A public library’s digital presence is confined to its local authority’s website. The Libraries Consortium has launched a platform that escapes this one-dimensional transactional world. Kelly Saini Badwal, Head of Cultural Services at Sutton Council and Anthony Hopkins, Head of Library, Heritage & Adult Education Service at Merton Council discuss what they’ve done.

YES, public libraries in the UK do already have a digital presence. But they are not spaces where their users are likely to hang around for long – not unless something has gone wrong.

It is probably fair to say that most local authority websites aren’t places residents casually visit to fill a spare moment in their day. Of course, they do exactly that in a real library, museum, leisure centre, or park – but not the virtual spaces on their websites.

For members of The Libraries Consortium (TLC) that is hopefully about to change. The group – which now has 23 member authorities and is looking to grow – launched its new Library Service Platform on 14 September.

What is it?

Kelly and Anthony described the new LSP (library services platform), Discovery platform, as a single digital platform that pulls together all of the consortium’s libraries’ online resources. This alone is a novelty – to have all their resources easily accessible at one point – but they say the real revolution will develop out of how and why these services are joined up by users in the future, and how member authorities learn to interpret the data that this generates.

Anthony said: “What you get is much more eye catching, it promotes stock and key services on one page, but mainly the Discovery platform is just more browsable. It’s a place for people to stay and discover and spend time. It does all the transactional stuff that our old web resource did, but it encourages people to spend time browsing and accessing new resources in a way that they haven’t been able to do before.”

Sector profile

Asked if this new platform is likely to raise the library’s profile in their own authorities, Anthony said: “I think it’s already doing that. If you go onto council websites they are all very transactional. You pay for something, or you book something, or you complain about something. Very few councils have explored how you achieve that broader social interaction. They haven’t generated interest in their services ­online enough to build up the profiles of the people that use them. That could be done by making their users more aware of events, pointing them towards other services or making their websites more browsable, but at the moment – I don’t want to say all – council websites are transactional. I know that what my own council is doing with social media and resident engagement is changing a lot, its more proactive than it used to be.”

Kelly agreed, adding: “The new Discovery platform demonstrates how effective user engagement and development of ­innovative services can drive up demand for online services. As such the Discovery platform puts us at the forefront of local authority technology and enables us to better engage with our colleagues. “We have a digital first policy at Sutton and this helps us deliver that. We’re advocating for our residents that there is a digital option and that it’s easy to use.”

How joined up?

When a user searches for a title they will be shown if it exists in any part of the consortium and in any format, or from any provider. For example the 23 consortium members buy their ebooks and audio books from different providers like Overdrive and BorrowBox. In the past, these apps operated with less integration. Now users can easily move between them with searches that include all the content available across the consortium.

Anthony said: “For me personally, as someone who has used Libby for a lot of years, I’ll probably go on using it. It works well for me, but it helps to have it all integrated into the platform and it means people can carry on using what they are accustomed to, but get additional access. Generally what I find from Merton residents is that they aren’t that bothered about format, it’s just what’s available quickest and this does that. But there are certain books that are only available through certain providers, for instance Borrowbox will have some exclusive content, or it may be that an ebook has only been purchased from Overdrive – so to give the customer the full range of what we offer, that’s what the LSP does, and that’s not what each individual app does.”

To make sure sharing of resources remains fair, Kelly says: “We monitor which boroughs borrow and which ones lend ebooks and we have a formula that alerts us if one is borrowing or lending too much… it’s around 50/50 and if one is borrowing more, then we’ll have a conversation about what stock may be needed. But it’s usually very well balanced.”

Search and usability

On the same page she can see what books she is currently reading or needs to return, as well as easy access to the other library services from events, heritage services through to library opening hours.

Kelly says: “In the old system you get a long list and you have to find the format you want from that list – be it a printed book, audio or ebook. Now, for each title, it tells you what formats are available and in which library. It is a lot easier to look at and use. And the titles can be rated, shared and reviewed, so it’s much more what people are used to as consumers of things like Netflix or Amazon.”

She points to the Discovery platform’s blog and online reading group which allow existing groups to go online adding: “there is a generation of people who expect to do things digitally and this new platform supports that. We do have online reading groups too but not as many as we’d like and this new functionality might help increase that too. It’s all about giving people choice. We’re doing all the good stuff we’ve always done but what the Discovery platform is good at is joining it all up, with physical, online and recommendations.”

Events

One of the areas that Kelly and Anthony see as a big breakthrough is in how events can be searched, signed-up to, and offered via preferences.

Anthony says: “The problem is that we deliver about 450 events per month which is a lot – and obviously a lot of that isn’t going to be of interest to everybody. The LSP allows you to filter them by library or borough, or subject or age category. So it gives them options about how they filter it. And then the preferences engine will suggest events based on reading and interests. We’ve never been able to do that kind of cross promotion of services in libraries before.”

Data

The legacy of Covid means that people still sign up for events, which provides data on what people are doing. Kelly says this data is valuable. “If I wanted to know how long people stayed on the site, or physically in a library – it’s about where can we learn about our customers and what they want. And with this system there’s so much data that we should be able to see things like how much our members use each other’s resources. I have two existing members of staff starting data analysis apprenticeships in the autumn and we’ll be working with them to see what data is there because you don’t tend to know, until you ask a question.”

Kelly refers to a sector-wide debate about how much use libraries can make of their data: “There is a lot of soul searching in terms of can we raise income from the data we gather in libraries. It would never be personal, the obvious examples are where some providers take our data and sell it back to libraries – but it is an issue that needs further thought and examination,” adding: “We’re working nationally with CILIP and Libraries Connected to determine how data in public libraries can be used to ensure the value of libraries is understood.”

In her own borough she said: “We’re looking at family hubs and libraries and how we can work together. Using data to find out if families use both services – making sure that we haven’t broken any GDPR rules – and seeing if people use the family hubs use the library and if we are providing them with what they need.”

CIPFA

Kelly says the new LSP “produces all the CIPFA reports that we need to submit. I remember where I used to work we had one person doing it – she’d start in April and would be finished a few months later. Now we have a report that does that for each authority.”

While this could mean that some library services will no longer see the bureaucracy and staffing time as an excuse to opt out of the CIPFA survey, more importantly Kelly says: “You have live or real-time version of CIPFA. It would tell you about how many books have been lent or library visitors there have been, or how much each library spending on books. But it doesn’t include a lot of the financial detail, like employee numbers, not yet, but there’s a thought.”

Preferences AI

But for now most of the data is about preferences and making the platform as user friendly as possible. Kelly said: “If I pick a book, I can say if I like it or not, add it to a list I want to keep, I can share it in other platforms, suggest to friend… you can tweet friends.”

Anthony says: “It will build up your preferences regardless of the stock format, so it will build in a similar way to the other platforms you’re used to already like OverDrive, but we’re not using their preference engines, we’ve got one that covers all providers and physical stock.”

Sector unity

As the sector awaits more news on the Single Digital Presence (we will be publishing an update from the BL in the next issue) what are the possibilities for this Discovery platform to tackle some of the issues?

We continue to be part of national discussions regarding sector improvement in this area. We’re presenting at the International Internet Librarian Conference in October again and we’ve been invited to speak at EDGE2023 in Edinburgh.”

Kelly added that the LSP (built by Solus) can sit on any LMS system. It’s not tied to one supplier but its potential for unifying the sector’s digital presence had not been explored.

However, she said that expansion of the consortium would require it to explore some of those issues anyway.

So, some authorities have gone for a lighter version of the Discovery platform and only have their catalogue, while ­others like us have everything, our heritage, events and all our library information. This will be due to local differences, how different authorities might be set up, so some library ­services might not have as much control over their IT.

“For TLC, if we look at the possibility of larger expansions across the UK, we would have to look at the reality of sharing physical stock, its environmental impact, so we could look at regional hubs or other solutions.”

She said: “We’ve been speaking to a number of other consortia who are interested in our model and a couple of other authorities are open to further conversations. We would encourage anybody interested in joining to contact us. The consortium has demonstrated over a number of years how effective it is in terms of saving authorities money whilst also improving services. New members also get to increase their resources hugely. Before joining the consortium, Sutton held about 250,000 items of physical stock, now as part of the consortium, Sutton has access to over seven million items of physical stock. You can see further benefits at our website: www.thelibrariesconsortium.org.uk”.