'Surely the branches can take the local history material?'

Having read on Voices for the Library the excellent, if saddening, comments of Roger Taylor, the outgoing Performing Arts Librarian, on the loss of specialisms in Somerset libraries, it seems timely to tackle the issue of specialisms in Devon Libraries. Sadly, specialisms in Devon are going the same way as Somerset as in the new structure all the specialist librarian roles were, to use a wonderful piece of management-speak 'deleted', regarded as outdated and too expensive to maintain. As many of the specialisms were housed within the Exeter Central library, the directorate management appears to have misunderstood the 'Head of Department' tag given to each of the specialist librarians and decided that this was just departmentalism and created 'silos' within the building. This manages to ignore the fact that the Performing Arts Library and Westcountry Studies are both entirely separate libraries with county roles which happen to be within the same building as the main lending library. It also ignores the county nature of much of the work done by the Lending, Reference and Childrens libraries. The specialist staff in many of the larger branch libraries such as Barnstaple and Exmouth were also 'deleted' and deed superfluous to modern library needs. 

The quote which heads this post sums up the attitude of the directorate management as this is what was said when the county role of Westcountry Studies was put forward during one meeting regarding the restructuring. The manager in question, whom we shall call Mr Suit, seemed genuinely to believe that the material held in this exceedingly specialist library was in a small enough quantity to be able to be split up and moved out to the branches. He was also taken aback when one member of the Westcountry staff pointed out that much of the material was also rare and valuable! Where exactly Mr Suit thought Napoleon's death mask, the 100,000 or so illustrations, the endless newspapers or the enormous Burnet Morris index (a huge card index to a vast variety of local history references put together between the two world wars and bequeathed to the library service) should go one cannot imagine, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. But then one can also imagine that Mr Suit doesn't know of the existence of any of those items. It also had to be pointed out that many of the branch libraries just don't have the space to house local history collections as the pressure on storage and shelf space in every library is great, particularly as most do not have the luxury of a stack. The branches as it is frequently have to weed out the lesser used stock, which is often the more specialist material, in order to make space for new items. As it is Westcountry takes a huge amount of this material and adds it to its own collections in order that it is still available for the public to use. The Performing Arts library would also be well aware of this situation as it fulfils a similar role in taking ex-branch stock that the branches no longer have the space to keep. The branch librarians reinforced this view by telling Mr Suit in a further meeting that they needed specialist libraries to field the enquiries that they were not equipped to deal with and to ensure that the depth of stock and knowledge which the public expects is available. 

If you've never visited either the Performing Arts Library or the Westcountry Studies Library you may not be aware of exactly what they do, although you may have benefited indirectly from their services. If you've ever attended a family history workshop in a branch library, or if you've attended a concert or play performed by a local choir, dramatic society or orchestra, then you've benefited from their expertise. 

Performing Arts provides a county-wide service for sheet music, playscripts and specialist books about all aspects of the performing arts  - film, theatre, dance, television, radio, music of all kinds - and also provides this service to the entire country via the inter-library loans system. Performing Arts offers a hire service for sets of playscripts for performance and sheet music for both orchestras and choirs and therefore is often instrumental in the performances given around the county by countless local community organisations. The hire terms are pretty good, particularly when contrasted with the fees charged for hire by most publishers, and I suspect that if groups only had the option of hiring from the publishers, many performances would not be able to go ahead. As Performing Arts is part of a network of libraries similar to itself around the country, if they don't have what you want in stock the likelihood is they can find it for you. The only thing which stops them is a lack of availability which is usually resultant from conditions applied by the publisher. For example, you cannot get librettos - that's the script for a musical or opera - of Linonel Bart's 'Oliver' as the publisher still holds the rights on them. Likewise trying to find an orchestral set of Vaughan Williams 'Fantasia on Greensleeves' is virtually impossible as the composer was subject to a change in copyright law about 12 years ago which saw a number of composers works end up back in copyright. Incidently Performing Arts has about the only complete set of this work available for loan in the country. If you need 300 copies of the Faure Requiem, Ratcliff Novello edition, for a choral workshop, they'll find them for you from all over the country. This part of the service is free, all you do is pay for the hire of them for the period you need them. Oh, and they'll even send them out to your local library for collection if you want (quite often to the branch library's horror as 18 boxes turn up and they've no-where to put them...). They also offer advice and expertise as the staff know their stock well and know a thing or two about the subject matter. The staff across the years have been musician, actors, film-makers and enthusiasts and dancers, they often have a particular interest or love for a particular aspect of the performing arts and they know the stock inside out. They understand the importance of the right translation of a play or the right edition of a piece of music. They know what a BWV number is (its a number assigned to the works of J.S Bach which makes finding them rather easier), that there are several composers named Bach and that Haydn had an annoying tendency to write all his masses in Bb and name them three times... If you go and say 'I'm looking for a piece of music but I don't know what its called or who its by but it goes like this' and hum it to them or quote the lyrics, they'll have a damn good go at finding out what it is for you (and quite often manage it). Or perhaps you want some plays for your reading group to read through but you're not sure what sort of thing you want. They have a playset guide put together by the staff which lists plays by type, and more importantly, by the number and make-up of the cast. Looking for a comedy for 6 women and 2 men? There's probably one in the guide for you. You wouldn't get this service without the staff who know and understand the subjects in question and their stock. 

Equally, Westcountry Studies performs the same sort of task but for local history. Tracing your family tree and don't really know where to start? Westcountry Studies offers one to one sessions with a member of staff to get you started or help you out of a rut if an ancestor is proving particularly tricky to trace. Want to know more about your town or village or the street you live in? Westcountry will be able to provide newspaper cuttings, books and maps of the area - although of course for some of the tiny villages there isn't much to go on. The library basically does the other half of the Record Office's job - the Record Office keeps all the surviving documents for Devon, Westcountry keeps all the printed material. The collection is made up of books, maps, periodicals, newspapers, illustrations and photographs, pamphlets, articles and ephemera (all the stuff that doesn't fit neatly into another category - playbills, theatre posters and broadsides for example). The level of expertise on hand is quite extraordinary as the staff have a deep knowledge of the stock, local history and where else one can go for help. If they can't help you, the odds are they know someone who can. The type of enquiries they deal with can vary massively from family history to the origin of place names, the history of holiday camps in the region, earthquakes in the 18th Century, the settings of Jane Austen's novels or  the life of a local artist or writer. The holiday camps and earthquakes are genuine enquiries which the library has had, as was the query over Jane Austen's travels in the Westcountry. In each case the library was able to help, providing guides to sources, help on finding them and in some cases such as the earthquakes question, undertaking the search of 18th Century newspapers for the enquirer. Enquiries are often from abroad, particularly in terms of family history and often the enquirer has no other way of obtaining the information they need. If you look at the Devon libraries web pages, there is a link marked 'factsheets'. On the factsheet page there are a number of article under the heading 'local studies' - all of these were produced in-house by the staff to using library resources and their own knowledge and are a brilliant demonstration of the expertise the library provides. Or have a look at the Devon libraries Flickr page (www.flickr.com/photos/devonlibraries) which showcases some of the images in the Westcountry Studies library collection, as well as some really beautiful books from the Exeter Reference Library special collections. 

With the axing of the specialist librarian posts, some of this knowledge and expertise in the service is going to be lost forever. In terms of the Westcountry Studies library, they are set to lose two of their staff. That's two brains stuffed full of local history knowledge that are just gone. In each case the librarians in question have years of experience and amassed a vast knowledge right across the local history spectrum. In Performing Arts, at least one post will go and again the loss will be huge and impact across the county, particularly as the other service with Performing Arts in particular provides is the full cataloguing of all the song books in the county. The Performing Arts Librarian also has a particular knowledge of classical music and as such spends much time selecting stock for the library in terms of recordings and sheet music that would probably be otherwise missed. However, according to the consultation document for the restructuring "Some staff in frontline roles are undertaking stock selection and this may be preventing them from focusing their work on the delivery of high quality customer services." which totally misses the point of what Performing Arts, Westcountry Studies and staff in the lending, childrens and reference sections of both Exeter Central and the branch libraries are doing. In selecting stock according to their knowledge of both the subjects and the readership in their libraries, they are aiming to provide the best service possible in terms of stock for their readers. This is being dismissed as a waste of time and something which could be done centrally by either an automated system or someone who has no contact with the frontline in this way (I will point out that a lot of stock is centrally ordered, and this in no way detracts from the job the staff administering this do, its just that it is then focussed and supplemented by staff on the frontline). 

Sorry, this has become the longest post ever, but I wanted to ensure that you all understood what is being lost and why it is important. What the loss of specialisms represents is a drain of knowledge and expertise from the service which will ultimately leave the library users the poorer. The management at the directorate level cannot see this and instead see it purely in terms of numbers - that professional and specialist librarians cost more to employ than library assistants and therefore to save money they must be 'deleted'. 

First cut is the deepest

Now that I have your attention, I'll expand further on what is actually happening in Devon libraries.

I spoke previously of a restructuring that amounted to a demolition of the library service from within but didn't elaborate. The demolition takes the form of staffing cuts, not unexpected in itself, but being implemented in such a way that library staff recongnise that its likely to be the prelude to library closures.

The initial announcement on 3rd March saw a cut of a third in senior library staff while the rest of the senior staff take significant paycuts. This may sound sensible, 'cut some overpaid managers' etc, but there are some serious implications to this move.

What doesn't seem to have been taken into account by the people making the decisions - who I hasten to add aren't library managers but managers for our directorate, Adult and Community Services - is that the staff in question are generally staff who spend at least 50% of their time on the frontline serving the public. It was asked whether the resulting cut in frontline staffing would be made up with more staff hours being provided by library assistants, something which was carefully hedged around by the managers who came to deliver the news of the restructuring. We take this careful avoidence to mean 'no'. The odd thing is that the amount of time spent on the frontline by the staff who are being cut is explicitly referred to in the restructuring document;

"However,this group of managers has tended to find themselves tied into the day-to-day
delivery of frontline services in their base library"

Well, yes of course they get 'tied up' in the day to day running of the service as all libraries have historically been chronically understaffed. The senior staff have to work the on the frontline regardless of what else they need to be doing as there is often no-one else available to do the job! And you're proposing we cut the senior staff down without replacing the time they spend on the frontline?! Actually, scratch that, not 'proposing', you are cutting the staff and not replacing them.

So this is the problem, the staffing at the senior levels is being cut down which actually means that the number of staff serving you over the counter is going down. This is just the beginning as the consultation document we have regarding a second phase of restructuring suggests that staffing at the lower levels, those staff who spend virtually all of their time on frontline work, is also likely to be cut. We have been losing staffing steadily over the last few years, with Exeter Central alone having 16% less staff than the exisiting structure claims we should have. Keeping libraries open is already a struggle with the staff we have, so with even less staff, they won't be able to stay open.

We don't know what will happen next as we're being kept in the dark. It's been insinuated that library opening hours will change - well they're going to have to if we have less staff. We also know that single manned libraries, that is libraries being kept open with only one staff member, are set to become more common again. The problems with both of these 'solutions' is that the service that you, the public, receive will deteriorate. You'll have a library that is open for less time, with less staff in it to serve you, less expertise avaiable (the specialist librarians are being axed as well, there is no longer a Performing Arts or Local Studies librarian and your specialist childrens, reference and lending staff in the bigger libraries also no longer exist) and it is likely to be less reliable. With single manned libraries there is the danger that opening hours will become unreliable as if the staff member is ill or wants to take a holiday, there is no guarantee that there will be a member of staff available from another library to open it instead, particualary with staff being cut back. If a library becomes unrealiable, people stop using it as much. With a drop in usage, the faceless managers beyond the library service have something that they would consider a solid reason to shut the library in question - "people aren't using it".

There may be trouble ahead....

I admit as library staff we all thought this when Devon County Council, who I'm just going to refer to as the council from now on as its less to type, made the 'no libraries will close' announcement. We all felt a sense of disquiet as libraries are traditionally a soft target for spending cuts and we expected that the suggestion of no closures would come with some sort of enormous 'but' attached to it. We were right.

The first sign of the impending storm was the decision over the Devon Record Office staffing. It was announced in January that the Record Office would lose a third of its staffing, something which stirred up anger and apathy in equal measure. Amongst those who knew the service and understood what it provided, anger was widely expressed at the seeming disregard that the council had for the preservation of Devon's historical record. Apathy reigned elsewhere with comments such as 'surely this is something which should be pushed as far into the voluntary sector as possible?' and 'how many of us have ever had cause to contact a record office?' being made. Sadly the latter view is the one which is likely to prevail.
We knew in libraries that this initial insight into the way in which cuts were to be implemented didn't bode well. We waited for the storm to break.

On 3rd March, a month later than initally intended, the new structure for libraries in Devon was announced. It became clear quite quickly that this wasn't a restructuring, it was a demolition.  The worst part was that it was being done in such a way that from the outside it wouldn't seem that bad, that if we complained we could all too easily be branded as 'whining public sector workers who need to get real'. We were also told that we were not allowed to discuss the restructuring with the public. The library service looked like it was being brought down from the inside, and we were being told that the very people who used the service and gave it a reason for being there weren't allowed to know the changes that were to be made and how it might affect them. Why? Because the council remember all too well what happened last time it tryed to shut libraries - the public spoke up and made it such a huge issue that the council was forced to back down and only four of the proposed libraries were shut, with one being forced to close due to condemned building and one due to a site redevelopment which didn't allow for a new library.
We need your strength again to help the service through the lastest threats and the only way we can work together is if you, the public, know exactly what is happening.

The power of one

So here I am, one lone voice shouting into the wind and hoping that someone out there will hear and start shouting with me. And that from there we can go from one lone voice to a whole multitude shouting in unison to get the message across - "Your libraries are not safe, act now to save them!"

Devon County Council had put out the message that "none of its 50 libraries would close, but some branches could have opening hours reduced" and we all made the mistake of believing that our beloved repositories of knowledge were safe from the programme of cuts, that they would survive intact. But this is not the case, your service is being attacked from the inside in a 'restructuring' campaign that looks like it intends to destroy the service we know, and close your libraries. You won't find this in the press, or on the Local Authority's web pages or in their press releases, you won't know its happening until its too late, but your libraries are on the endangered list and only you, the public, the borrowers, can save them.