With Gertrud Erbach, Senior Editorial Services Manager at News International and Sally McMahon, Head of Libraries and Information Services for Brighton and Hove, I spoke to masters students at the UCL School of Library Archive and Information Studies.
As promised, here are copies of my presentation and the BSMS collection development statement.
Download ucloct06.pdf
(>9MB)
Download cdg46_collectiondevelopmentstatement_bsms.doc
Gertrud gave a fascinating account of collection management at a major news organisation, covering information services, picture services, archives and group records. She noted a fall in enquires from sub-editors, who now have desktop services and the Internet for fact-checking. Their editorial databases contains full text from twenty five newspapers, all except the FT, which she expects to include soon. They spend a great deal of time adding metadata to articles. She discussed some of the intellectual property issues (high profile writers apparently retain their copyright) and how they handle corrections and legal problems such as articles which are the subject of writs, as well as picture indexing. The NI systems sounds very well-staffed: the Mail has apparently closed its library, while the Guardian survives with a staff of only eight. I was interested in the impact the free papers are having on the traditional titles. Every London street is now clogged with distributors for the different free-sheets.
Sally spoke on collection management: some views from Brighton and Hove. Stock selection and supply were included in the Private Finance Initiative deal for the new Jubilee library in Brighton. She discussed some of the implications of the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, Better stock, better libraries, about which she was optimistic (see my view of it here). PricewaterhouseCoopers found that while UK public libraries spent £85 million on stock, they spent a further £35 million on the process of buying that material and came up with a series of proposals to reduce that overhead, including clusters of libraries, an e-marketplace and a national catalogue. She wondered if PricewaterhouseCoopers might not have over-estimated the possible savings, ignoring the local costs of moving to a new system and questioned how the balance between local control and a national system might be struck.
She reported that a group of six library authorities in the South-East had come together for joint procurement of a library management system, which would offer readers a single card they could use in all participating libraries. She mentioned Coldharbour community libraries in Kent, who as part of the love libraries initiative had removed all spine labels, which provoked several questions.
She described how Brighton and Hove stock supply was made part of the PFI deal, which she thought was probably unique. Both bibliographic services and stock procurement were outsourced. The advantage was that it allowed them to get the largest possible PFI grant, as well as meaning the materials fund is invulnerable to councillors of the future intent on cuts.. The building is owned by the developers for twenty-five years, after which it reverts to public ownership. They are now considering relinquishing selection to the contractors, using evidence-based stock selection (I'm not sure quite what this might mean).
She discussed their RFID system: 70% of all transactions are now done by RFID, and they can use wands for stocktaking. They will not be able to improve on the 70% figure until they can take payment electronically, and there are problems with coding some of the audio-visual stock. She looked forward to licensed downloads, which would replace physical collections of audio-visual material.
She discussed the Public Library Service Standards, which she found were not always very forgiving of authorities with rapidly growing populations. She also discussed how library users and councillors find stock management difficult to understand, particularly withdrawals of items. There seems to be no correlation between stock levels and public satisfaction. New standards will be released for consultation in March 2007, to be implemented in 2008.
She mentioned the Strong and Prosperous Communities white paper [has anyone noticed that whoever registered the Department of Communities and Local Government domain, couldn't spell: comunities.gov.uk?] which will change the way local authorities manage performance, with a greater emphasis on customer satisfaction. She wondered how greater local control could be balanced with the Public Libraries and Museums Act duty to run a “comprehensive and efficient” public library service and felt there was danger that vocal minorities might hijack services
