Problems with comments

I'm not sure why, but the "comment" function on this blog isn't working at present.  I have trawled the Blogger self-help site for answers & tried a few fixes - to no avail as yet.  But I will persist to see if I can get it fixed. 

In the meantime for those of you who have contacted me about the disabled comments function if you want you can email me your questions & I will post them. (It seems that as the blog owner I can post - but no one else can.)

LMS Governance & Decision Making (part 1)

I mentioned the other day that we have been working on ensuring that we have the correct governance and decision making processes.  As I have mentioned in a number of forums and documents, this work has been ongoing, since before the Request For Proposal was issued, & it continues to evolve.  We have worked with the Libraries Board, the Local Government Association and the Public Libraries SA Executive to ensure that we have the structures and processes that allow for effective consultation and decision-making.

Rather than creating a whole new decision making process we have used both existing Libraries Board decision-making structures and utilized existing mechanisms which are used in local government as much as possible to establish how decisions will be made regarding the LMS establishment, configuration and longer term management.

The structures and processes are best viewed at a high level using the table below.  While no diagram is perfect or can explain everything, it is a good place to start. 

 
On the left hand side of the table you can see the processes that were in place during the procurement phase of the project.  The Libraries Board established a Steering Committee, which signed off on an Evaluation Plan (EP) and managed the Request For Proposal process.  The Steering Committee utilized an Evaluation Team to undertake the evaluation of the various RFP responses.  As identified in the EP the Evaluation Team established a number Subject Matter Expert groups (the red boxes) that provided advice to the Evaluation Team.  This process has stood us in good stead in ensuring wide engagement in the process, with coordinated access to many experts who could provide their expertise to the process.

Towards the end of the evaluation process the Steering Committee established an Interim User Group.  The role of this group was to identify all of the questions that we would need to answer to ensure that we have a consortium that has a set of known policies, procedures and processes that will govern interactions between libraries and with library customers.  This group was not asked to answer these questions, but to identify what the questions were.  The significant question which hung over the work of this group was which decisions would be made locally and which would be made as a consortium.  The other issue was, “What is the capability of the (at that time unselected) LMS to deal with complexity and diversity?”  The membership of this group was self-selecting through an expression of interest process that was open to all in the public library network.  This group has done a great job in asking the questions that we now need answers to. 

So we’ve now got to the conclusion of the procurement process & we know what the LMS can do.  So on this basis we will soon be moving from procurement to implementation.  I will provide a similar post soon about the decision making process during the implementation phase of this project, where the Transitional User Group will operate & then follow it up by writing about the final shape of the governance and decision making process post implementation.

Busy understanding the LMS functionality

On my Tuesday post I mentioned that amongst other activities we have been looking at the LMS software’s capability in greater detail.  We’re doing this so that we can understand what the consortium’s options are regarding rules governing library operations.  PLS staff have worked with technical experts from some of the early adopting libraries and staff from the vendor this week.  We’ve spent over 8 hours across the last 3 days in the PLS meeting room working through details with a vendor representative who was on the phone, and managing the image that was on our screen.

We have worked our way through how to establish and manage the rules around collections, borrowers, serials and acquisitions and how these sets of rules interact to produce the permissions for who can borrow what, for how long & what happens when items are due back (fines, no fines, notices etc.).  This has included how to set up permissions to manage and fulfil reservations across the consortium, notifications re reservations etc.

We are now much more confident that we understand how the system works, what our options are and what decisions we will need to make regarding system set up.  We have identified that in almost all situations there are opportunities for flexibility and variable options for each library.  So we’re comfortable about how the system works and that it has the flexibility to accommodate considerable diversity amongst consortium partners if this is what we want to do. 

We’ve also discovered some additional features and more options that we were not totally aware of during the evaluation period.

We are also pleased to note that there is virtually nothing that will be done in the initial set up that cannot be changed over time.  This will allow us to both modify the system as additional libraries join, or as the consortium chooses to alter its practices over time.

However as a consortium we still have lots of decisions to make regarding overarching policies related to how we want the customer experience to be.  From some of my earlier posts, and the comments that they attracted it is obvious that we may all have slightly different views in these areas.  While we can all agree on statements such as “we will deliver outstanding customer service” how this is translated into policies and procedures that govern outcomes for customers may be slightly different depending on our own personal or organisational perspectives.

So – how do we progress this?  Well we now have the key parts of the decision making structure in place & I will talk more about the details of this in a forthcoming post.

LMS - moving forward

I've just realised that its been several weeks since I have posted about progress on the LMS project.  

Part of the reason for not posting is because we've been really busy on a number of fronts.

We're currently working on the legal agreements required to ensure the successful implementation of the project.  We're finalising three legal agreements, which are:

1. the software agreement between the Local Government Corporate Services (LGSC) (who will be the principal for the purposes of software ownership), and the Vendor for the purchase of the software and services.
2. an agreement which will be signed between participating councils and the LGCS.
3. an agreement between the Libraries Board and the LGA/LGCS for the operations of the LMS both during the procurement & implementation stages and during the operation of the LMS post the implementation for each council. 

We've also been busy on several other fronts.  We've been working on:

• finalising the governance & decision making structures, 
• working with the vendor on understanding the software's capabilities to establish how our consortium will operate, 
• developing a change management strategy to support libraries,
• preparing to advertise for a new staff member who will have library system expertise,
• contracting for external project management resources to support the LMS roll out, 
• developing our communications strategies, and 
• working on the ICT requirements to support deployment.

In the interests of brevity I will not comment on all of these sub-projects here, but will comment on each of these aspects in the next few posts. 

Libraries Board 2011 country tour

The Libraries Board will be undertaking its annual country tour on Thursday & Friday next week. This tour will take us through libraries in the Mid-North. Specifically the Board will visit Clare, Burra, Peterborough, Jamestown and Port Pirie on Thursday, and then Port Broughton, Snowtown and Balaklava on Friday.
 

As is customary, the Board will hold it's meeting over breakfast on Friday morning.

 This tour will be the first in 21 years that does not include former Board member Janice Nitschke. I would like to pay tribute to Janice who has represented library practitioners on the Board for as long as most of us can remember. Janice's commitment will be remembered not just because of her active & successful representation of the sector but also for her dedication. The number of times that Janice has got up at 4 am to drive to "town" as the airport was fogged in are beyond counting. And her flights, attendance at meetings in Adelaide or staying in town to carry out network business have been a real service to us all. Janice's championing of "the country" has been a consistent part of her service, and her unstinting service for "the network" needs to be recognised by all within the network.

 Janice has also been, and continues to be a mentor to so many in the network. I am sure that with the "spare" time that she now has Janice will actively use her experience to continue as a mentor to many.

 Changes to State Government Board regulations mean that in future Board members can serve for a maximum of 8 years. While I appreciate Janice's dedication over several decades I also support the notion of regular renewal on the Board and the opportunities for changes in representation. The changes in regulations also mean that the number of Board members will reduce from 9 to 8.

I would also like to acknowledge the leadership of Dr Peter Goldsworthy AM who has been Libraries Board Chair since 2002. Peter's last meeting will be while we are on the mid-north tour.

 Peter's time is precious - as he spreads himself across his medical practice, his role as a successful, internationally recognised author and his additional duties including chair of the Libraries Board. Despite this busy schedule Peter has managed to juggle his commitments & travelled the State meeting with people in public libraries and leading the Board's considerations of public library and State Library matters.  Under Peter's leadership the Board has been so supportive of the State-wide LMS project as well as managing the GFC's impact on the Board's investments as well as some positive outcomes on a number of other State Library issues.

 We will see a number of other changes to Board membership over the next 6 months. I will keep you posted regarding these changes as they occur.

New Library Consortium in New Zealand

Following visits to New Zealand over the last couple of years I have been aware that the National Library of NZ and the public library network have been working on a consortium approach for some of the country's public libraries.  Work started in 2007, and they have just launched this consortium, called "kōtui" - a Māori word which means to interlace or interweave.  The first library service to join was Marlborough, which started in 29 September.

Information about kōtui can be found here and here.

This consortium will start with 14 local government authorities (45 libraries and 5 mobile libraries) but extend beyond this initial group over time.

The consortium has chosen the Sirsi Dynix Symphony LMS to manage their physical collections, and has chosen EBSCO's Electronic Discovery Service to manage their digital materials. The LMS will be hosted in New Zealand.

This consortium will be quite different to what we are building here in SA.  The participating libraries are not necessarily geographically related, with libraries spread across the country. They will gain the benefits of a modern LMS and e-resource tools in a hosted environment, but at this stage there is no facility for collection sharing through inter-library loan.

We will keep in contact with our NZ colleagues as it is likely that we will be able to learn from each other as we develop and grow our respective consortia.

National Public Library Statistics

The PLS Standing Committee met yesterday.  Among the papers it considered was the just released Australian Public Libraries Statistical Report for 2009 -2010.

The report is about to be loaded to the Intranet (where previous year's reports already reside), and is already available on the NSLA site here.  Some interesting features from an SA perspective include:

• Loans showed growth over 4 years, but dropped back in 09/10, perhaps due to several larger busy libraries being closed for extended periods for rebuilds.  We'll need to keep an eye on this figure!
• SA continues to have the highest loans per capita of any state or territory (11) and the highest visits per capita (7.3)
• Funding per capita is highest in SA - over $9 above the national average, and over $6 higher than the next highest funded State.
• Expenditure on library materials is slightly above the national average.
• Expenditure on electronic resources is below the national average, and the second lowest in Australia
• The number of public Internet PCs has increased by 62% over the last 5 years, and SA is now ranked second, and well above average.  (This may explain some of the congestion and Internet speed issues that PLS is currently looking for solutions to.)
• For states where there are comparable arrangements where State Governments are co-funders of libraries with Local Governments, the SA State Government's contribution is a significantly higher contribution than in other States (at 24% of total expenditure).
• While the public library collections across the state are large (4.58M) and provide high numbers of items per capita (2.86) only 32% of the collection has been bought in the last 5 years.  This is the lowest replacement rate of any jurisdiction in Australia.

Of course averages, medians and means mask local variations for individual library services. So for the curious, it may be interesting to measure your service against both the SA and national averages.

One measure which I expect to see significant movement on in the next couple of years is the number and percentage of people who are active library members.  SA reports a figure of 53%, which is the highest in Australia, and 8% above the national average.  However all libraries count this figure by adding together all registered borrowers and dividing this by the population.  The advent of a shared LMS will see each library member only being counted once!  So those library users with 3 cards will be counted once, not three times in the future.  I can see our figures dropping substantially, but we can then report an accurate figure, with no double (or triple) counting!

Of course statistics are only one measure of how libraries perform, but they are one indicator of how things stand.  These figures seem to indicate that SA public libraries continue to have high recognition and use by our customers, and are relatively well funded by both funding partners.