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 2004 Volume 2 (2)

Strategic partnerships

Co-operation in action

The Edinburgh Libraries Strategy is now being implemented. Chris Pinder outlines the work ahead.

'...plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.'
Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The context of Eisenhower’s thoughts, the battlefield, is a far cry from the world of library co-operation yet the quotation is perfectly appropriate. The Edinburgh Libraries Strategy was officially launched on 4 December last year and represents the culmination of considerable time, effort and intellectual input expended by a lot of people. However, the Strategy means nothing without the planning that now needs to take place to implement it.

The Edinburgh Libraries Strategy grew out of the City of Edinburgh Council’s Cultural Policy (1999) which, in turn, fostered the creation of individual strategies for music, play, libraries etc. For libraries it was noted that “while informal co-operation does take place, there is currently no overarching strategy or planned approach to collaboration”. As a response, the Edinburgh Libraries Strategy Working Group (ELSWG), a cross-sectoral grouping of representatives of the city’s major library providers was established. By late 2000 a ‘Libraries Strategy Brief’ had been compiled and consultants appointed to “determine the scope, shape, deliverables and associated timescales of an overarching libraries strategy”. The consultants, working with the ELSWG, surveyed library users, ran focus groups, fed back to the main group and finally produced the Strategy and related Action Plan which was approved by the City Council in 2003.

A significant milestone along the way was the publication of the Edinburgh Libraries Guide, which lists well over 120 libraries in the city. The Guide attracted some media attention from the city’s press and radio. Originally published in print, and enthusiastically devoured by members of the public, the Guide is now kept up to date on the Web.

Other initiatives included the formation of several sub-groups: staff development – to promote visits, exchange of experience and seminars; digitisation – initially to explore potential for a joint NOF bid; web page development – to create the Group’s own presence on the web (see www.elisa.lib.ed.ac.uk) and a ‘passport’ group – to improve access to libraries for Edinburgh’s citizens.

Prior to the launch of the Strategy it was agreed to move away from the ELSWG acronym to ELISA, the Edinburgh Libraries and Information Services Agency. The change also conveys the sense of moving forward to an active organisation with strategic intent and it is this challenge that is now our over-arching concern. Having received official Council approval and had the formal launch we know we now have to put real substance into the venture. We set out to establish something that would make a difference to the City and that will impact upon the lives of all its citizens.

Our aspiration is that, in ten years time, Edinburgh residents will have equity of access to the wealth of library and information services and resources across the City, whether through physical or electronic means. We recognise the extremely positive position from which we start. The City is rich in libraries with collections and resources of local, national and international importance.

There is already some joint and collaborative working between many city libraries. Library staff are skilled and experienced professionals and services generally receive high satisfaction ratings. The public libraries deliver a wide and inclusive modern service including learning support, internet support and housing community projects.

On the other hand, resources are restricted and customers consistently demand more and better services. Specialist libraries, of which there are many in the city, are insufficiently involved in collaborative ventures (and may also be insufficiently involved in the development of the Strategy overall). Importantly, there is a lack of advocacy for libraries within the City. This, together with the lack of a single contact point for the Edinburgh library community, makes it difficult for partners and individuals to navigate and connect with library services. Given time, it is probable that a strong movement towards cross-sectoral approaches and simplified structures will mean that greater potential for library development will come through regional partnerships or ventures with museums and archives. We in ELISA (and probably Scotland generally) look with some longing at the regional agencies established through the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council providing strategic leadership, advocacy and advice to enable museums, archives and libraries to better work together for the public good.

Libraries operate in a social and political environment and there are many opportunities for the Edinburgh library community to contribute to the government agendas of lifelong learning, social inclusion, digital inclusion and cultural tourism through partnerships with, for example, tourist agencies, community learning partnerships, Social Inclusion Partnerships, writers and publishers. The Edinburgh Libraries Strategy is for the benefit of the public and library and information staff working within the city. It has five aims:

• To implement a Strategy for libraries in Edinburgh which is appropriate to the City’s pre-eminence as a major world capital
• To foster, develop and support lifelong learning in the City of Edinburgh
• To identify, advocate and maximise the contribution of libraries to the educational, cultural, economic and democratic life of the city
• To extend and improve co-operation amongst libraries in Edinburgh
• To contribute to the preservation and promotion of the cultural heritage of the City of Edinburgh and to maximise access to that heritage for citizens and the national and international community

Each of these aims is supported by a number of objectives and for each objective there are a number of actions to be undertaken. Actions are set to a short, medium or long timescale covering the period up to 2007. The Strategy has 68 individual actions set against some sixteen objectives.

So, to pick up on Eisenhower again, we’ve got the Strategy (or plan), how do we set about the planning? ELISA is currently a group of professional librarians who are willing, able, motivated and enthused enough by the potential of great things within the city to give up some time now and again to focus on developing the Strategy. However, this is no realistic basis for long-term, sustained delivery against the strategic objectives. In thinking about the issue of advocacy for Edinburgh libraries our consultants had come up with the idea of a staffed, professional directorate, similar to the agencies established under the MLA. Indeed it was felt that many of the actions we set ourselves are not fully achievable without the establishment of such an agency. Unless there is a significant change of policy, however, no central Exchequer funding is going to be made available to realise this dream and we will have to rely on our own devices.

We intend to do this in two ways. Those libraries currently responsible for ELISA recognise that progress will be patchy and slow without someone at the centre to co-ordinate implementation, priorities and progress. We are therefore seeking to raise funding from member institutions to enable us to appoint a Development Officer. The postholder would act as a focus, or a catalyst, and work with staff from member institutions in tackling the action plan that we have already set ourselves. Another, complementary, route is to look at the distinctive competencies or capabilities of member institutions. In this way, the specialised expertise, processes and techniques that an organisation has accumulated over time, its collective learning, can be used to identify lead institutions or at least individuals with relevant expertise and experience for each of the action points.

In this way, it should be possible for the Action Plan to be taken forward and managed by what might be described as an Adhocracy, a fluid structure which is agile and can adapt and evolve easily and is built around distinctive competencies and commitment to major actions rather than the rigidity which might be implied by a centralised authority.

The constituency of the ELSWG has been more or less static over the period leading up to the launch of the Strategy with around a dozen libraries represented. One purpose of the launch was to use it as an opportunity to raise the profile of the Strategy and to get library and information professionals from organisations in the city with no current involvement interested in participating. We have had some success in doing this. To those of us involved to date it is extremely important that the Strategy does have the “Heineken effect” and provides a platform for all libraries and information centres within the city to engage in its development and implementation. This has led us to consider the structure of the group required to steer and oversee developments.

The group of people we currently have around the table is far from representative of the vast range of library and information services throughout the city. The larger organisations, the public, university and college libraries, are well represented but there is a plethora of specialised, commercial, research and other libraries who are not so. A major challenge is to find a mechanism for engaging these organisations without ending up with a counter-productive 40 or 50 people squeezed around a table. What we would like to do is involve representatives of these libraries in the several working sub-groups which we plan to progress the work of the Strategy and which, in effect, encapsulate the distinctive competency approach suggested earlier.

Our Action Plan suggests we look to at least six such groups to take our agenda forward:

• Business Committee – to oversee the development, organisation and funding of ELISA
• Staff Development – which is already in place and working well
• Access – to work on a scheme for collaborative access arrangements
• Digitisation/Conservation – to explore digitisation programmes as well as conservation policies, disaster recovery training etc
• Web development – to develop virtual access to information and collections, online catalogues, a staff intranet etc.
• Promotions/Marketing – to raise awareness of the Strategy for public and practitioners alike through events such as Library Open Doors Day and publicity materials etc.

I believe that we can rely on active and widespread participation from the LIS sector in Edinburgh and that there is considerable support for what we are doing. We rely on collaboration and goodwill. In achieving our aims it would be wrong to strive for perfection – better to go ahead with 80% right than wait forever for 100%! Throughout we must accentuate the positive and if a particular library feels unable to subscribe to a particular action then, as far as possible, we proceed without it. And finally... we must publicise what we’re doing so that our customers, the people we are doing it for in the first place, get to know what we’re up to.

Chris Pinder is Director of Learning Information Services, Napier University.

Information Scotland Vol. 2 (2) April 2004

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