Southampton Central Library with copier.


of our existing customers and bring in new customers.”


She added that the new technology also benefited and encouraged other existing and potential library activities: “We support local asylum seekers and refugees through partnerships with local charities,” she said, adding, “this allows much better support to print out a lot of documents and allows us to promote the services we offer as a library of sanctuary.”


The extra revenue and the savings on staff time are all valuable too. “The job of counting up coinage, and banking it is not one that I think anyone has missed”, Liz says. She also mentions that these new services fit easily into public library culture: “One advantage is being able to raise income from a service which customers find valuable and don’t mind paying a reasonable sum for.”


Under the surface


But Liz said that starting the Kuario partnership relied on a number of different factors coming together. Possibly most significant was a big structural change in the council. “We previously had full control over our IT spend and specifications for solutions which we drew up independently,” Liz said. “In an effort to coordinate spending and reduce duplication, improve standards and prevent siloed solutions the council moved to a centralised IT provision across the Council.”


Deal timing


Simultaneously with the change in relations with IT, Liz said another big challenge was looming: “Our printers


24


were towards the end of life so required replacement to be fully effective.” The timing was good, she said, because “it put us at the front of the queue for a corporate rollout.” However, with IT recently centralised,


there was no guarantee that libraries would get what they wanted: “We had always worked well with our IT colleagues,” Liz said, “but were a bit nervous that our solutions would now be corporate first and library-customer-centred second. However, our Head of IT and Digital is extremely supportive of libraries and our unique place in the service catalogue for the Council. Because we provide both staff tools and support the public, IT has remained inclusive of libraries during the procurement and decision-making process. We are now the expert user.”


Ongoing benefits


Alongside the obvious benefits of the new technology, Liz says the underlying restructure of council IT procurement also has advantages: “In the bigger picture, roll out of IT tools has meant that our teams now benefit from being part of the same infrastructure as the rest of the Council, our public Wi-Fi is corporate and we have reduced the discrepancies with log ons. It has reduced the overhead on libraries to have to research, compile specifications and find best tender routes. We still do a lot of that as due diligence, but the burden does not fall solely on us.” In relation to the Kuario print project she said: “Previous to this Library printers across 11 libraries were a separate contract to the print infrastructure across the rest of the council. This meant that although we could specify a bespoke solution we were at risk of higher costs


and were unable to buy value by being part of a large-scale procurement.”


Firefighting


Another benefit to the changes has been that when there have been teething problems with the technology, library staff are not solely responsible for fixing them. Liz said: “This project has the advantage of having Konica Minolta as a single point of contact for hardware software and service issues, and as the liaison between us and Kuario.” She said: “When we were having technical issues during the pilot rollout – which were tracked back to memory limitations on the older MFD hardware – we found that being part of a single contract meant that, with negotiation with Konica and the Council, the hardware could be replaced and upgraded as part of a bigger rollout. This would have been prohibitive if libraries had not been part of the single council contract.”


Partnership One key factor for this to work is a good working relationship with IT. She said: “We have reduced the single points of failure where our library services were ‘special’ – working differently to the wider council – but we are able to make use of bigger frameworks for better procurement value and compliant transparent purchasing. A big ‘but’ is that this is only possible because we have expertise in-house and a willingness to consider some compromise on some of our requirements to be part of the Council. And also very importantly, IT has the expertise to listen, understand and compromise on maximum savings to provide or procure a service which meets the needs of library customers. So, it definitely has to be a partnership.” BG


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