Lock Ms S wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> A Further Education Library colleague is looking for information about
> recommended levels of service provision, for example, how many
> professional library staff and staff in general a library should have
> per student/user/FTE in an institution, etc. etc.
> 
> Cilip provide a useful Jobs & Careers section, but does anyone know of
> any figures (hopefully compiled outside of the sector to help add more
> weight to the argument?).
> 
> I'm sure you can all appreciate (and even relate) to why this
> information is needed so any advice and assistance would be gratefully
> received.
> 
> Regards,
> Selena.
> 
> 
> 

Dear Selena,

As one of the few remaining professional staff in Bangor I can certainly 
appreciate why this information is needed!

There appears (to my knowledge) to be a lack of prescriptive standards 
for academic library services, both in the FE and HE sectors. I believe 
there were some such standards way back in the 1970s,(the name Atkinson 
comes to mind), but these are now clearly out-of-date.

Prescriptive standards may in any case be out of step with modern 
mangement thinking - not much point saying how many staff you need 
without saying what you want to do with them. The idea now is that you 
have to define your objectives in relation to those of the organisation 
as a whole, and get the institution to commit to the resources necessary 
to achieve them. COHFE used to produce a set of indicative objectives 
for the use of people setting such standards in their organisations; 
don't know whether these are still around.

A method used by many universities to compare themselves with other 
institutions is benchmarking. SCONUL produces a set of benchmark figures 
for university library expenditure annually, but I'm not sure what 
happens in FE. The trouble with benchmarking is that it measures only 
how much money is spent on the service, not what is done with the money. 
Low benchmarks are meant to be "good", but all they really say is that 
the service is cheap. Some might say you get what you pay for....

One of the arguments used by management in Bangor in defence of the cuts 
was that our benchmarks were very high in relation to those of 
comparitor institutions. What they had conveniently ignored was that we, 
unlike any of these other institutions, had 8 branch libraries to run. 
We had an independent benchmarking study done by the people in 
Loughborough who produce the SCONUL statistics, which proved that in 
reality not only were the benchmarks broadly in line with everyone else, 
but we actually had fewer professional staff than most other 
universities. These new figures were not, however, taken up by 
management, whose main concern was apparently to defend their original 
position.

The good news from Bangor is that we now have a new University 
Librarian, Alison MacKenzie, and have succeeded in obtaining two new 
professional posts, one of Electronic Resources Librarian, and one of 
Research Support Librarian. So if anyone in your institution tries to 
tell you that Bangor is living proof that you can run a library with no 
professional librarians, you can answer that it ISN'T TRUE!

Eileen Tilley





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