Kelly Saini Badwal.
thing, or you book something, or you complain about something. Very few coun- cils 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 Discov- ery 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 pro- viders 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
September 2022
library services from events, heritage ser- vices 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 recom- mendations.”
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.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Rept0n1x Anthony Hopkins.
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 con- tent, 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 conver- sation 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
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 start- ing 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
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