Tailor Your Outcome

Reading Time: 9 minutes

It is not uncommon to lump similar people together, based on their job titles, or similar organizations, based on their outward facing appearance or context. I tend to avoid this. Even statements as simple as “library directors do X” may be sprinkled with caveats. Do they? Do all directors do X? One thing that I think is true: a library will be significantly impacted by whether its director and governors have a scarcity mindset or a growth one.

I’ve talked about my labels. I was told once that I had a growth mindset during a job interview. It’s not a label I’d used for myself, or had others use for me, but I understand its application, in hindsight. Like many pop psych or business coach phrases, not everyone would define it the same. This author thinks that there’s a lot of negative wrapped up in being growth mindset. And I agree with him, to the extent that I agree with his concerns about ego and false confidence and the like.

For me, a growth mindset is the opposite of a scarcity one. Simply put, is your glass half full or is it half empty? Do you think that the resources you have are enough to do something successfully or are they not?

What I think is perhaps not considered is whether there is a shared view of what something successfully is? If you have an idea and it is fixed, and your resources don’t meet that need, then you may feel as though you don’t have enough. If, on the other hand, you look at your resources and conjure up possible uses of them, you may feel as you have plenty.

When I think about resources and growth and possibility, I think of the phrase cut your clothes according to your cloth. You may want to make a ball gown but you might only be able to swing a midi. Do you pine for the gown or do you make something smaller but still amazing?

Flex or Reflex

For those who haven’t been monitoring it, the state of public libraries in England is, well, shit. Governments have been steadily taking actions that cause the local councils that operate libraries to have to shut them or destaff them, which is practically the same thing.

And the government knows they have a library problem. They recently completed an independent review of public libraries. They mostly lost the message, to me, in the third paragraph, which they reiterate in the conclusion—and books must always be at the heart of every library—because we can’t possibly know what every library needs always. But that is also a discussion we have amongst ourselves. Also, the report completely misses the fundamental problem: the government isn’t ensuring funding to support the library. When people look at problems with libraries, it is often because politicians are moving money away from libraries and not towards them.

This mindset is also apparent in the Buckinghamshire Council, where they faced the need to find £555,000 in savings from the library operations by the time they craft the 2026-2027 budget. Hey, presto, the solution is Library Flex! It is, for me, an example of ignoring the amount of cloth you have and trying to still have a ball gown. The report on the initiative states that pretty clearly:

Neither satisfies all requirements. At this point the people in charge should ask: maybe the requirements need to be rethought.

The Library Flex model is a shift to what the report calls self-operated libraries where the people using libraries can access and use the facilities without any library staff. The capital investment is about equal to 20% of the library system’s budget (£200,000 to begin with, plus £300,000 for 8 more locations, out of a total of £3.4 million if using this year’s budget but it will need to come out of £2.9 million in the future).

This is all magic thinking (thaumaturgic, for the lawyers in the room). The Buckinghamshire Council plan relies on (§2.4.1 Safety):

• “growing the volunteer, community group and Friends group offer to create a welcoming space when staff are not present but if risk assessments identify the need for a security or reduced staff presence then this will be factored into the design”;
• “CCTV will have 360-degreecoverage ensuring there are no blind spots, occupancy monitoring to control number of users in the library and remote access monitoring to enable staff/security to respond in real time if necessary“;
• “Library staff will be able to use the Tannoy (trans. “public address system”) remotely to react to live incidents“

I mean. Did the authors of this report even ever work in a public library? It’s like when politicians are asked the price of milk. I nearly spat my coffee at the “yell at a patron remotely” option. What do they think that patron will do?

And of course, the £500,000 in new capital expenditures will be offset by a 25-30% cut in actual staff (or £582,350 at the deep end).

The list of disadvantages (§2.6) is kind of fun to read. This may not be a common term in the UK but I would agree that most of these patrons would be S.O.L. and I don’t mean engaging with a self-operated library. But it’s the key risks (§2.7) that make this plan make my skin crawl.

A library that is open from 7am to 10pm and only staffed between 11am and 3pm is left unstaffed 75% of the time. An assault is not going to be brought to an end by some remote person yelling over the PA and it will be over well before centralized staff are able to respond. When I think of the times patrons have yelled at my staff, and we’ve dealt with the patron immediately (ejecting them), that verbal assault still lands, psychically. The people who wrote this report have no idea what they are opening the library up to, or are being willfully ignorant.

Part of the problem is that Buckinghamshire Council already views libraries as a charity and not as an integral part of their community. They are comfortable divesting responsibility as they have done with funding. Their report shows that there is a dearth of volunteers available, which is “key to future sustainability”.

I didn’t see the report deal with the issue that the remaining 75% of staff will need salary increases into the future. The staff salaries are already 89% of budget. If they cut 30% and bring the salary nut down from £3,106,384 to £2,524,034, it’s a temporary solution. If we assume the staff will get an annual increase (what am I even THINKING) of 2%, and the whole point of this was to bring the £3.4 million budget down by £550,000 to, in round numbers, £2.9 million, five years of 2% increases will bring the salary nut to £2.786,737 or 96% of a £2.9 million budget.

I think it is also wildly underestimating the increased costs of its surveillance requirements. I didn’t see any increase in security personnel costs or explanation of how staff will respond (I’m assuming vehicles will be required) to remote locations to after-hours misconduct. The revenue cost with SOL also most certainly ignores the staff cost currently involved in ensuring those technologies run (printer jams cleared, kiosks maintained, etc.). The numbers are simplistic.

So. I’m clearly not a fan of Library Flex Buckinghamshire.

But’s not largely not the specific pieces of it that are at issue. I love the idea of self-service (please, NOT S.O.L.) and, in fact, I think self-service can be more inclusive than staff-based solutions. But when you de-staff a library, you are removing the people who keep all of the systems running. There is a reason that we do not trust autonomous cars.

Library Flex is assuming that systems—computers, kiosks, access points, photocopiers—will work as smoothly without staff as they do when the staff are there. The people in Buckinghamshire need to rethink their clothes.

What might Library Flex look like if it was implemented at a library system that approached almost the same goal but from a more resource-aware perspective?

Never Mind the Flex, This Is Extended Access

Let’s take a trip back in time, to Scott County (MN) and 2018-ish. And that is in the past is an important point. The folks in Minnesota were thinking about this future need before cuts were demanded (as far as I can tell). This was an opportunity to grow, to expand.

You can read about what their extended access program is. As you read through their FAQ, you may think, gosh, that’s a lot like Library Flex! It’s an after-hours, unstaffed library. It is focused on self-service to allow flexibility in library usage.

Because of the overlaps, I won’t spend a lot of time doing a comparison. The interesting part is, in any event, not the similarities. It’s the legwork and the outlook.

The Scott County library worked with the University of Minnesota’s Resilient Communities Project to develop a report on open self-serve libraries (here’s the report PDF). Since the initiative was not spurred on by funding cuts, it seems to have been able to contemplate all the possibilities. Not “how do we keep all branches open” but “what would expanded access look like”. What gown could we make?

The report has data on safety rather than trying to guesstimate the risk. Theft was about the same with or without staff, for example. It discusses the very real privacy risks of moving to a 360 surveillance of public library use, discussing camera footage access and encryption of video.

The growth is built into the report as well:

The capital expenditure rivals the costs that Buckinghamshire is exploring. Another Minnesota county, Dakota, is looking at $275,000 in capital improvements and $150,000 annually in expanded utility costs to enable extended access for 10 locations.

I particularly like that the model is staff-centric. Unlike Library Flex, which adopts a heavy assumption that volunteers will enable the model to work, Extended Library is built around maintaining the staffing. It assumes the cloth will be there.

Tellingly, the view is that this will require expansion, not contraction.

Another aspect of the Extended Library in Minnesota that I like is that it is opt-in. Library Flex UK is open to anyone with a library card. Extended Library requires library card holders to opt-in, go through a training, and sign an agreement. This creates a specific service audience. It will make marketing easier, because you know who is opting in and can focus on those who haven’t yet. It will make service changes easier to communicate, because you know who it will impact.

Extended Library is built on a commercial product by Biblioteca and this video they created is a pretty nice piece of marketing. The librarian explains the philosophy and talks a bit about the way for the library to prepare for expanded access.

What Does Your Cloth Look Like?

It is hard to work in a library where you feel you are short of resources. I visited a law school in May and someone sitting next to me was admiring the furnishings. “I wish our law school was as rich as [this one]”, they said. I think it makes a different to how people feel about themselves, how they feel about their ability to provide services. It impacts our value perception.

The question a director should ask is how to ensure that there is a perspective that the resources are enough to meet the needs. To flip from a glass half empty to a glass half full. It is my experience that sometimes the value perception is just that. It is not a reflection of the actual state of resources.

I have had some of that experience at my current law library. We just closed our books on the last fiscal year. We ended very healthily, financially. We have a full staff. We have been, on the whole, expanding services. Any service or collection cuts have been made because they do not align with our operation, not because there is a sense that we can’t afford them.

It is important to know that your cloth and someone else’s cloth are not the same. I was at an AALL conference session and mentioned our transit ad campaign. Some people thought that the note taker for our group had mistaken the amount ($30,000) our ad campaign cost by a zero ($3,000). It wasn’t, but we each have our own perspective of how big our cloth is. If, like us, you can do something within your resources, don’t worry if other law libraries can’t or don’t do the same thing.

Could we have done more? Might we have done things differently? Yes. I know libraries that spend 3-4 times what we spend on materials. We could have kept physical branches. But if you find that your law library’s resource demands continually outstrip your library’s resources, that isn’t a sustainable outcome.

Perhaps most importantly, it causes your organization to operate with a scarcity mindset that will permeate beyond not just having resources. It is hard to take pride in your work, in your workplace, with that sort of a mindset. It is a mental rot that will impact your library.

A scarcity mindset can lead to short-term thinking. You become so focused on avoiding the pothole in front of you that you don’t see where the road is going. I saw this recently with an organization that could not transition to a longer-term strategy because of the fear of leaving what they were doing, even though they were experiencing mixed success.

A lesson from the Minnesota experience is that leadership needs to be thinking about this early and often. If you are able, build up your financial situation so that it is resilient to unexpected impacts. We have been experiencing higher-than-expected filing fee revenue in the past 2 years. Our management team has kept our expenditures down, enabling the excess to be banked for the future, secured by resolutions passed by our Board. I can’t take any credit for the money but we are deliberately trying to keep our expenses trailing our income growth.

It’s attitude too. When I talk to my managers about doing something, I try to always emphasize one thing: we have plenty of money. $5000 to overhaul the AV in our training room? Let’s do it. A $250 license to a product that will help our reference team? No problem. Considering an expense? Fine, but make the decision based on the impact it will have on our organization. Cost is a factor, but it’s rarely the factor that should decide moving forward or not. That AV solution? It could have been 10 times the cost but our IT manager got really really creative. Cut your clothes to match your cloth.

The reality is that we may be skimping or going cheap because of our mindset, not because of our resources. It doesn’t mean we are profligate. It means that we need to share a mindset that it costs money to provide high-quality service and to have high-quality staff.

Your library doesn’t have to wear the same clothes as another library to be successful. But you can make decisions that ensure that your clothes fit your cloth.