the one factor that has destroyed the library service - it has created layers and layers of people and of cost for the sake of job preservation. Until the library professional body sort this out, they deserve no mercy and only universal disdain.

Re volunteers - As a library volunteer could I just point out that professionalism (as in a professional approach to the job in hand) isn’t limited to those who are paid. Inevitably technical skill will be lower with volunteers not least because they are probably doing a task for only a few hours a month. Proper training obviously helps. The culture put about by some librarians on blogs does remind me of the famous Cleese, Barker and Corbett sketch i.e. “I look down on him because he is not a professional librarian, and the library assistant says I look down on him because he’s a volunteer. We volunteers are meant to know our place! Isn’t such an approach hopelessly outdated?

A few moments thought and I would certainly back that (as a library assistant), a somewhat seismic organisation change though.

Quoting from your initial comment and to bring things full circle:

"We are about to go into the next budget round and the people who will actually determine what happens are the leaders of the councils.
They are not well informed or briefed about the values of libraries - and the practical management issues that could be brought to bear. At present all they hear are local people saying 'it's not fair, you don't understand, you are evil' and their finance managers saying 'there is no money'
Unless somebody explains a route through the marsh, they will close a lot more libraries this year."

I am too stressed to put everything from 1964 back on the table again myself, but whose responsibility is all this? The DCMS? ACE? The library profession and senior public library management? Library lobbyists? Our research universities? Politicians (local, central government)?

The etching of Willesden Green Library, 1894, at the top of a recent article by Zadie Smith caught my eye:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/02/north-west-london-blues/

It would not have been possible to put a price on the value of a local public library in 1894 to a community - not all the gold in the world. Fast forwarding 118 years, our society is unrecognisable from its 1894 counterpart, what now is the role of the public library? What is the value of the public library in the modern age? Who answers these questions?

I don't think it is ACE (I need to check with the Act itself etc. here), or the DCMS. Who traditionally (or otherwise) initiates the modernising of an Act of Parliament?

In the more immediate future - could a quality and balanced pack of information pitched at an appropriate level be provided to councillors - for the purpose of council decision making, factual, a-political, with an assessment from the most knowledgeable in the field?

Note I've used the word apolitical above where I meant without political bias.

Providing councillors with key information is about the best I can think of myself at the moment, but even that is not particularly satisfactory by itself. The reason I suggest this is because I don't think they have ever been presented with a concise but fully comprehensive document on the subject (something with the full breadth of the issues, I'll back channel The Good Library Blog with a document I wrote to local MPs and which had /some/ success - it includes more of the relevant facets to this that I think need to be pressed home to councillors and MPs.)

A not unrelated post on local government planning processes here:

http://welovelocalgovernment.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/officers-and-members-a-response/

Quoting from which:

"The best councils have a clear distinction of roles, in my view. Members [councillors, and I would argue directors also] are there to set the vision, policy, direction and budget of the organisation. The running of the council, providing that these are all being delivered in an appropriate way, should be none of their concern."

I actually disagree here. From my experience of the days when the mission statement was a fad, if you look into the concept, the mission statement should include both a vision for the role of the organisation in society and at the community level (stakeholders etc.), but also the detail of how that vision will be achieved. For this latter the direction level of the organisation needs the expertise and knowledge of managers (and technical staff!).

Management and technical staff need the organisation to have a strong sense of direction for the future, it I would suggest takes a knowledgeable management and a supportive culture from technical staff to maintain this sense of direction - the modern world we live in is far too complex without, this level of co-operation is needed.

This is essentially no more than maintaining the strong coupling that, e.g., a sole proprietor would have between his/her role at a community level and getting the work done (either themselves or through others).

No one has ever questioned librarians' skills as librarians, but the following is definitely what is needed in terms of the management skill of the librarian library manager, the world we live in is too complex without and where without the cracks will show:

“A Labour MP has told the House of Commons that UK businesses need better management rather than deregulation.”
BBC Democracy Live, 24 May 2012
http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/newsid_9723000/9723171.stm

Research shows (backchannel for citation) that monkeys with additional vocabulary are more able to successfully solve problems than those monkeys with fewer words in their vocabulary. Presumably 'better management' will have read a few more books. I rest my case.

I'll think on it more tonight, but the essential problem with libraries remains the same: they're still being "run" (in the main, and there will be notable exceptions) by socially-inept, unmotivated, utterly non-entrepreneurial individuals who have replaced clear thinking and initiative with semantic games and lumpen inertia. Volunteers who have sound common sense (possibly from a lifetime's experience in more entrepreneurial fields) and management experience may well be more effective than so-called professionals who are probably more interested in writing huge, unreadable and unread reports (Conway!).

So-called professionals I recently met included a senior librarian who, when asked why they hadn't marketed themselves as information professionals who could integrate IT systems etc., lamely said "no one asked us," a reply which was pathetic beyond belief. Librarians have to market themselves, not wait for someone else to do something.

Then there was a pair of library managers I met last May-July. One completely unmotivated and (really rather funnily) cynical about the whole "profession," the other that brontosaur with the enormous backside who, after twelve weeks of careful work by myself and several organisations re a library post, ruined it all (literally at the last minute) by blundering in and saying "there's no work." There was also the idiot in senior management who pulled a library job at the last moment - five minutes before I was due to turn up (having walked a mile in full suit in 90-degree heat) to be interviewed for it.

There are neither words nor semantics adequate to describe the incompetence and indecisiveness of such people, who deserve neither our time nor our money, and librarianship will not improve until, indeed, it gets managers who are actually willing to think for themselves and do something. And considering my experience of "professionals," I consider it's entirely possible volunteers could do a better job. They'd really have to try to do worse!

Last thought: if someone had told me the day I left library school that I'd be writing stuff like this twenty years later, I probably wouldn't have believed them. It's a measure of how pathetic library management has become that I felt I either had to do so or go insane with frustration, and it was only once I did so that I really got anywhere.

Mussolini might actually have got it partly right. Shoot a few library managers, guys! It's the only way you'll get anywhere!