Elaine Fulton

Biography: Elaine Fulton has been Director of the Scottish Library and Information Council and CILIP in Scotland since 2003 and worked for them since 1998; She had 20 years experience in public library sector with a particular interested in the use of ICT to develop services. She was closely involved with the co-ordination of the People's Network project in Scotland and the development of Best Value toolkits for libraries. Her work with ICT has led her to develop an interest in standards and metadata for interoperability to enable information sharing across all library sectors. Two key areas of work in this are have included “Enabling seamless access: towards a national information strategy for Scotland” and “Organising Information”, which have contributed to the Scottish Executive's Digital Scotland and interoperability frameworks. More recently she has been involved in the development of the National Entitlement Card scheme in Scotland to enable library management systems to meet the technical smartcard standard and thus enable library services to be a critical part of provision alongside the transport card and the Young Scotcard.

Abstract: Building on Success: a public library quality improvement matrix for Scotland

The publication of this new quality assurance scheme for Scotland's Public Libraries in March 2007 by Patricia Ferguson, the then Culture Minister for the Scottish Parliament, signalled a move away from input and output measures to outcome and impact focused evidence for our 32 local authority public library services. Following 2 sets of input and output based standards and Performance Indicators. Scotland has a long tradition of excellent public library services Current library legislation places a duty on local authorities to deliver “adequate” and free public library services. However, the legislation does not clearly define the term “adequate”. Although COSLA developed two sets of public library standards, there is still variation in equitable provision across Scotland. SLIC, the Scottish Executive and heads of public library services agreed it was time to review the approach and to use self-evaluation to provide evidence of best practice and create benchmarks which will help to define the term “adequate” in practice. This paper will outline the journey, discuss issues and update on progress.