INTERVIEW
The first real taste of digital revolution?
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) (
www.thelibrariesconsortium.org.uk) 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 plat- form, 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 revolu- tion will develop out of how and why these services are joined up by users in the future, and how member authorities learn to inter- pret the data that this generates. Anthony said: “What you get is much
36 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Rob Mackinlay (@cilip_reporter2,
rob.mackinlay@
cilip.org.uk) is Senior Reporter, Information Professional.
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 some-
September 2022
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