The technology and people underpinning the Library Consortium’s new game changing LMS explained by heads of service at Sutton, Kelly Saini Badwal, and Merton, Anthony Hopkins.

The Library Consortium (until recently the London Library Consortium) has existed since 2002. It started with two London boroughs and now is made up of 18 local authorities, of which 17 are London Boroughs. Next year it will expand further outside the capital when it is joined by Essex and Thurrock with other authorities in the process of joining too.

From 2002 to 2019, the consortium’s library management system was hosted by Axiell. But it has now been replaced by SirsiDynix. The new LMS has been in place and operational since March 2019 and it is now about to enter a revolutionary stage – the implementation of the Library Services Platform (LSP). This will link together the various apps and digital services that currently run independently of each other and provide customers with an exciting new front end to access online services.

"Ebooks have not been treated in the same way as print books and there is a bit of a disconnect between different parts of the supply chain."

Kelly Saini Badwal, Head of Cultural Services at Sutton Council, which is the Consortium’s lead authority, said: “At the moment if a customer wants to use digital stock, if they want to borrow an ebook or magazine or audio book, they have to use a different App for each one. The aim is to bring all that together. It’s very exciting because it is very customer driven. Customers will be using it in the same way that they use other apps like Amazon and Netflix, and it’ll give them their top reads, recommendations and, for example, if they’ve read a book, they’ll be told if there’s an event from that author.”

Anthony Hopkins, Head of Library, Heritage and Adult Education Services for the London Borough of Merton said that the Library Services Platform (LSP) had been developed by SOLUS, a SirsiDynix development partner and that, in addition to connecting existing services, it opened the door for other council services beyond the library and potentially even to commercial services. “It allows us to use ‘best of breed’,” Anthony said, “So that we don’t have to develop our own systems – if there’s something out there that people are used to using, like for example Eventbrite or Google Calendars, we can just bring it in and plug it into the platform.”

Aim and fire

The consortium explored uncharted territory in its search for a new LMS. It was able to do so mainly because of its collective financial power and collaborative working with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Both Kelly and Anthony acknowledge that this power was an important factor. Anthony, who sits on the Library Consortium’s Strategy Group and was involved in selecting a new LMS, said: “When you take into account all the authorities it is a multi-million-pound contract, giving us strength in numbers in terms of procurement. When we went through the procurement process we really pushed the market in a way that I don’t think the sector has ever done in the UK. This was because we were not just thinking about purchasing an LMS, we were looking at the next generation of technology and a platform and having far better services and systems for our customers to access.

“We engaged with a lot of providers outside of the library network,” he said, “We went to the Googles, the Amazons and the Microsofts and gathered their thoughts and ideas as part of the soft market testing – all of which we built into our specification.”

Cost and value

Value for money for management systems is a moving target because an LMS does far more now than it ever did, and usually costs less. Not only has the office been revolutionised allowing the sharing of content and access to content the consortium was looking for, but it has revolutionised the way customers access library collections, becoming the digital front door and front desk.

Kelly and Anthony estimate that the size of their LMS budgets are around 15-18 per cent of their stock budgets. But the relationship and value of the LMS in a public library ecosystem has changed. Kelly said: “Yes it has changed a lot. It is driving a lot of our IT now. Before it was a process driven function, there to process the books. Originally it was set up to replicate an inhouse process but now it is an interactive tool and the impact is huge.” She said that the costs had also dropped, saving authorities thousands – “but we’re not spending anything like that now”. Compared to its predecessor Anthony said: “This is a cheaper product and we’re getting a lot more in terms of system offer and the LSP. The strength is in the numbers, so the more people in the consortium, the cheaper it is for everybody.”

Back to front

The consortium’s vision for Ebook management shows how the system could be integrated. Anthony says: “Overdrive doesn’t communicate with the LMS at the moment, it provides some data and information but there’s not a direct interface with the LMS. But it’s one of the things that we expect to be moving to with the LSP, the platform, the front-facing part that customers see and access. So, while the LMS feeds into the LSP (library services platform), the LSP is also drawing in data and information and services from a raft of different things, such as Overdrive.” These connections will enable smoother interactions with customers. “At the moment waiting lists are managed in overdrive but they will be moved onto the LSP,” he says. For Kelly in Sutton, the consortium means her users have access to over 6 million books rather than 150,000. And Anthony points out that what Merton spends on ebooks would give it access to 10,000 books while membership of the consortium bumps that up to closer to 150,000. One of the key purposes of the LMS/LSP is the management of the complexity of sharing and access across nearly 20 library services. But a side product of the scaling up of services is the scaling up of data generation – potentially making it more powerful.

Data

The integration of the LMS, the LSP and all the apps and digital services will generate a lot of data about users. Kelly said: “At the moment public library leaders don’t use data as well as they could. They tend not to consider their own data or what value it has. We tend to rely on global, national information. But that’s something that’s changing. We’ve been looking at the data that the library consortium has now. I’ve got a colleague working on this - for instance looking at how customers use the LMS, what they are searching for, if they find it or if they don’t, and why or how that happens. This is going to give us a lot of insight into what we need to purchase for our customers and where we lose our customers. We’ve always had data like this but now we are actually doing something with it. For example, recent feedback on the website found that customers get to a certain point in downloading an ebook and then get stuck when the process shifts to ¬another organisation’s platform. So, they’ve found the book but when they move to the provider’s platform they go “Oh no, now I’ve got to re-log back in again,” and we’ve lost them.”

There is also a lot of untapped data coming in from the existing apps. It remains untapped because it is not integrated. Anthony said: “The platform will just be a lot more integrated at the back end. At the moment its bespoke separate reports … with this we can potentially share it with other systems to improve the picture of the customer and what people are using, how they relate and engage. This is the kind of work that’s going on at the moment.”

While this could unlock many possibilities, Anthony says: “Sometimes the way the data is merged is quite complex, so if we all worked in isolation we’d really struggle, but the fact that we all work together means that we can manipulate it, read it better, and share challenges and problems. What the system can do is pretty advanced and we will need to get a better grip on it because there’s a lot more that it can do for us.”

People sharing

Technology and finance often dominate the digital agenda. But if the people and the institutions who use them don’t also change, the new tools won’t work. In a world where local authorities are struggling to provide basic services, aligning work forces with new technology is going to be difficult. It’s a problem that a consortium may be able to overcome. Anthony says: “Public libraries in England and the UK budget wise have shrunk. It means a lot of our officers need to be multi-skilled and it means that in every authority there will be someone with an element of expertise in development or data management. In a consortium it’s going to be what we’ve got collectively, that we need to build up. We don’t all have LMS expertise and none of us has anyone whose only role is to support the LMS. So, it’s how we bring it all together, that’s where we get the efficiency and the expertise.”

Because of the breadth of skills needed, new specifications rather than new posts may be needed. For example Kelly say’s Sutton’s data analyst role is not new: “It’s a post that we’ve always had. It was there to support our stock purchasing but now so many processes have become automated that she has the capacity to grow the role. We’re very lucky that data is something that she’s interested in, so we’ve progressed it to become a data analyst’s role.”

Kelly points out that there is “a bit of give and take” when it comes to time freed up by central LMS “because some staff spend more time working in the consortium, for example the chair of the stock and user group works for Sutton but he spends about 50 per cent of his time on the consortium.”

Knowledge share

Kelly says that right from the start joining the consortium opens a reassuring peer to peer communication that doesn’t just require collaboration, but also demonstrates its value.

“When a new authority joins, an existing authority will hold their hand and staff will go on site for a couple of days to get used to the system, the new terminology, new layout. When Hounslow joined, Croydon staff went and supported them because Croydon had just joined and they would remember the problems, the things they had to get over, and they got to share that knowledge. That’s really powerful. Staff get someone at their level telling them it works. It is much more powerful than me, as head of service, doing it.”

She says: “The biggest thing for me has been the knowledge sharing with heads of service. We come together and say “this hasn’t worked for me” or “my customers are complaining about this” and we help each other. Just talking to other heads about the challenges we face really helps. It’s an added bonus that you can’t quantify financially. I can get advice that otherwise wouldn’t be readily available.”

Originally published in CILIP's Annual Directory 2021 Buyers' Guide.

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