New space for old books: #rbscg14

At the end of August (Wednesday 27 to Firday 29), the CILIP rare books and special collections group met at the University of Aberdeen for its annual study conference, this year on the theme ‘New Space for Old Books: Building for the Future’. The full conference programme with details of all the speakers and paper titles should still be online (.docx link).

The conference took place in the new University Library building, a dramatic blue-ish cuboid that stands above the city on a hill, and which has probably the best views of any library anywhere:

View from #rbscg14 pic.twitter.com/OV7ZhTsjtQ
— Naomi Percival (@naomi_percival) August 27, 2014

There were 17 papers in total, and I don’t propose to write them up individually. I felt that three main themes emerged: project management, knowing your collections, and managing the environment.

Projects
Project management is hard. Everyone said this. Major building projects are incredibly complicated and you will need to set aside a lot of time to manage them. Architects, tendering for services, buildling, weather, finances … Try not to have everything happening at once, but do try to have a plan from beginning to end when you start. In particular, it’s very useful to have the utilities and air conditioning designed together, even if they’re implemented in separate phases.

Be prepared with ideas about what you’d like for your buildings. Decisions are sometimes made very quickly – particularly if money suddenly becomes available – and you’ll want to be able to put your case forward well. Don’t be afraid to be ambitious and imaginative when you do.

Unexpected difficulties will come up. You can try and prevent some of these – for example, by checking the financial health of your contractors – but some of them, like the weather, you can’t. And sometimes it may be that things don’t move forward because there just isn’t sufficient institutional interest.

Therefore you need to be pragmatic at all stages. You might be able to keep your service running as usual through most or all of a project, but you might not be. Communicate with your staff and readers about this – it’s not the end of the world to stop doing things if people know why, and for how long. It’s likely that staff roles will morph during the project, as different areas of expertise are needed. This might be uncomfortable for people who’re already adapting to the changed priorities and working conditions, so, again, being honest and upfront about what’s happening and why is important.

Two resources were mentioned as being useful:

• RIBA advice on working with an architect
• The Major Archives Project Learning Exchange

The stuff
We heard about the construction of several brand new buildings, all of which to some extent or other also involved the bringing together of previously separate collections and services from one or more institution, the creation of new services, and deliberate moves to engage with new audiences and communities.

The Keep in Brighton brings together the special collections from the University of Sussex, the East Sussex Record Office and Brighton’s Royal Pavilion & Museums Local History Collections. From the point of view of readers, there is no difference between the collections: everything can be searched in one place and there are no differences on access rules and regulations. However, behind the scenes the collections remain separately owned and managed. This meant that there was significant work to do in harmonising policies and procedures (such as fetching, handling, registration requirements for readers, reading room rules and so on) before opening the service.

The Hive, Worcester, is Europe's first joint university and public library. It combines the University of Worcester research collections, the collections of the Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service, the university research repository, the public library, the local government one-stop shop and more. It has admirable aims, even if its list of ten core values reads to me like something from 2012: inspiration, connection, aspiration, learning, integration, inclusivity, enduring values, well-being, sustainability, visibility. I was very pleased to hear about the efforts that had been put into staff training and customer service. Staff for the Hive were drawn in from all the different areas represented in the collections. They held staff workshops about how to answer customers’ queries: customers see all the staff as the same, whereas each person has a particular background and areas of expertise and non-expertise. They devised a very structured referrals process, so that people know what they should pass on (and how to do it) and what they can answer themselves. All this under the matra: ‘We welcome, we innovate, we respect [each other's specialisms]’.

Two members of staff from the Glasgow School of Art library spoke about the work they had been doing (pre-fire, of course) to encourage wider use by their students and others. This included bringing artists and writers in to use the collections to ‘inspire, challenge or expand their practice’ through a project called the hatchery. This has included using the library space for installations and tableaux vivants. They cited the Library as Incubator project as a useful resource and inspiration for this work. In a newly designed special collections area they’ve also been running workshops and sessions based on the collection both to draw out items to use as inspiration, but also to explain to students how special collections and archives work. Various pieces – such as a camel (!) - have been inspired by this.

Bringing lots of things together can obviously have its benefits. Aberdeen University Library special collections reported a huge increase in use once they were in the same building as the rest of the university library, instead of being hidden in the back of somewhere else behind 5 doors and several corridors... But I wonder whether collaboration sometimes isn’t just seen uncritically as a Good Thing by senior management, without consideration of the individual requirements of user groups and services.

The key, it seems to me, to making a collaborative project work, or to getting the most from your collections is to know really well what it is you have in the first place. You have to invest time and effort in understanding the potential of your collections and the interests and needs of your current and potential future readers. I think this is a moral I hear in a lot of conferences because I never feel like I spend enough time getting to know my own collections...

Environment
Environmental control can be really difficult whether you’re in a historic building or a new one.

Susie Bioletti spoke about the difficulties in managing the conditions in the Long Room at Trinity College Dublin. It’s Dublin’s second biggest tourist attraction, with something like 550,000 visitors annually. It gets loads of sunshine, there’s heaps of dust (that follows no known settling pattern), people bring in humidity and heat with them. Since 2004 they’ve been undertaking detailed surveys. They measure dust using a ‘loss of gloss’ technique in which glass microscope slides are placed in various locations and their reflectivity (or lack of it) is measured to give a value for the quantity of dust that has settled. They plot environmental recordings against a calendar in order to demonstrate trends and to pick out dates that are particularly bad because of particular events – a useful visual way to map this data.

You can expend a vast amount of time, energy and money trying to keep a very tight control on temperature and humidity, when it could be a lot more efficient to take a more relaxed attitude (especially considering that facilities management is rightly increasingly concerned with wider environmental impact, carbon usage and so on). NAME from ORGANISATION summarised the recommendations of PD 5454 (the replacement for the BS 5454 standard) as:

• know your collection and assess the risks that apply to it specifically
  
• recognise the difference between mixed traditional archive materials which can’t be split up easily, and those specialist materials that need particular conditions
  
• re-conceptualise environmental control as ‘allowing fluctuations within set parameters’ rather than ‘rigid control’
  
• Keep the RH up in reading rooms – it’s a shock for documents to move from 50% RH in the store to maybe only 25% in the reading room. Temperature is less of an issue. (Would that this will end the scourge of 16ºC reading rooms...)
  

These are all sensible and encouraging, and echo what was said at the late BL Preservation Advisory Centre ‘Knowing the Need’ conference last year.

Several people in the audience, however, raised a very important point: it’s all well and good to adopt a more relaxed approach to conditions in which PD 5454 is a guide not a rule when considering your own collections. However, the stipulations in PD 5454 are routinely used by institutions loaning objects and books as the guide for acceptable storage and display. If you want to be borrowing items for display and exhibition, then you need to trying to meet these conditions for many places to allow you to borrow. I’m not sure we’ve found a way to square these two approaches yet.

And last but not least

1. The recurring theme of the conference was having the Queen visit to open your building. It’s not compulsory but it does get all sorts of otherwise disinterested people to notice you.
2. Need a better name for your basement? Try ‘Garden Level’, a term used at – I think – St Andrews.
3. Aberdeen is gorgeous. I can’t wait to go back:

   by  Katie Birkwood 

Visit to Ipswich: three libraries

On Monday 22 August 2011 Abby Barker organised a visit to three Ipswich libraries for the CILIP East of England Branch.  I went along because I'd never been to Ipswich before, and because the libraries in question sounded pretty interesting and were from sectors I know little about : a private institute, a large FE college, and a new university.

These notes have been languishing, half-written, for months.  They're clearly never going to get written up in full, so I'm publishing this post in note form.

An entrance to a hidden world

Ipswich Institute

What?

• Founded in the nineteenth century for the purpose of educating mechanics.
• Today it offers members a lending library, a coffee shop, space in the centre of town to sit down and read, and educational courses and talks.
• It inhabits two historic buildings in centre of town. One has been its home for a long time, the other was acquired recently.

So what?

• As with any organisation using historic buildings, the facilities aren't ideal. There currently isn't access to the first floors of the buildings (where many of the talks take place) for those who can't manage stairs, for example.
• As a member organisation, everything they do has to be approved of by the membership. This means that innovation can be hard - things like using some coffee shop space for part of the library can cause upset. 
• The Institute seems to function as a public library for some of its members. Obviously it's a tricky issue to wonder whether this library 'takes people away' the public libraries: they've paid for something, so why not enjoy it? But given the trouble facing public libraries this did just make me a little uneasy.
• Several of the people on the visit were fairly local to Ipswich, and said that they'd seen the Institute doorway in the middle of town, and never really known what it was. I wonder how many other 'hidden gems' there are out there - and how much public libraries (or others) are like this for many people. To be fair, the Institute said that it's numbers were healthy and that they weren't particularly marketing themselves to get more.

Now what?

• Investigate independent libraries. Read up on the Association of Independent Libraries.

The swirly  Suffolk New College logo

Suffolk New College (Learning Curve)

What?

• This is the library for an FE college

So what? 

• Crowd control: the librarian said this was better than it could be, but she still had to work to get people not to eat, to behave appropriately, etc.
• Getting the students to make the most of the resources
• The librarian has brought material for particular courses together on the shelf, rather than sticking rigidly to Dewey.  All sizes are also together - no oversize shelves.
• Trying to make stuff appeal
• Success with some subjects in getting librarians into induction sessions - trying to spread this through subjects
• Getting stuff back - only very few books at a time - many go missing
• Wider responsibilities are being given to the library as part of the development/reorganisation of the College (it seems as though continual change is part of the furniture):
• study skills/support
• careers advice
• Uncertainty about funding/future - this year's intake only known at enrolment at the start of September

Now what?

•  Think about how HE institutions (or public libraries) can and should be helping students come from an FE background like this: the library was well-run, but small.  How can we mitigate the overwhelmingness of the libraries they'll face later on?

The Waterfront Building

University Campus Suffolk
(The library's web presence is almost entirely via a VLE, with no outward-facing webpage, so sorry - no handy link!)

What?

• UCS is very new.  It offers HE courses validated by other local universities.
• Most of the campus is housed in brand new buildings (such as the Waterfront Building, right). 
• The library is in an old ('60s) building that has been refurbished.
• The Library is in a separate building to the rest of facilities, across a road from the rest of the campus 

So what?

• As the institution's so new, there's no 'average' student yet - changing student profile(s) mean that the services required keep changing.
• A new institution undergoes constant change: for example, initially there was a Learning Resource Centre (i.e. computer room) in the Waterfront Building, which was very popular with students.  This has now been removed to make way for a tiered lecture theatre (requested by the student body).
• Another new innovation for the new academic year is the inclusion of the library in the 'infozone' in the lobby of the Waterfront Building: hope it will help people find out about the library and how to use it.
• Students come from a lot of different backgrounds, often not 'typical' HE backgrounds, so there's a heavy emphasis in the library on the accessibility of resources
• DVDs are interfiled with books, not kept separately
• The journals archive is colour-coded according to broad subject areas, so encourage people to use it by browsing
• There's an emphasis on making more time and space for learning support and info literacy teaching
• The library offers taster study-skills sessions before courses start - these are popular with new students and they find them useful.
• Students can book time with a  subject librarian

Now what?

• What can an 'elitist' institution like Cambridge learn from libraries like UCS?  They go all out on making access as easy as possible: what's the best way for us to do similarly?  What are the barriers to us doing this?



Doing it wrong

'How academic libraries annoy academics' is a recent post by one of the blogging team at Social Justice Librarian (tip o' the cursor to Kristine Chapman for bringing it to my attention).

The post itself is worth a read (although I'll summarise it here, too) but it's the comments that are really, um, enlightening.  So go and read them. It'll give much-needed context to what follows here.

Firstly, the post.  Greyson went to the library to get a book previously found on the catalogue.  The visit was unsuccessful. Put very simply, a book marked as available on the catalogue couldn't be found in the library, and after using the 'report a problem' button on the record Greyson was told that that sort of problem had to be reported in person at the circulation desk of the library in question.

As horror stories go, it's not a classic. But it does reveal at least a couple of problems in the library system: no easy catalogue access in the book stacks, and unclear reporting mechanisms. If 'report a problem' means 'only report certain kinds of problem' then it ought to say so, and it ought to say what to do for the others.

But the details in this case really aren't the point here.  Greyson points out that a wasted half-hour like this is precisely what will make academics advocate less forcefully or frequently for the library:

"I want my faculty colleagues to be advocates for our university library. So I do what I can to give them warm fuzzies about it, pointing out new acquisitions in their areas, noting that online access to the Journal of Important Stuff is brought to their desktop by the library, etc. But some days the library doesn’t make this easy for me. Some days I’m afraid to tell them too much about the library, in case they actually try to use it and have an experience like the one above.

I absolutely know there are budget constraints, time constraints, people-power constraints and bureaucratic time-suck constraints on academic libraries. I can explain why any given problem with the library systems might exist. But I can’t make archaic systems less frustrating and more worthwhile for people who have the option to avoid contact with the library most of the time. And those are the same people I really want out there speaking for the importance of the library. What a conundrum."

In short: we're alienating the very people who could help us the most. Ouch.

This is a hard message, and an important one to hear, understand, and act on.  But what do some of the comments say? They say "Greyson, you're doing it wrong".

Example 1: "I kept waiting for the line where you went to the staff and asked for help locating the book instead of schlepping back to your office."

Example 2: "Don’t blame the library! We are here to help. Any faculty member that has contacted me directly gets my priority response, as nurturing that rapport with them is at the top of my list, since it “trickles down” to students too and helps them in the long run as well."

Example 3: "I think you should have asked the reference librarian before leaving the library. Computers are excellent starting points for information seeking, but nothing can replace good old fashioned face to face contact. Others have mentioned the following as well: just because it’s not on the reshelving cart or lying on study table doesn’t mean it’s not in the library. As a cataloger, when adding a book to the collection, the book is typically in the OPAC for about a day and a half before it actually physically becomes part of the collection. Why? Simple. After tagging the book in OCLC, and entering the holdings information for Voyager, I still have to take each book and write the call number on the inside cover, print the spine label, cut the spine label, apply the spine label, apply the protective sticker, and use a boning tool to make sure all those stickers stay stuck. Thus, new acquisitions are on the cart in my office for a day or two after they begin to show up in the OPAC, depending on how many books I have to process."

(To be fair, many of the comments are fair, balanced and constructive.)

"You're doing it wrong". Is that the best we can come up with?  I was really surprised and disappointed to see such a hostile and unhelpful reaction to a post written with the explicit attention of drawing to librarians' attention a perceived problem.

If the reasonable reader (which I would say, in this instance, Greyson is) finds something difficult, then maybe the problem is with the system and not the reader.  And it's our job to find the ways in which it's broken and to fix it. That's not always easy: it's hard, once you're inside a system, to view it as an outsider does, and to see what's illogical and what could be improved.  And even if you can see problems, it's hard if you're at a junior level to instigate change.  That's why it's great if and when readers point out what's not working for them.  (I would, of course, advise Greyson to send a link to the post to a librarian at the library in question - they ought to want to know about reader experiences.)

Yes, sure, it'd be nice if people always asked us when they're stuck, and told us when things don't work right, but people on the whole don't like doing that.  Honestly now, how many times in Sainsbury's do you actually ask where they've moved the mustard to, and how many times do you just wander about cursing under your breath hoping it will leap off the shelf into your basket?

Back to libraries... Not only were people annoyed that someone who did something in an unexpected way dared to complain, a few of the commenters seemed personally offended at an apparent attack on their work.  This misses the point. There's no point trying to defend a broken system by pointing out how hard you and/or your colleagues are working, or how much you yearn to help people with their queries.  (Indeed, maybe if the system worked better you'd feel less like everyday at work is an uphill struggle.) The broken system isn't (necessarily) reflecting badly on your work ethic, but it is still broken.

Frankly, I think we need to get a grip and stop blaming the readers. Whether it's broken because it's more-or-less the same system you've had for the last 30 years, or because it's something new that just isn't working, or whatever, if you find yourself saying to readers, "that's not how we do it" or, "oh no, blah doesn't mean blah it actually means thingummy" or, "you have to go and tell so-and-so that" then really, who's doing it wrong?

lolcat added to try and lighten the mood.

Library Day in the Life: Round 6, Day 2...

[The sixth round of Library Day in the Life is running from Monday 24 to Friday 28 January. You can find the other participants, and sign up yourself, on the project wiki, and watch the #libday6 hashtag on Twitter. This is the second time I've taken part. You can find my Round 5 posts tagged with libday5, including my introduction to what I do for a living.]

No blow-by-blow rundown of the day's activities today (mainly cataloguing). Instead, some very brief thoughts on staffing a reading room.

...or, The clueless reader: what should we do?

I work in a rare books reading room.  Standard reader interaction goes something along the lines of 'Can I see MS K.31, please?' 'Yes, certainly, fill in this form, take a seat, and I'll fetch it for you'.  Or perhaps, 'Can you tell me where Glover's papers are catalogued?' 'Yes, they're available on Janus'.  Every now and again someone comes in and asks broad, open ended questions like 'Can I see what you have about slavery', or 'Can I see some medieval manuscripts', which we, frankly, find difficult to answer.

The difficulty arises not because the questions aren't 'valid': it's certainly reasonable to want to look for material on slavery in our library because we hold papers connected with the abolitionists Wilberforce and Clarkson, and we have 300+ medieval manuscripts, so that's also something you can easily find here.  The difficult in these reader interactions arises because we're used to our readers having done plenty of research in advance of their visit.  Being a special collections reader is quite a specialised business--in terms of handling material, reading room etiquette and 'resource discovery'--and most of our readers are already fairly well 'trained'.  Indeed, most readers are so 'good' that we, as library staff, are quite out of practice at helping the ones that aren't.

There's sometimes the feeling that it's 'not our job' to teach new/inexperienced/clueless readers how to read up on the topic first, research their particular interest, and search catalogues and listings for relevant items.  We might feel that this is the job of their supervisor or course tutor, and that our role is just to produce the material once they know more-or-less exactly what it is they want to see.  When readers come to us very early in their research, it's easy to feel like they're looking for us to do their research for them.

I don't generally find it very easy to turn these interactions round from something slightly antangonistic ('what are they doing here when they don't know what they're doing?') to something positive ('here's an opportunity to show somebody what we do and what we can offer them').  Partly this is because it's hard to tell someone that actually they need to put in more time and effort to what they're doing, and partly it's because this sort of work isn't really accounted for explicitly in procedures and policies.  Although we have information online about the special collections and the reading room, none of it is written from the 'new to special collections?' perspective.  We have no 'script' for how to induct the new reader.

The obvious answer to all this is that we, as specialist librarians, need to recognise, value and assert our expertise: instead of grudgingly acquiescing to the poorly-thought-out research requests of the new reader, we should step in and educate them.  And to do this well, we'll need to develop planned ways of doing this, rather than relying on adhoc introductions, the quality of which will vary tremendously from day to day.

Passion, Persuasion and Persistence

Last Tuesday I went to an 'intensive session' organised by the CILIP East of England branch on the subject of word-of-mouth marketing in libraries.  Annie has already written-up a summary of the day, so I'll restrict myself here to a few thoughts about some of the issues raised.

The one sentence that stuck with me the most came from Jenny Salisbury's introduction to her presentation 'Frontline advocacy: making it happen':

It's not all about how the customer fits into our services but rather about what the customer needs and how we meet those needs.

Like much good advice, this statement seems at first glance to be almost redundantly self-evident.  But when you start to think about your day-to-day working life, can you honestly say that this is an attitude that's always maintained (another theme from the afternoon session was the difficulty of evaluating customer service levels: people might say, and indeed think, that they're giving excellent service, but that's not always how an objective observer might see it)?  When new staff join a service, does their induction focus mainly on *what* you do, or does it look at *why* you do it like that and what it is that users/readers/customers/members use you for?  How often to do hear someone expressing mild annoyance at a customer request that's above and beyond the standard service you offer, rather than view it as an opportunity to modify the service to include this sort of request?

'death metal monkeys' by brum d on Flickr

This isn't intended as a criticism of any person or service in particular, but as an illustration of what hard work it is to keep service levels high.  To prevent the development and spread of bad habits, everyone needs to understand the reasons for the required standards of service, and new staff need to be thoroughly trained.

We also need to keep re-evaluating what it is that our customers need.  In academic libraries (certainly in Cambridge Colleges) it's easy to slip into mindset that we know what we're there for, and therefore not to think about developing new services, or new ways of delivering traditional services.  It's also tempting to think that 'they (the readers) should know/be able to work out how to do that', whether 'that' is using the catalogue/the photocopier/the printers, or finding a book on the shelf, or searching Jstor, or whatever.  This is an obviously silly attitude, and, while it's not always easy (or flattering), the best way to improve everyone's experience is to try to work out *why* they find it difficult, and then try to make it easier.

The main thread of the day is that people are naturally inclined to tell others about bad service much more readily, and that we need to make sure that we're giving them fuel for good word-of-mouth publicity.  This is clearly a laudible aim.  There was a subtext that this would also help as an advocacy, not just marketing, tool.  It's not necessarily the case that good customer service will make our customers into advocates for our service, although focussing service on the most important statekholders can at least raise the profile of the library, and may help make an impression on Those Who Make The Decisions.