So long, and thanks for all the quips

Today is a very sad day at work as my Deputy, Kirsty Taylor,  is leaving to return to the Other Place to become a college librarian.  Kirsty has been a colleague of mine off and on since 2000 (although the poor girl did have a break from me for a few years when she worked at Nuffield College, Oxford and the New Zealand parliament – don’t feel too sorry for her!) and, as a result, we work together very well, having a natural shorthand with each other as evidenced by this typical exchange – Andy: Can you do this? Kirsty: No.

Sarcasm and directness are both part of our working relationship  and as I said in my leaving speech for her earlier today it’s sometimes very useful to have people around you who will say “No”, especially when the person doing the asking is someone as pushy as me. I am genuinely grateful to her for helping me to steer our service in the right  direction over the last 4 years and I recognise and appreciate that she’s often picked up unglamorous  process and procedure while I’ve been blithely forging ahead. She’s also instituted hugely important changes that have stuck, for instance, holding weekly team meetings which now happen, without fail, every Tuesday at 10am.  That’s going to be one of her legacies.

Worth mentioning as well that she’s a grafter, quietly and without any fuss – unless it’s a SDC Platinum problem (which have been known to turn the air a vivid shade of blue) – she get’s stuff done. Even now, on her last day, she’s set her mind to sort out installation of a Bloomberg outpost at the Economics library. You spend a helluva lot of your life at work so I’m also grateful that she’s been so damn easy to get along with. It’s going to be very weird that she won’t be here next week but I’m very pleased for her that she has a new challenge ahead of her in a new environment. I think we’re both agreed that change is good and it’s high time she was making all the decisions.

Kirsty recently relented a little in respect of a debate that has raged between us ever since we first met. I consider myself to be a Northerner having been brought up from 3 to 16 in Newcastle and Northumberland and having a Geordie mother, but Kirsty – a Geordie born and bred – has never accepted my claim (typically greeting my assertion with scorn). Recently she admitted for the first time that at least ‘I behave like a Northerner’. I think I’ll take that (it’s all I’m gonna get).

One final memory is of a party thrown by Kirsty at which, needless to say, the drink flowed well, so well in fact that afterwards, in the early hours of the morning, the wife and I were briefly apprehended by the police while playing shoot-em-ups in the street. Perhaps the fact that we were dressed as Lara Croft and Superman respectively persuaded the officers to let us go after just a few words of caution?

Until the next time our paths cross…

Open All Hours

In February of this year, Judge Business School Library service went over to 24/7 opening, with members having access outside of staffed hours via swipecard. We decided to try this out for a number of reasons:

• To finally succumb to demand. This had been requested by students for many years via  the staff-student committee and the annual library survey. In fact, in the 2008 survey it was the most requested improvement, cited by 29%  of respondents.
• Because as a business school that considers itself to be world-class, arguably we could no longer justify the limited opening hours  of 9am to 7pm.
• In order to provide a more flexible and customer-focused service to our users.

The main argments against the move to 24/7 were as follows:

• the security of the staff area (specifically the lack of lockable cupboards and shelving at the open Library Desk)
• the fact that we only had a self-issue terminal so users couldn’t return books after hours
• the fear that materials would be removed from the Library without being loaned
• and finally, the possibility of more food and drink debris and the related need for more cleaners

Thankfully the first two points could be easily remedied with a bit of cash injection for furniture modification and a self-return module for our existing 3M terminal, while the second two were always going to be more ‘suck it and see’.

As far as I was concerned, and as I repeated at length to nay-sayers, if a few books did go missing, then in the grand scheme of things that wasn’t too important. What was much more significant was that the overall service would be vastly improved and expectations (particularly of our North American students) would be met. I also wasn’t too interested in exactly how many people would use the library after staffed hours, as the willingness to go 24/7 and the message that would sent about our service was far more important than the reality of use.

So 4 months down the line how has it gone? Well I’m pleased to say that very few books have gone missing, the Library is no dirtier than before and usage has been higher than I imagined, especially between 7 and 9pm and during the pre-lecture 7am-9am slot. As for the praise we’ve received, well, quite frankly its been embarrassingly good. In the annual Library survey, students variously described the new 24/7 opening as fantastic, excellent and even ‘heaven-sent’. To say that 24/7 has proved popular is something of an understatement.

All that and not one mention of Arkwright, Granville and Nurse Gladys Emmanuel. So to put that right:
     Granville: I’ve got the blood of poets and lovers in my veins.
     Arkwright: [as Granville leaves] Yes. And at least one electrician.

Andy

Every way that we can

It’s probably the most difficult problem that librarians around the world are currently facing : how to get the instiutions in which we are based to understand what it is we actually do and moreover to recognise our value and relevance. I realise I’m not saying anything new or groundbreaking here, but I honestly believe that if we don’t start addressing this issue of issues more comprehensively and conclusively, and soon, then in this leaner and less forgiving age, we may genuinely run out of time to get this message across. Earlier this month, this fact zoomed even more inexorably into focus for me, after hearing about sweeping staff cuts to a library service that I’d always regarded to be as safe as houses.

So where are we going wrong? Well for one thing I’m convinced we’re still not being bold enough about communicating the value we bring to our organisations, and for another that we’re still assuming that stakeholders have a better understanding of the myriad complexities of librarianship than they do. Yes we all have our champions and supporters, but they are far outnumbered by those who, if pushed for a description of what it is we do, would inexplicably trot out the old ‘stamp, shelve and shush’ cliches. We can no longer afford to be complacent or assume that our services will be eternally funded. Going back to an earlier post, like Bertrand Russell’s Christmas turkey, sooner or later we may stop being fed and suddenly find that we have no future.

So what can we do about it? Plenty. Its no accident that I spend so much of my time marketing my own library service through newsletters, plasma screen adverts, boomarks, online and printed guides, Youtube videos, consultation exercises, focus groups, teaching and training, our portal, emails, Twitter, surveys, Facebook, inductions, social bookmarking and internal committees. Rather it’s in recognition of the fact that I’m more convinced than ever that the services we offer need to be communicated and promoted in every way that we can, and that all the avenues that are open to us must be fully explored and utilised. I see accountability and statistics as equally key, so that we can incontrovertibly prove that our services and resources are sufficiently used, that our staffing levels are appropriate, and that our contribution to teaching and research is both tangible and vital. Of course, statistics do not constitute a cast-iron guarantee, but they’re incredibly useful safeguards against uninformed assumption.

Can we market ourselves too much? Can we spend too much time seeking to prove our worth? I don’t think we can. In a world where the activity of an information search has been popularly distilled into sticking a word a Google and hitting return, we cannot assume that our incalulably more complex raft of services will be understood, never mind embraced. And I suggest that this should be our other primary objective going forward: to simplify our services and to explain ourselves in as straightforward a manner as possible. This should lead to better  understanding of, and more importantly, sufficient buy-in to, our services and in turn to some much-needed professional security.

Activity based costing – a worthwhile activity?

I met the news that I was going to have to carry out an activity-based costing (abc) exercise on my library service with considerable trepidation. My main concern was that I simply couldn’t see how I could generate the data, my other was the time it would take.

In essence, I was required to assign library costs across the business school’s staff and students, with students divided by programme. My main budget lines are staffing and databases with printed journals a distant third, so it was suggested that I concentrate solely on these two lines. However – and it’s a big however - although we record heaps of statistics about enquiries and database usage we don’t, and in the latter case can’t, record either by user group. I was assured that this was understood and that instead the intention was to create a guestimate picture, and that I should not spend too much of my time on it.  A good thing too as I had a million and one other things clamouring for my attention! After receiving this welcome reassurance I set about constructing the guestimate by assigning the % of time that my library team spend with different user groups, the time spent on databases by respective user groups, and according to which specific user groups the databases are effectively purchased. For e.g. advanced finanical datasets chiefly used by faculty and PhDs. 

In order to reassure myself that my guestimate wasn’t wildly out I decided to ask my Deputy to concurrently calculate the same figures in order that the final totals could be derived from from the middle ground between the two.

What was immediately fascinating about the results was that the %s we both independently assigned were almost identical. Perhaps this exercise was going to be worthwhile after all?

The next stage, which was not actually required for the abc exercise was for us to compare these figures against registered library users to see if there was any parity. On this occasion I was not at all surprised to observe a complete contrast. Almost half of our users (48%) are not actually business school members and yet in terms of staffing and databases they only account for 14% of our resources. Whereas conversely our MBA and Masters of Finance courses together represent only 17% of our registered users and yet they actually account for around  a third (35%) of resource spend and activity.

In short, the process quantified our service in a way that hadn’t been previously been attempted or indeed presented, giving us much food for thought going forward. Yes it’s broad brush but nevertheless its a worthwhile representation. So if you have an hour to spare in the next week (yes I know – a spare hour, what’s that?!) then why not give it a whirl for your service. I’d wager there’s a good chance that it’ll help you see your resources and activities in a brand new light…

Andy