National access to online services
Recently the Society of Chief Librarians announced what was widely reported as an “initiative” on universal membership of UK libraries – although Tony Durcan makes it clear that it’s not anything new at the end of his interview on the ”Today” programme. The story stirred up considerable interest in the media and became a very welcome good news story about a somewhat beleaguered service.
The UK public library service enjoys a similar position in the national conscious as the Church of England and the NHS. Like the Church many believe that libraries are important but that belief doesn’t quite stretch to their actually visiting one. Like the NHS, we love our library service but worry about whether we are getting value for meny from it.
So the good “news” that libraries in the UK (except Scotland) are now “open to all” was received very positively, and the suggestion (in the SCL’s announcement) that we might one day have a card based on another system in a “galaxy far far away” (or in British Columbia at least) opened up the whole debate about single card access to all our libraries. An issue that Tony had suggested had had us “bogged down” for some time now because of technical and financial issues – although the Scots have been working hard to extend the benefits of their “National Entitlement Card” to library users for some time now.
Ed Vaizey announced plans for a national card some while ago. I remember shouting abuse at the radio when he was interviewed about it – also on Radio Four. There are just so many issues to be resolved to deliver such an idea, you can’t create solutions by sound bite. Work has to be done and some planning undertaken.
Which is precisely what hasn’t been done with one aspect of the brave new world of universal membership – online services.
I recently joined Manchester Libraries online and was pleased to receive a shiny new membership card allowing me complete access to all their services. In the interests of balance I should mention that “other library services are available” but I chose Manchester because a) I used to be a member when I studied there and b) they told me about the service through Facebook.
From the borrower’s perspective it’s brilliant. I simply fill in a form online and a card arrives! I don’t have to prove I live in the UK, or have any entitlement whatever to use the service. It’s such a great that I’ve mentioned it to all my ex-pat friends in France who are already expert at gaining access to UK services by using accommodation addresses for their Sky subscriptions.
Now of course I doubt very much that there will be massive “illegal” use of Manchester’s stock collections but I’m not quite so sure about their online services. Some of them are quite expensive to use if you’re not fortunate enough to be entitled to become a user of Manchester Library – which happily we all now are!
So the next logical step would seem to be for all other UK public libraries to cancel their online services and simply add a link to Manchester to their library services page. Why should Oxford (where I live) pay expensive subscriptions to their online service providers when they can be used via Manchester? Why not make Manchester the UK hub for all online service provision - a de facto national public library (online) service?
There is of course the slight difficulty over payment. At present every public library service pays their provider a fee for the services they make available to the public. In the case of the deal brokered by the MLA this is based on local population. Most other deals have a similar demographic element.
So someone, somewhere needs to be thinking quite hard now about what happens when existing contracts expire don’t they? Or will Manchester be prepared to accept that their user population has now expanded to the entire UK (and potentially beyond)?
It will be interesting to hear how service providers, and of course the MLA, plan to accommodate universal access to online resources next time around.
(Thanks to all those other workaholics whose Saturday afternoon was spent twittering this debate and especially to Chris Hall who summarised the arguments on his excellent blog)
My Manchester card arrived today. Off to check it out