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HE 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 But it has now been replaced by SirsiDynix.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 cur- rently run independently of each other and provide customers with an exciting new front end to access online services. 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 a­different­App­for­each­one.­The­aim­is­ to bring all that together. It’s very excit- ing because it is very customer driven. Customers will be using it in the same way that they use other apps like Amazon and Netflix,­and­it’ll­give­them­their­top­reads,­ 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)


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 col- lective­financial­power­and­collaborative­ 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 out- side 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 of­which­we­built­into­our­specification.”


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.


Next generation public library LMS


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.


had been developed by SOLUS, a Sirsi- Dynix 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.”


Kelly Saina Badwal.


Anthony Hopkins.


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 costs­less.­Not­only­has­the­office­been­rev- olutionised 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


15


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