START WITH A GOOD BOOK

G.E. Gorman, Victoria University of Wellington, Regional Convenor, Library Link

In 1985 Stephen Roberts published a little gem of a book, Cost Management for Library and Information Services, that dealt with a much-neglected aspect of library management. Back then libraries were regarded as cost centres within their organisations, and their mission was to provide information to readers and users. Roberts argued that librarians (we still used this term in the �80s) needed to know how to manage their costs more effectively, and offered a variety of approaches in this well-received book.

More than a decade later we have a new edition under a new title: Financial and Cost Management for Libraries and Information Services (2nd ed. East Grinstead: Bowker-Saur, 1998). Today libraries, librarians and readers have all but vanished. Instead we speak of information services (or even �knowledge organisations�) supplying value-added, profit-generating services to customers and clients. Those who work in these places are no longer librarians but managers - carried to the heights of absurdity, I have seen a chief librarian in an engineering firm styled �senior data engineer�. This piece you are reading was written during a QANTAS flight on which the senior steward introduced himself as my �customer services manager�.

Customers and Readers, Managers and Librarians

But when we fly are we customers or passengers? When we visit our GPs, are we customers or patients? When we attend university, are we customers or students? When we use our libraries, are we customers or readers/users? In any of these situations where there is a relationship between professional and a member of the public, it is demeaning to speak of customers - demeaning, but totally in keeping with the unbridled managerialism that confuses and bewilders the citizenry.

A customer - a mere customer - buys a product and departs. A passenger, patient, student or reader enters into an association with professionals within an organisation: these professionals are the aircrew, medicos, academics or librarians who operate according to professional standards, standards which nowhere speak of �customers�. These professionals are not shopkeepers or sales assistants serving customers. We are not dealing with baked beans in the supermarket, but with a continuing, recursive relationship that involves a service tailored to individual requirements.

What does this little diatribe have to do with Stephen Roberts� book? Quite a lot - our profession likes to think that it has moved on since the beginning of the �80s, and as evidence of this we use a new language, the language of the marketplace and the service �industries� that dominate our lives. Many librarians are unable to conduct a conversation that does not smack of the trading floor, the boardroom or the negotiating table. This is reflected in part in the title of the book, which employs �financial management� and �information services� to make it sound very �90s. Yet it is still the same book, attempting the same task as the original. As Roberts points out, there has been a significant shift to business and management approaches in libraries - sorry, information service centres - yet very few libraries are actually run like business enterprises. No matter how hard we try, no matter how convoluted a term we invent for �library�, this will never happen if the library is to continue doing what it does best - providing information to people. The right information to the right person at the right time, to paraphrase Ranganathan - not just any information to any person.

Funding and Accountability

To take this approach is not to say that libraries should be managed like private fiefdoms, with the senior librarian controlling the purse strings and doling out bits of cash on demand. This is the way it used to be done, and it was not at all a professional approach to stewardship. Roberts maintains that libraries and librarians must become adept at financial and cost management not only to manage their organisations more cost effectively, but also to avoid being overtaken by market and political forces. We agree with this, and believe that librarians need to speak the language of their stakeholders and masters. Roberts teaches us this, and he also teaches us a variety of ways in which to manage our finances. But what we learn here should not be applied across the board so that our readers become figures on a spreadsheet.

There is a major clash of philosophies developing, in my view, between information managers and librarians. The latter are interested in service to people; they are community oriented, with a strong egalitarian bent and a desire to serve the needs of their users. The former are organisationally oriented, which means that they principally respond to requirements expressed from on high, without particular attention to the needs of their �clients�. They are, rhetoric to the contrary, essentially hierarchical in their thinking and see themselves as professionals set apart from the hoi polloi. Both librarians and managers believe in accountability, but accountability to whom is where they differ - accountability to the readers for one, and to the masters for the other.

Managers talk about flat management structures, about staff participation in decision making; but in libraries how many of these individuals actually ask staff for their views on how funds should be allocated, and then act accordingly? For librarians, those who have a stronger community orientation, there is no intention to argue for funding without constraints. Whereas the manager looks for regulation and constraints imposed by corporation or government, the librarian believes that accountability - and perhaps even funding - derives from the community.

An example of how this might work (or not) can be taken from the case of a particular national library, which over the years has taken its cues from a government which is notably anti-intellectual and anti-cultural. This national library has performed very well from the government�s view, cutting expenses, cutting staff, restricting services, abrogating national collecting responsibilities, adopting a greater user-pays approach to services.

But what of the community? What does it think of all this? There has been a groundswell of opinion not only from the profession at large, but also from the public, from people who question whether this national library is really a national library providing the level and quality of services and collections that one has the right to expect of a library that is national. This library has fallen for managerialism in a big way, with management by diktat and control by professional and political elites now its normative behaviour. The national librarian (who of course wouldn�t be caught dead with �librarian� pinned to his pinstripes) argues that financial constraints require these changes. Real librarians, by contrast, maintain that this person, and his organisation, simply do not understand that a library operates differently - that the financing of libraries derives in the final analysis from the users and ought to be based on the satisfaction of these users with the services being provided.

It is a corruption of professionalism to continue down the road of financial accountability that looks up the hierarchy and does not look across to users. When we argue for funding we need to teach the politically correct that readers have the final say, because we exist to provide a service, not to balance the books or make a profit.

What the Journals Say

In the MCB LIS suite this issue has not been much discussed of late, and there is considerable room for debate which one would like to see occurring both in the journals and in the various electronic forums managed by MCB. What we tend to see is (1) an acceptance of the move to market-driven jargon in relation to users, and (2) an acceptance of the funding situation. For example, Jennifer Rowley and Jillian Dawes, "Customer loyalty: a relevant concept for libraries?" Library Management 20: 6 (1999), pp. 345-351 have taken �customer� as a given and focus their discussion on how to manage �customer loyalty�. We need to go back beyond this, and to debate the value of �customer� in relation to what we as information professionals are doing, and how we fund our activities.

Innocent Ejoka, "The funding of library research in Nigerian universities." Library Management 20: 6 (1999), pp. 338-344 does not address the matter of accountability in his discussion of library-based research and its funding, although he does indicate that most publications in this field result from self-funded research. One wonders whether, if users and stakeholders are taken into account more directly when we undertake research - and if these are truly viewed in this light rather than as mere customers, the level of funding from outside for research and other activities might increase.

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