Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal April 2003 Volume 1 (2)

Profile: Alison Hunter

Remote access

Running a rural library service that reaches right into the community.

Alison Hunter has been in post as Library and Information Services Manager for Shetland Islands Council Library Service for just over nine months. She started her career as a school librarian with Strathclyde Regional Council and has been a mobile librarian, branch librarian and then a young people's librarian with both Edinburgh City and East Lothian.

A spell acting up as principal librarian in East Lothian convinced her that she would like to develop her career and manage a library service, hence the move to Shetland.

She firmly believes that coming from a children's specialist background is an excellent grounding for developing a career both in terms of the skills involved and partnership working. Project management, bidding for funds, engaging with young people and adults, events organisation and working in partnership across libraries, councils and other agencies are crucial and transferable to a head of service post.

It is an exciting period of development for Shetland Library. The service has recently moved to a newly refurbished church building with a state-of-the-art learning centre. The quality of the new premises was confirmed by two recent awards for refurbishment and by the number of people flocking in to use email and access the internet.

A restructure of the service is currently being implemented with additional library assistant posts to cope with the demands of the new building and the People's Network.

Another post of Learning Services Librarian will have the dual remit of developing and managing the learning centre and contributing to the lifelong learning agenda throughout Shetland, as well as implementing and running a library management system for the service. It is hoped to have the learning centre branded as a LearnDirect Scotland site and to set up partnerships with the local colleges and colleagues in community learning development to deliver training.

The next stage in the centre's development is to programme in taster sessions targeted at specific areas of the population, computers don't bite sessions, core skills and other training and to encourage groups to book the centre out of hours.

In Shetland school library staff report to the library service which holds a budget for lending and reference material for schools. The post of Young People's Services Librarian has been created to manage the staff in each of the eight Junior High/High schools, and support them in developing a library and information service to young people in Shetland.

While school book provision is of a very high quality, access to ICT in school libraries is in need of improvement. An ICT Education Strategy group is working towards this improvement and together with a new library management system will provide libraries in schools with much better access to ICT and online learning.

Delivering on initiatives such as Bookstart and Chatterbooks will also be an important remit of the Young People's post. Bookstart was launched in January and baby book sessions are taking place regularly throughout Shetland. Chatterbooks reading groups were launched at the beginning of April with an excellent session from children's author Keith Gray. Five groups are now underway in Shetland.

Alison feels that the biggest challenge for her in Shetland is the remote nature of the communities served. She believes this challenge can be met by turning school libraries, where possible, into community libraries, reconfiguring mobile routes and to continue to develop library collections for island communities.

ICT will also bring advantages both in terms of the People's Network and a new library management system; the council has just awarded Talis the contract for this. Users at a distance will be able to request, renew and ask for information at any time. Where appropriate, material can be delivered out through community libraries, the mobiles and the van delivery service.

There is an excellent range of community facilities in remoter parts of Shetland such as village halls and leisure centres as well as schools where partnerships could be developed to provide a library service.

Alison's priorities for the service are to complete the recruitment to the Library team and to build the team up to deliver a first class service to the people of Shetland. To this end the service is hoping to gain the IIP award in May. Developing access to People's Network and providing more content working in cooperation with library services and other agencies across Scotland is another ongoing priority. Implementing the library management system will also be a major task in the next few months. As well as improving access, it will allow the stock to be more usefully exploited and the service to be monitored and evaluated.

The management system will also help to build on reader development initiatives. Shetland Library has found Reader Development training to be of great benefit and will be cascading the skills gained down to other staff.

In the wider professional field, Alison considers the most important current issues for public library services are both building on and sustaining the People's Network and the fall in issue figures. "The People's Network has certainly increased the numbers of people coming in to libraries and the challenge is to encourage them to use other library facilities as well," She says. "Given recent and continuing developments in the library service in Shetland I feel that the service is ready to meet these challenges. I am looking forward to working with my staff, the Shetland community and library colleagues throughout Scotland.

Information Scotland Vol. 1 (2) April 2003

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