Umbrella 2011: Libraries in the Big Society

Umbrella 2011

Libraries in the Big Society

[Being my scribbled notes on a discussion session from the viewpoint of provision of government information services, on a key theme of UB11 – ‘The Big Society’ and what that means for the delivery of services to individuals and for libraries and for the departments themselves]

The format of this session was three shortish speeches by people speaking in a personal capacity followed by questions and comment.

Speaker 1

The first speaker worked for a large transactional-based department and saw The Big Society as empowering the citizen, which meant making information available from the department to partner bodies or individuals and helping people with it to make it more accessible to them. He also noted that such information could be used to tailor other services and processes to make them a better fit for people. So his department mainly produce material electronically and through DirectGov for subject-based information, but also  produce print on demand as 40% of silver surfers aren’t on the internet. The role is to get information out, but also need to make sure don’t overload people and that the information is understandable.

Speaker 2

The second speaker from a smaller department saw things in terms of connecting people to information to make better decisions. ‘The Big Society’ as devolving power to the frontline with local participation and ownership against a context of reduced spend and a massive rate of change.  There was however potential tension between sharing services to save money and localism as an agenda.  In terms of departmental agenda there was a lot more accountability for the frontline, not just over-arching policy.  There was a great deal of change, increased ICT, reduced headcount to deliver services, but it did bring new kinds of opportunities with it.

Speaker 3

The third speaker noted ‘The Big Society’ was confusing and saw it as double devolution – devolution from central to local government and then from local government to local community. This raised all kinds of issues – volunteers in the delivery of library services, accountability to government and people, statutory provision of local services v local delivery models.  He went on to note that the Transformational Government Agenda had been on-going for a while and focused around delivering lots of data direct to the citizen. However there were issues with this around e.g. who pays to make the information available and how nicely  and how do you find your bit of information amongst the vast swathes. Should ‘value added’ information be added by government?  It’s the taxpayer who’s eventually paying for it. Or should information just be made available for other people to do the value added bit to it? Move towards public data corporation?  He also asked how quick ‘The Big Society’ will be. He noted ‘The Big Bank’ was due to be set up but would take seven years and be funded from dormant bank accounts. He discussed the shared services drive  e.g. subscribing to another department’s product for part of your own operations, and the changes that brought with government departments selling to each other interally e.g. 40% of his staff were paid for by another organisation. He noted everyone was operating on a much smaller staff base than before and the importance of cost effectiveness in deciding what services to produce.  This meant a far larger skills base was needed for staff but the radical change had created types of career opportunities that hadn’t existed before for those who were left.

Comments and questions section

There was a good range of these from the floor. [While this was very early in Conference by the time I came to write up my notes afterwards I realised that actually most of the themes of conference were here.]

One theme of UB11 made itself very clear in terms of there being a rare opportunity to take the lead, but only if people kept pushing themselves forward promoting and proving what they could do and the value they could bring, there was no job security for unsung heroes, necessary to get the credit to justify on-going existence. Sensible to hitch selves to current agenda and show how fit into delivery of that. Have to show relevance.

And another theme to do with the evolving skills base of the profession and what constitutes the information professional.  There was discussion of the need in one department for a balance between project management, business change and librarian skills. The department had a physical library in a basement, no enquiry service, but it did have account managers who went out to clients. Web backgrounds were as prevalent and relevant as traditional cat/n/class ones. The range and width of activities necessitated and expected to be undertaken impacted on skillsets needed and things like Chartership needed to be re-examined in that light.

And another theme of UB11 that was raised was quality of public sector information, its reliability, how understandable it was. Whether it was reliable or not there was certainly huge amounts of it produced and increasingly being made available and that could raise problems e.g. around interpretation. Producing quality information is expensive so is it about publication or is it about quality.

Another UB11 theme was around the speed of technological change and need to provide the service that the organisation is asking for and doing things you know it can’t get rid of and worries people (e.g. FoI in government). There was discussion here on things like how fast you can change infrastructure, uses of cloud based services.

And one last UB11 theme that was touched on was community volunteer run or managed library services in the context of the Big Society / Government agenda and issues such as information assurance

Opinion…

My personal musing on this session goes that as usual the slight debate format with multiple speakers was a very good one for bringing out, in the second session, what (now looking back at my notes) are mostly key themes of my Umbrella this year.  I say ‘my Umbrella’ because I suspect some key themes differ if you followed a very different programme to one I did and others would be universal to all sectors. But certainly re-occuring themes in the sessions I attended were Big Society / Government agendas, enabling access / quality government information, the need to be visible and relevant and blow own trumpets within our organisations and generally to society, the widening skills-base and how that impacts on the profession, the economic climate, and speed of technological developments, role of librarian as educator…

I think what was most interesting about this session, as someone who isn’t a government librarian but uses a lot of government information, was getting varied perspectives on the internal driver’s on departments currently, the sheer rate of change, and how the mix of agenda’s impacts on what information is made available and how to get it into the public sphere.

And the key thing in my memory from it is providing the service the organisation wants in the here and now to keep and visibly demonstrate relevance and strategic fit.