Everybody fights nobody quits (except CILIP)

Forgive the silly title, its a quote from Starship Troopers and it popped into my head when I read the CILIP letter. I have had a response from John Dolan chair of the CILIP council as I sent my last blog post to all the council members asking whey they had betrayed library campaigners. This is the email I sent:

Dear CILIP members,
My name is Trevor Craig, I am not a member or a librarian. I am a campaigner in Oxfordshire campaigning to retain professional staff in libraries. There are various reasons for this. I have written a blog post on your recently discovered policy change on volunteers:

http://questioneverythingtheytellyou.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/librarians-against-libraries-and.html
Can you please explain why you as the professional body for librarians are undermining efforts of campaigners like myself to retain staff in libraries? 

With kind regards,

And here is the full response which although I'm not happy with the content I'm glad they have responded since I'm not a member:
"Dear Trevor,
I am writing on behalf of CILIP’s Council members in response to your request for information. CILIP Council’s policy on volunteering was agreed in 2010 and is kept under review, as are all CILIP policies. Our policy states the following:‘CILIP acknowledges the contribution that volunteers make to libraries, enriching the services they provide and helping to sustain their viability. In order to optimise the value of that contribution it should form part of a professionally managed public library service that has at its core sufficient paid staff to ensure the direction, development and quality of the service provided. Volunteers are not 'free' and need proper management, training and development. In many cases a volunteers’ coordinator should be appointed to ensure appropriate management and recognition of the value of volunteers.’This policy has been public since it was agreed and the discussion about it earlier this year was in the public meeting of CILIP Council in March. Papers were published and are still freely available. The policy acknowledges that volunteers have for many years been a part of the work of public libraries and have had a great contribution to make. The difficulty for everyone is that now they are being asked to take on more of the delivery of the core service rather than ‘added value’ aspects of it.CILIP has consistently refused to publish advertisements for volunteer jobs where it is clear that they are substituting for paid professional roles, or to deliver training courses to volunteers, despite a steady stream of requests. We have said that libraries must be managed and run by sufficient paid staff. However, at the same time we are dealing with harsh choices and realities for local communities. In many cases, if volunteers do not come forward to support the library services, the libraries will be closed. These volunteers cannot provide a library service as we all know it as they are not skilled and trained. We have made a clear stand against this and against any local authority that considers this acceptable.
CILIP Council members are honestly facing a dilemma about their professional feelings and those of our members and at the same time, the good of a community who may lose all library provision unless volunteers are part of the equation. We are committed to listening to and discussing this situation with our members, many of whom work in these libraries.Volunteers, and CILIP, are not ‘the enemy’. The enemy is ignorance of the value and the importance of library services to a literate, healthy and prosperous society, and that is the enemy that we are trying to combat.Best wishes"

It doesn't really answer any of my concerns sadly, I believe the stance of CILIP however well intentioned is (has) sent the wrong signal to the ideologues running councils that they can save money by replacing paid staff with volunteers. It doesn't make financial sense and CILIP have taken this stance without any evidence, they have just bowed to the perceived political wind.  I fail to see how job substitution is a good thing for libraries, CILIP or its members. If I were a CILIP member paying £19.40 a month I be asking for my money back.


The fight goes on, CILIP sadly for now stay in my enemies of libraries venn diagram.



Here is a link to the letter:


https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B6dU0yhpP-MUSlVJVC1DM3NMLVU


Link to Johanna's blog which has all the details:


http://johannaboanderson.wordpress.com/

The "Librarians Against Libraries And Librarians Association" CILIP changes its name to LALALA

I wasn't going to write anything on this but sadly I am far too angry after days of thinking about it that I have to vent. In my head I have a little Venn diagram of the enemies of libraries and it has who you what you would expect in it: David Cameron, Big Society, Keith Mitchell, LGA, Ed Vaizey and the DCMS etc. In the past few days CILIP has crept into the enemies box. The reason for this is their stance on job substitution and using volunteers in public libraries.

They have changed their policy on job substitution as to not be too rigid. Here is the text:

“However Council agreed at its meeting in February 2010 that this policy was too rigid and failed to reflect present day realities where significant expenditure reductions had to be made. Some authorities had already introduced a number of voluntary-managed libraries (e.g. Buckinghamshire and Cambridgeshire) and there was also a strong policy steer to increase community engagement in the running and management of libraries that had emerged before the recession, for instance as part of the Big Lottery Community Libraries Programme. “

CILIP are the chartered institute of library and information professionals. The vision of clip is:

"A fair and economically prosperous society is underpinned by literacy, access to information and the transfer of knowledge.”

And their mission and the reason they exist is to:

“Promote and support the people who work to deliver this vision.”

And:

“Be the leading voice for information, library and knowledge practitioners, working to advocate strongly, provide unity through shared values and develop skills and excellence.”

CILIP’s membership is libraries in all sectors not just public libraries and they provide lots of expensive training and courses. I’m not a librarian so I have no idea how good they are at this stuff. Sadly their main goal to promote and support the people who deliver their vision they have betrayed.

This policy only applies to public sector libraries and despite their vision to promote the people who pay their membership fees they are happy to allow those people to be replaced by volunteers like me. There is so much wrong with this stance that I have to make it into a list:

1.       Rural libraries are mainly the ones in the cuts firing line, replacing a couple of part-time library managers (not librarians) doesn’t save actually save any money because of the number of volunteers required. I can prove this is the case in Oxfordshire and I think the same applies elsewhere.

2.       How will CILIP continue to exist when its fee paying members are replaced by volunteers?

3.       Cameron himself is quoted as saying “the big society isn’t about cuts, it’s about making existing services better”

4.       Volunteering England is specifically against job substitution of paid staff with volunteers, quote from the chief exec: “There is a danger that volunteers are seen as a way of reducing costs, and that undermines staff jobs and is extremely damaging to the perception of volunteering.”

5.       You have handed the ideological morons who live in a bubble of simplicity a massive weapon to sack your members. However nuanced and pragmatic your intention this has severely undermined the library campaigners up and down the country.

6.       When the economy recovers will you reverse this stance, this seems to be the only reason for it?

I feel like I have been kicked in the teeth by this, so much time campaigning to keep professional staff in the rural libraries against the misguided ideological attacks and its completely undermined by the professional body for librarians who believe its ok to replace their members with volunteers. I’m going to email the current members of the CILIP council and ask them why they are against libraries.

I'm also going to volunteer to be chief librarian of Oxfordshire County Council, this should save about 5 of the threatened libraries.

Some links if you want to read a more coherent and well-argued dissection of this nonsense:

http://johannaboanderson.wordpress.com/

http://informationtwist.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/cilip-volunteer-policy-job-substitution-letter-to-cilip-update/

Ian Clark’s storify:

http://storify.com/ijclark/volunteer-libraries?awesm=sfy.co_xeC&utm_campaign=&utm_medium=sfy.co-twitter&utm_source=hootsuite.com&utm_content=storify-pingback

The volunteering England policy:

http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/governance/news/content/12147/volunteering_england_offer_guidance_on_avoiding_job_substitution

And the ill-advised nonsense from CILIP:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9r-dNr4kPL0WGJHcUZMeThEQXc/edit

If people don't know what you're doing, they don't know what you're doing wrong.

Ed Lazy closing his eyes to closures

In March I put in a FOI to the DCMS asking what advice (if any) the minister for libraries Ed Lazy had received on whether he should intervene because a local authority isn't fulfilling its statutory duty under the 1964 act:

"It shall be the duty of every library authority to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service for all persons desiring to make use thereof,"

The last 8 words of which are always conveniently ignored by everyone in the debate I feel.

I put the original request in on the 15th of March 2012 and the department responded on the last possible day asking me to clarify my request.

I did clarify the request and again they waited until the last possible day to again respond but this time saying they wanted another month because they have to apply a "public interest test" on whether they should release the information.

Considering they are supposed to reply promptly to requests by law, the fact that in both cases they waited until as late as they could to respond means I think they are not following the law or at least not in spirit. 

The exemption they have used to delay further is section 36 of the act which is "Prejudice to effective conduct of public affairs." which did make me laugh because Ed Lazy hasn't conducted any public affairs in regards to libraries, his head has been firmly in the sand since he took office.

I’m sure there are further holes I can pick in the evasive and obfuscating response so far but I will leave that until June to see where the “public interest” lies in seeing what advice if any the minister has received from his officials. Sadly we don’t yet live in the utopia of transparent government though. And as Sir Humphrey Appleby remarked “If people don't know what you're doing, they don't know what you're doing wrong.”

Slightly off topic, as a non-librarian, FOI is the only real weapon I have to hold these buggers to account. The LGA, CILIP, SCL and the political parties are all failing to protect libraries and in some cases are complicit. Some (if not all) of these bodies receive public money in one way or another and I think they should hang their heads in shame, sorry if you belong to any of these organisations but as a non-library person its how I see it.

They are too busy wasting public money on poorly licenced new technology or doing what Sir Humphrey would call useful work. But no amount of toolkits, partnerships, conferences or other management double speak detracts from the fact that these organisations are not stepping up to the plate to protect libraries. They are too busy with their creative inertia to realise the ship they are on is sinking and unless they act soon the vocation of librarian won’t exist in public libraries in ten years.  I am happy to volunteer to make the service better for others but I’m not volunteering to replace librarians and library managers.

I do however get a sense that the political wind is changing, but its already too late for some libraries.

Link to the foi:

 http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/exercise_fo_powers_under_the_196#incoming-280995

Apathy is the greatest evil

The most shocking thing about elections these days is the low voter turnout. The most recent council elections had voter turnout at an average of 32%. For a candidate to be the winner they only need to get just over 16% of the vote to win. This would mean that potentially, 84% of the electorate could have a councillor that they didn't vote for. You can argue this is their own fault for not voting and I have sympathy with the argument. During 2010 15.5m people managed to vote for their favourite "singer" on X-Factor. I'm not suggesting politicians should have to sign on telly for votes but making voting easier would obviously increase the very poor turnout. The politicians having policies based on evidence and not coming up with stupid ideas on the hoof then scrambling to find the evidence would help but I have covered that in other posts on libraries. Putting my annoyance with the policy process to one side I have been having a think about how this could work technically. Sally Bercow retweeted one of my tweets the other day on this and I had lots of good arguments both for and against. Below is what came back plus as many for and against arguments I can think of off the top of my head, regardless of how factual they are. I will add to this as and when I think of more or people suggest any.

Possible issues against:

1. Open to hacking and mass vote rigging, dos attacks to bring down system (dos = denial of service)
2. Expensive
3. Government absolutely hopeless with IT project management
4. Databases always raise data protection concerns
5. Any single mistake will be jumped on by special interests who want to keep current system, politically difficult to sell to voters and party members.
6. Existing system is tried and trustworthy
7. Trust in the new system
8. Access to the system, not everyone is online 

Possible issues for:

1. Would increase the very poor voter turnout
2. Counting would be instant or even real time
3. Would stop the fraud with the current paper system
4. Would if successful actually save money, current system has lots of costs to taxpayer
5. If voting systems change PR etc then this system the counting will be just a quick. For paper systems, long winded and difficult to count alternative vote, second preference etc.
6. Electoral register already an online process and has been for some time, that could have just as easily been hacked to create fake voters.

I'll just quickly whizz through my thinking on the above, then set out how it could work.

Against:

1. Modern encryption is stronger than it ever has been, see the link below on 128 bit SSL to see how hard to hack it is. The current paper based voting system is also open to mass voter fraud. There have been cases of mass postal vote manufacturing in the UK and various other issues with ballot boxes going missing or being tampered with. Lots of the volunteers who collect the boxes are party volunteers and with the best will in the world there will always be problems with any system that is used.

2. It would be expensive to develop, probably millions I would imagine. Just for context, millions is a tiny figure compared to the government spend of 722(ish) billion pounds every year of our money. The cost of counting the ballots also costs money each time, the counters get paid (I think), the returning officers and their staff are paid and the facilities have to be hired to count the votes. As we moved away from FPTP because of devolution and hopefully Lords reform then the manual counting only gets more complicated. The London Mayoral count was a bit of a shambles judging by how long it took and ballot boxes going missing and re-appearing.

3.This is the biggest one against for me, The government have a awful track record on IT. The IT companies always get the blame but I can assure you the bulk of the blame belongs with the politicians and civil servants. Procurement is very poor, requirements are ill thought through and because of politics are liable to change a lot which leads to cost overruns and delays. Technically this is a very simple thing though, I'm sure the government could muck it up but I wouldn't want them directly involved, it should sit with the electoral commission.

4.Thanks to poor data handling and the scare stories in the Daily Mail people are very concerned about this one. Considering this system would form part of the already existing electoral register then I would hope people wouldn't be unduly concerned. For the actual voting online process the data would only need to be a random unique identifier and probably date of birth, postcode and gender. 

5.This is more political than technical, there will be problems with any new system and a trial would pick up more problem and these would have to be addressed. As much planning as you put into any new process there will always be issues. The people who want the status quo to remain will jump on this and denounce it as a failure regardless of what happens.

6.The existing system isn't tried and trustworthy though, in nearly every election I can remember there has been issues with voting, especially with the more recent introduction of postal voting. I do have sympathy with people who like to vote in person at the ballot box, the two systems can quite easily run alongside though.

7.This is again more political and with any new IT system it needs to build up trust with the users. You use more IT systems everyday that are far more complicated that simply counting votes. Banking, online food shopping, Lovefilm, Itunes etc are all sophisticated in how they work. They all have a good track record on security, I do amazon orders from my phone quite regularly and have never had a problem. Convincing non technical people of this will be very difficult though.

8. The speed of our broadband is one of the worst in Europe, but what we lack in speed we make up for in users. 77% of homes in 2011 have internet access according to the ONS and 45% of the internet household users have mobile phones with internet access. Both of these numbers are a higher percentage than the voter turnout for local elections. Plus for those without access we have libraries, community centres, internet cafes and family members who could get any without internet online to vote, as time goes on this small percentage not online is only going to decrease.

For:

1. This speaks for itself, politicians have no mandate to do anything when the vast majority don't vote for them. Anything that increases voter turnout can only be a good thing.

2. This is just the nature of technology, the benefits would be more for the media and the returning officers who could be done and dusted by 10:30.

3. The current system can be nobbled, any system can. I personally think a online voting system would be more secure than a paper based one. Both would have to run along side for quite a few years though until people build up trust in online voting.

4 & 5. As we saw last night, it takes a huge operation to count votes, even more so when systems other than first past the post are used. In programming terns counting is what computers basically do and in the long run if we moved over to a completely online system this would save lots of money.

6. There is already a online system in place to register to be on the electoral role. To my knowledge this has been successful and there hasn't been any issues of the system being hacked or used for electoral fraud. Online voting would be a addition to this system.

I'm sure there are many issues I haven't thought about both for and against. The overriding thing again though is voter turnout. We have a democratic deficit in this country and increasing voter turnout will mean the politicians have to listen more and cannot rely on their core 16% of voters to get them over the finish line. 

The technical side.

As I have said above, it isn't a complicated thing to count votes. The database would have to audit the votes and could track when the votes happened, the ip address of the voter (if it needed to) and any other fields of data that would satisfy the electoral commission. Currently when you are eligible to vote you get a polling card, this has your information on it and a unique code which is in a database and is tied to you and various other bits of information on where the polling station is and normally a little map etc.

The information we need therefore is already in a database, we just need to tie it to the data on who is up for election in your parish/division/constituency/referendum and then allow the user to vote online with it create their own rows in a table using these two sets of information. In database terms it is very, very simple.

The voter would then go to the site (or app) that would be written for online voting, stick in their unique code and also a couple of bits of information not on the card to verify who they are. Date of birth would be enough but the more you use (NI number, mothers maiden name etc) the more secure this side of it would be. Bearing in mind with the current system just having someones polling card is enough to vote, you are not asked for ID. Once you are securely logged in and verified you would be presented with the elections you are eligible to vote in, you pick your candidates, click submit, are asked to confirm your choice and then its done. The database is updated with your choices and your unique id is flagged preventing you from voting more than once. This can all be tied into the electoral commissions existing site. The voting choices could even have bio's and pictures with links to what each candidate stands for and promises to do if elected. Once the voting period has closed, the votes are already counted and we know who has won. The database will hold who voted, when and from what IP address. If there were any issues of voter fraud, the IP addresses can be tracked to the service provider and the person who pays for the connection. The database  and webserver would both have a fall over cluster (like a car with two engines, one as backup that seamlessly takes over if one fails). And the reports will already be predefined to show the results. Sample checking could be done to check the voters did vote when they said they did. 

Over 40 years ago we put a man on the moon, we cannot do online voting, really?

I will probably draw up a diagram on how this will work and a database schema when I get time, below is a few links on things I have mentioned.

Registering to be put on the electoral register database online:

http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/

Article in the independent on voter fraud, specifically the postal votes:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/electoral-commission-boss-faces-fight-for-job-after-claims-of-fraud-7707489.html

A article on the maths side of 128bit ssl encryption:

http://www.inet2000.com/public/encryption.htm

Library Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

The Conservative group in Oxfordshire have elected their new leader to replace the outgoing Keith Mitchell. The leader is a man called Ian Hudspeth. He was a cabinet member but was booted out when he challenged Keith for the leadership last year. Why this is significant for libraries is Cllr Hudspeth spoke out against the current library scheme both at the scrutiny committee and cabinet. He was one of only two elected Tories to speak out against the flawed proposals.

Cllr Hudspeth fighting the PM for the brolly (pic Oxford Mail)

 His rural division of Woodstock is one where the staff are being cut and the library will be forced to rely on "volunteers". Having a look on Ian's site there is a post he wrote at the time when the current proposal was voted through and gives his thoughts on the way forward for libraries in Oxfordshire, here is a snippet:

"The one glimmer of hope for Woodstock and all libraries is that the budget for next year allows them to remain as they are with the savings budgeted for future years. This does mean that we can continue to fight to have a fully funded library in Woodstock."

I understand a lot of the Tory group were unhappy with the proposal and didn't get a chance to vote at group level. The idea behind it came from a meeting with David Cameron and Cllr Mitchell when Cameron intervened when the threat to the City libraries caused a lot of negative publicity involving celebrity authors. I don't think the staff in the library service itself had very little to do with it nor the flawed and misquoted data used to support it. Sixteen of the twenty one cut libraries are in Tory divisions.  

Whatever Cllr Hudspeths ideas are for the library, he seems more pro library and I hope this means a scheme that will save money, keep the libraries fully staffed, open and most importantly restore their status as statutory (in the view of the council). When asked by the Oxford Mail why he won the vote he said:

"But I would hope they can see that I am bringing fresh ideas and a new approach to the county council."

I hope the new approach means a reprieve for the libraries but also a more consensual approach, Keith did rub a lot of people up the wrong way, the job of a politician is to lead by consent in my opinion. Most non party people like myself don't like tribal politics, despite how entertaining it can be to watch them insult each other. We care about what works, want evidence based policy, not policy based on ideology and then trying to find the evidence to fit the policy. 

Finally on Cllr Keith Mitchell, although I find myself disagreeing with him on lots of issues, all the people who know him I have spoken to have all say he is a workaholic and was always putting in long hours as  leader. He is also a very accessible politician, he always answers emails and tweets, sometimes with insults! But he is always up for a debate. I wish him luck in whatever he does next.  He is speaking at a "Do we need libraries" debate in Liverpool next month, despite having a annoying title I look forward to hearing his views. I do hope he understands that people like me are happy to volunteer to improve the library but I refuse to be forced to volunteer to replace staff. The rural voters are as entitled to a statutory library service as those in cities.

Oxford mail article on new leader:

http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/9674072.COUNTY_COUNCIL_LEADERSHIP__New_chief_expecting__mammoth_task_/

Link to the new Leader Ian Hudspeth's website and his library page:

http://www.ianhudspeth.com/id18.html

The Liverpool Uni's "Do we need libraries?"  (YES!)

http://www.liv.ac.uk/events/policy-provocations/do-we-still-need-libraries.php

Those who search through piles of rubbish in the hope of finding something of value

The slightly misleading title is according to wiki what scrutiny actually means: Scrutiny (French: scrutin; Late Latin: scrutinium; from scrutari, meaning "those who search through piles of rubbish in the hope of finding something of value,") Which I think is quite apt considering some policies that come from government at both local and national level. What has been clear to me quite recently during the libraries fight and watching the various select committees is that politicians are incapable of following the rules and putting tribal politics to one side and actually scrutinising policies and departments on evidence. I don't think it applies to all of them of course, there are some very strong committees in Westminster which are chair by independently minded back benches who are unafraid of upsetting their own governments and whips. I think though although the committee system in parliament and scrutiny at local level is a improvement at what has gone before I think improvements are needed. I had jury duty last year and spent a week mainly just sat about waiting to be called, I did get to sit on a case for the last two days which was a very interesting experience. Why can we not have citizen involvement in the democratic process in a similar vein? I would imagine it isn't beyond the wit of government both locally and nationally to arrange "scrutiny service." It would of course still need a professional chairman and deputy, this could be a civil servant and politician but this should only be to run the meetings and answer the questions of the lay members of the committee. They should be the ones doing the actual line by line scrutiny and making sure what has been proposed and that it stacks up. Currently what we have is committees at local level where the bulk of the members are from the party that holds power, in Westminster from what I have seen the committees appear to be a bit more independent but watching how partisan some members of the DCMS committee are I feel they cannot be trusted to be impartial. The system will of course bang on about the cost, considering how much departments like defense waste every year on very, very poor procurement I think it will more than pay for itself. If its good enough for law, its good enough for government.

Lies damn lies and statistics

Because of the sad death of a Councillor Roger Belson over Christmas, Oxfordshire County Council held a by-election for the vacant division of Watlington in the South of the county. The division was held by the Tory candidate Caroline Newton. Although the share of the total votes for the Conservatives was only down by about 4%, the actual drop in votes was very dramatic. There were 1720 votes for the party in 2009 but only 865 in this by-election. The turnout was very poor, only 24% of those eligible to vote compared with 54% in 2009. I don't know if this is a common trend for by-elections but the fact that most of the voters stayed away and the vast majority of them were Tory doesn't bode well for the party next year. The Greens didn't put up a candidate this time but UKIP did. UKIP got 110 votes, obviously this helped bring the numbers down for the Tories. What I decided to do with the data "just for fun" as Peter Snow would say is apply the percentage changes to the three main parties to the other divisions in Oxfordshire. Only having a small sample and the numerous other variables that can come into play means it is only a very rough estimate but if the trend for the Tory voters did hold out until 2013 and similar happened in their other safe divisions then the Tories could be in trouble next year.

Here is the divisions as of 2009:

And then the projected divisions for 2013:

On this extrapolation the Tories would a two seat majority over the other parties. Of course this is based only on tweaking the numbers for the three main parties. If Labour and the Lib Dems put in a strong performance in most of the seats  then it could get end up looking a lot worse. I personally think the Tories have more to fear from the UKIP candidates as they can split their vote in the places were they're not really safe like Kennington and the Abingdon East and North divisions. The boundaries are being redrawn soon so we end up with less county councillors, not sure if this is in time for next year but this could also have unforeseen consequences. 

I hope the Tory group are having a long, hard look at themselves before the next election. Reading the reports in the newspapers about my favourite "oik assessor" Keith Mitchell (thanks to @daddyofbob for that one!) taking decisions on his own, announcing them to the media and expecting the group to back him, have done I think massive damage to the parties standing. Having also witnessed the "scrutiny" process first hand thanks to the pointless, vote killing library cuts, this is something that I believe also needs sorting. They are supposed to be independent and non-political, I personally don't think they are and they just follow the party line.  I have been searching the committee papers and have yet to find a single instance where the actually didn't approve something put to them and forced cabinet to look at something again. If true it means ideas and evidence are not being tested and it can only lead to bad decisions and policies being waved through. We see plenty of evidence of this in the Oxford Mail.

The time has come for the Tories to start listening to voters and not take them for granted in their rural seats as they have done for the past ten decade. And some proper, evidence based policies with real consultation that engages the voters with proper independent scrutiny. If they don't they could end up watching a coalition of Labour and Lib Dems running the County Council until 2017. Democracy demands it.

P.S I normally put up a link to the data. I'm not this time because I had to painstakingly cut and paste the results from annoying web pages on the OCC site because the council has thus far not put up the data in a actual data format! If anyone wants the data though just ask nicely and I will send it.

P.P.S here is a link to the Oik Assessors site with more info on the new county councillor, who unlike a lot of politicians has actual experience in the real world

http://www.krmcbe.co.uk/political_blog.htm