STRAIT to the future

8th Asia-Pacific Specials, Health and Law Librarians Conference

Economic rationalisation and its effect on government services

Sue Rigney
Department of Justice and Attorney General (Queensland)

Keywords: Resourcing trends; electronic delivery; funding; government libraries

Abstract

This paper analyses trends in public sector library resourcing over the past decade and attempts to presage what can be expected and how law librarians should best place themselves as we venture into the 21st century. A major focus will be structural and service delivery issues, the extent to which government libraries have been affected by organisational re-engineering and the prevailing economic or policy drivers governing government library resourcing. The paper considers the impact on library service delivery of "downsizing", "commercialisation" and the emergence of consortia. The importance of Library Managers' political skills are also considered in the context of securing solid resourcing and status to ensure libraries maintrain their place within the business of government.

Public sector librarians are realists. They know that if they are to survive they must look beyond the fallout of economic rationalisation straight to the future.

The key to that future is client service. Public sector librarians, their manager colleagues and clients within each organisation have weathered changes of government. They have adapted to all manner of management fads and changes in policy. Weighed down with the burden of learning and conquering the latest requirements it has taken some doing, nevertheless they have prevailed with dignity, ingenuity and a good dollop of inter-personal skills. Public sector people have a shared experience and know each other well.

What public sector librarians must now do is strive to capitalise on these all-important client service and inter-personal skills, one might say political skills, to integrate the library and information service with the organisation's core business. No-one knows as many people in the Office as well as you do. Librarians know their foibles and their interests.

An intimate knowledge of library users' information seeking habits puts public sector librarians in the box seat in working with library users to identify key content for inclusion on the corporate intranet. A recent example was New South Wales Parliamentary Library's inclusion on their corporate intranet of redrawn electoral maps linked to associated census data, just prior to the state election. The idea gleaned by the Library's Systems Librarian from one of the reference librarians was lauded as one of the most useful applications of technology offered by the library.

To survive, synergy between the goals as perceived by library staff and those perceived by the management of the organisation in which the library sits is essential. There may be a conflict in these goals. For example the library's primary goal may be the efficient provision of information by a skilled staff to create value for clients whereas management may prefer users to be more independent and want library staff to concentrate on their technical service skills.

However, being a player in the identification and capture of material for inclusion in the corporate intranet gives librarians an opportunity to advocate on behalf of our clients the structure, look and feel of the intranet - but also to adapt our cataloguing skills to the new world of metadata. Indexing will come to the fore as intranets grow and there is a need to provide abstracts and navigation aids to direct information seekers in their research. We will be responsible for arguing for, developing and maintaining underlying thesauri.

We will need to think out of the box. Working in focus groups, in workshops and with questionnaires, public sector librarians must determine what information library users want and need "in their face" and what is secondary.

As librarians our strength is our commitment to matching information to information needs so we are more likely to stay the distance in providing cohesion, continuity and functionality in intranet development. IT professionals are more likely to sooner or later get bored and move on to the next project.

In the meantime librarians must assert what they know to be true - that not everything can be "pointed to" - that it is important to put in place a quality set of well subject-indexed internet links, preferably with editorial comment on what makes a site useful.

"Silos" is the going vernacular for the staunchly independent units under each Department's roof. Librarians know where the overlap in knowledge and experience is to be found and can institute useful discussion groups and information sharing which is the underpinnings of "knowledge management" within an organisation.

To survive public sector librarians must perform the impossible - maintaining and developing parallel hardcopy and electronic libraries with the attendant labour and materials costs.

We can also expect to prove the contestability in a competitive environment of the level of resourcing for the services we offer.

Workload statistics are a vital part of the armoury. Administrators want to be assured that information services provided are valued and well used. The corporate client survey may be an over-worked tool but should not be ignored.

The results of well-designed internal surveys, which elicit the goals of library users as opposed to those of library staff, will assist in bridging the gap. What is the customer's perception of the standard of service offered by the Library? Is the standard of service what is actually expected and is it what they want?

Economic rationalisation essentially contradicts an inherent role of government which includes equity and access issues. It is sound "business" practice to centralise and rationalise services but the provision of information does not fall neatly within the numbers game. To some administrators if something cannot be quantified it does not exist.

To survive, libraries need to be dynamic, focal points of communities, first ports of call, not just assume they are, because frequently in reality the first port of call clients use to seek information is their informal network. Clients don't always think of the Library first.

In reality and to the casual observer, more than ever, public sector libraries that survive must have a service mentality.

The key to survival will be the strategies we use to retain our customer base and attract new customers.

The service libraries offer will still be reference and information-centred, reinforced by technical services, but there will be fewer hard copy books to acquire, shelve and manage. All staff will be highly computer literate, able to provide seamless support to end-users undertaking increasingly electronic research. In-house training to keep staff abreast of developments will be paramount.

Systems librarians will come into their own. They will work closely with technical and reference services staff to capture and develop information products tailored to user requirements.

Coming to the Library will not disappear for those wanting to talk over their research problem or to do some retrospective research or seek an inter-library loan. It could take on a different meaning if the brave new world of cheap interactive video conferencing that Ann Lipow described in her Online'99 paper eventuates. In that scenario public sector libraries may even co-operate to use this technology to provide extended hours or round-the-clock services.

Certainly I predict the roles and responsibilities of surviving public sector libraries will change dramatically in the next decade.

Looking Back

Economic rationalisation has been a part of all government policy for the past decade.

Queensland's Situation

No department or statutory authority has been untouched. In Queensland we have seen the simultaneous closure of two departmental libraries and the collections subsumed within one larger one. While this larger library is well placed in government there was nervousness about expanding expensive floor space too far and care was taken in what material was actually retained. Big may be beautiful but it can also be vulnerable.

Queensland's Department of Primary Industries' library had the opposite problem. Parts of their collection and staff, accumulated from a previous amalgamation, was segregated and hived off with the latest government restructuring. This had a devastating impact on the bottom line and forced the Librarian to call upon all her political skills and ingenuity to find immediate revenue-raising options to breach the gap.

In the Department of Justice one of the more off-beat ways the Library raised revenue following 10% downsizing in June 1995 was a joint venture with the Department's Human Rights and Administrative Law Division whereby the Library undertook the marketing, collation and despatch of Freedom of Information Manuals, written by the Division. The Library and Division shared the costs and revenue.

Some libraries such as the revamped Queensland Department of Natural Resources Library have been rejuvenated, given the funding for a state of the art web-enabled integrated library management package and have not looked back.

Libraries such as the Legal Aid Office and Queensland's Police Academy, have both taken the plunge towards "virtual libraries" abandoning hardcopy in favour of the electronic format wherever possible to get best value and widest reach for every dollar spent.

Other libraries within the sector have just taken what comes and lived within their receding budgets. Inevitably this has meant cutting back services. To my mind this is the path for living "most dangerously" because if services are pared back too far or the library finds itself distanced in any way from its customers it potentially cuts itself too thin without anything to "sell" and becomes an easy target. A contrary view is that governments change and there will always be Attorneys-General or Ministers wanting recourse to a library. Recent history does not bear this out.

In the Commonwealth the trend has been towards smaller libraries. Recent cutbacks in the Air Services Australia Library are an example. There has been some outsourcing of services library to library as with the Australian Defence Force Academy's assumption of the resourcing of the information needs of the Maritime Safety Authority.

Law libraries within the public sector nationally have felt the pinch. Funding has effectively receded since a relative high point in 1992/93.

Governments' levying of productivity dividends of between 1-2% in recent years on static budgetary allocations has been a significant factor.

Budgets have not included an ongoing escalation factor for publishers' continued price increases notwithstanding a low inflation rate.

Economic rationalisation has had the affect of forcing public sector libraries to streamline processes, cut costs, make hard decisions and work smarter.

Net lenders have closed off gratis inter-library loans to all but their primary reciprocal-borrowing partners.

To keep pace and accommodate the cost of moving to electronic delivery, libraries of necessity have had to find means including cutting back on binding, on-charging online searches, canceling subscriptions or reducing textbook purchases.

Collection development of necessity must be based on the just in time principle and law librarians are more discriminating in what is purchased, catalogued and stored. The cost of hardcopy makes purchase of the electronic format attractive despite the fact the electronic version is not authorised. An example is the Dominion Law Reports where the CDROM-online update looks decidedly cost-effective. Another reason for this decision may be the need to free up expensive floor space.

However, government law libraries generally report limited take-up of Butterworths' Online, to Unreported Judgments, and perhaps Casebase and one or two other products.

CDROM is the preferred format, not least because it has a lesser loss rate than scarce textbooks. Even then CDROMS networked to lawyers' desktops is by no means universal, with standalone installation often the choice for security and other reasons.

There is considerable resistance to switching to electronic delivery. Lawyers do not research by looking at one page at a time but by surrounding themselves with many books at once to grasp the legal problem in context.

Nevertheless in some cases loss of administrative assistance has hastened the demise of duplicate and remaining loose-leaf services no longer able to be filed promptly.

These factors have lead to a downgrading of the level of services able to be offered. Purchasing of multiple copies has become restricted. Purchase of new products is equally difficult.

Against this backdrop, public sector libraries frequently report a reduction in reference statistics with most correlated with a concomitant drop in loans.

Systems librarians on staff are common and there is agreement on the need for restructuring to better incorporate staff with a law, IT or public administration background to better respond to clients' needs.

Organisational and government re-engineering has exacerbated these factors for some libraries. Government financial management strategies, which have impacted on libraries, have included enterprise bargaining, Quality Assurance, "commercialisation", client service standards and accrual accounting.

In terms of governance most government law librarians report to an IT/IM or Corporate Services head or sometimes both, depending on the issue at hand. Autonomy is precious so where Library Committees exist they are ad hoc and in an advisory capacity.

Other State Developments

Here in Tasmania several law libraries have sought a joint solution as part of the State's overall debt recovery strategy. These libraries have not felt singled out. They accept that long overdue award restructuring within the public service from which they benefited could not be accommodated within Tasmania's already weakened economy and have had to look for different ways to fund it and their ongoing operations.

Over the past two years through the Tasmania Law Libraries Co-operation project, the Department of Justice, Tasmanian Law Society and Supreme Court Libraries have been working towards the development of an options paper which was submitted to an Executive Management Group of stakeholders as well as the Attorney-General earlier this year for decision by 30 June 1999.

Pending the parties' ability to agree, the thrust of the submission is a strategy which identifies the information services necessary to support the combined needs of about 200 practitioners within these three organisations over the next 5-10 years.

The submission makes provision for an independent Project Manager and Steering Committee. Key issues include: which of the three is to be the lead agency; and what are to be the funding, resourcing and reporting arrangements.

In particular, the submission recommends the rationalisation of existing resources to make savings to enable the take-up of electronic resources. "User pays" for private practitioners' is also canvassed.

Assuming this Tasmanian co-operative approach is successful it is one we in Queensland will probably aim to emulate over the next three years out of a need arising from the Justice Portfolio Libraries Review undertaken in 1998.

Without sacrificing the autonomy and unique services offered by each of the libraries, the Department of Justice, Legal Aid Office and Supreme Court Libraries can benefit by pooling resources and consolidating electronic delivery of legal research materials to urban and regional library users through a single intranet. This would mean better licensing arrangements and greater dissemination of a wider bank of information than would otherwise be feasible.

Following a review all Northern Territory Departmental special libraries staff, from November 1998, including the Attorney-General's Department Library staff have been outsourced to agencies by the newly created Department of Corporate and Information Services administered by the Director, Northern Territory Libraries.

Library operational budgets are still retained and managed by agencies but there is the risk of client services being compromised by a further push to centralise serials and monograph purchasing.

With the backing of a strong Library Advisory Committee the collection has been largely kept intact. As in Tasmania some astute distribution of expensive but important overseas materials between the Department, the Supreme Court and Northern Territory University law libraries in the years prior to this development has ensured its continued availability to all.

This move coincided with a rationalisation of government legal services in the Northern Territory. All but a skeleton litigation and commercial practice, the policy and legislation and Aboriginal land units have been retained in-house, the remainder being managed externally.

Federal Developments

Unfortunately the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Lionel Murphy Library collection and services have been broken up and rationalised in line with government policy.

In February 1992, the Australian Attorney-General's Department was reorganised essentially so far as the library was concerned into two arms - one focussed on legal advice to Cabinet, policy advice, public international law services and the drafting of subordinate legislation, retained and funded from the Federal budget.

The other arm, the Attorney-General's Legal Practice was "commercialised", charging other government Departments for the legal services it provides to them under a user pays system from 1 July, 1992 which became untied three years later.

The then Secretary of the (Commonwealth) Attorney-General's Department, Alan Rose, in stating the Practice's vision said:

"We aim to be the pre-eminent provider of legal services and legal policy advice in the Australian public sector. The term 'pre-eminent' contains two notions: that of being the legal supplier of first choice, and that of being as good or as better than the best in our field and being recognised as such.

The move to user pays is not unique. It is part of a deliberate policy shift throughout Australia. Public institutions are being required to find and implement new and better ways to meet the needs of Government and the community generally."

...we must justify our existence by demonstrating that we can provide in the most productive way the quality legal service and services required by our clients".

Opinion differs between those that think the raising of revenue to breach the monetary gap to achieve their objectives is anathema and those that have embraced it as a necessary evil.

Four years ago the Lionel Murphy library had 27 EFT staff. In its role as the Library supporting the Department's primary policy and legislation role, it now has 10. It has had a 40% real reduction in budget. Whereas once it had all three publishers' looseleaf services it now may have one. It has to be very selective in its acquisitions policy, establishing arrangements with other libraries to undertake certain online services when it cannot justify the service fee.

Major users of the library are now being asked to pay for value-added legal research - especially when this involves researching policy initiatives requiring LEXIS searches.

Under a memorandum of understanding which has been worked out over the past 18 months, the Lionel Murphy Library provides a range of services to the separately located commercial arm's library including leasing of part of its collection, borrowing rights and journal circulation.

In New South Wales, Victoria and in Queensland it is early days so far as "commercialisation."

The New South Wales Attorney General's Library has a paid Service Level Agreement in place it for the staffing and centralised technical services provided for the hived off Crown Solicitor's Office.

The Victorian Attorney-General's Library has sought reimbursement for resourcing library services for smaller units joining the Department with changes in government.

The Western Australian Department of Justice's Library signed its first Service Level Agreement for the provision of a lower courts' library service in September, 1995.

In Queensland we have also taken the view that statutory bodies established as a result of changing government policy, that is, non-core units of the Department of Justice and Attorney-General, which receive a contingency for research as part of their set-up infrastructure funding, should pay to use the Departmental Library if they so wish.

In 1995/96 the Queensland Department of Justice and Attorney-General Library prevailed despite losing one position and $30 000 from the bottom line which equated to a 12% cut - over and above the Borbidge Government's decision to downsize corporate services by 10%.

A major recovery strategy included the institution of paid Service Level Agreements with major clients, Crown Law and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions who fund two full-time and three part-time staff.

Ostensibly these agreements coincided with planning for Crown Law's initiation into a "commercialised" environment. Along with other corporate services the Library's base budget encompassing salaries, floor space rental and associated accommodation and operational costs was amortised proportionately across the three services the Library offers, namely collection development and maintenance, reference and research and specialist dissemination services.

This has enabled the Library to conduct regular legal research training programmes, as well as provide a CBD courier service, opinions capture and indexing service, issue a weekly serviced current awareness bulletin and provide the services of a Legislation Officer to, among other tasks, manage a 48-hour loan service of in-demand legislative reprints.

Three years ago we switched to consolidated annual billing for subscriptions persuading the keepers of various divisional purses to pool their resources with us to enable us to negotiate corporate discounts. This was a first step towards our eventually negotiating an enterprise agreement acceptable to publishers and internal stakeholders alike for the comprehensive supply of hardcopy and electronic resources.

It is curious to find oneself within the public sector in such precarious financial straits when on Tuesday 11 May, 1999 the Federal Treasurer (Peter Costello) announced the first federal budget surplus in 15 years.

Public sector reform has largely contributed to this result and this is not to say that much of that reform was not warranted. There is a greater sense of urgency and business-like focus now within the service than there was even five years ago.

Accrual accounting across the country has had the effect of making management and especially Legal Services more conscious of the cost of the library - especially with rent included on monthly financial statements.

Accrual accounting focuses on commitments and liabilities, including the depreciation of assets, rather than on expenditure. The aim is to identify the full cost of agency programmes by achieving better cost control. Consequential to this development has been the need to re-visit library valuations and seek to elicit transaction costs for the services we provide.

Budgets are no longer expenditure based but are directed to funding outputs to achieve specified outcomes. Librarians have to cost their activities as part of the move to accrual accounting. If our service is on track this can be used as an opportunity.

Looking Forward

The public service was branded with clinging to the staid, the outmoded, the traditional time honoured practices with reticence to embrace new technologies and innovations.

No more. The landscape will continue to change dramatically over the next five years and employment migration between the sectors will belie the myth.

Writing in Online Currents earlier this year Sally Davis stated:

"responding to user needs is a major challenge. The end users of today are very different from those of five years ago in their demands for ease of access, speed and service.

What is required is a "one stop shop" - reflecting consortia, alliances between libraries and publishers, to optimise reference services, access, availability and pricing.

To survive libraries need to look at new service paradigms - increasingly spending time managing the tools and means of access to information and less time on collection development"[1]

For public sector librarians who successfully lead their operations through the next 5 to 10 years will be managers extraordinaire.

They will prevail despite depleted funding notwithstanding any positive impact of the GST on government coffers. Librarians who succeed will be tenacious, politically astute and possess excellent advocacy and networking skills.

To consultant, Meg Paul, the importance of understanding the political environment within your organisation cannot be under-estimated. This knowledge is essential if you are going to use your influence and power to benefit yourself and the library. More importantly, you will be ensuring that with a good library the organisation will benefit".[2]

As Barry McIntyre stated back in 1992:

"In reality what underlies any funding model is the politics of resource allocation.

Exhorting librarians to vigorously defend library-resourcing claims he argued for the instigation of a strong tradition of clear reporting trends in library statistics manifested in intelligible funding models to advise administrators of what is happening in libraries.

Are libraries being funded less in real dollar terms? Can our libraries still purchase sufficient new information in the light of demands upon them? Can our libraries maintain services to agreed standards? What shortfalls have to be corrected in allocated resources?"[3]

If in dire straits financially successful library managers will probably have taken Meg Paul's strident advice and opted for charging a set levy over piecemeal "user pays" having argued an organisation cannot thrive and grow without timely information on which to base wise business decisions.[4]

Public sector library managers will therefore have developed their human capital.

Marina Whitman in her article, "The upside of downsizing" argues that people's jobs cannot be cut without a real plan for restructuring the business.

"The Internet is part of the trend where increasingly the winner takes all...The so-called skill premium has significantly increased...there is less security but more autonomy and more opportunity to help define your own job. Workers are encouraged to develop broader skills and supervisors to coach and facilitate more than be the boss."[5]

To this end today's paraprofessional will be upskilled in research techniques and will be far more engaged in bolstering the Library's reference and research service than undertaking technical services tasks.

This will be symptomatic of a stable and committed client-focused team, which has embraced continual change and whose jobs are so, restructured as to be unrecognisable from today's operations. This will eventuate from increased participation in consortia and flexing of marketshare by public sector library managers through protracted negotiation of enterprise agreements with publishers which, for example, will eliminate costly accessioning and accounts administration in favour of concessional fixed annual fees providing simplified wider access to a greater range of information.

Electronic ordering will be commonplace. Cataloguers will have honed their indexing skills and will be in much demand for their triple expertise in traditional cataloguing, metadata and indexing cum abstracting in organising the electronic chaos.

Cataloguers may even be involved in data mining techniques working co-operatively with Systems Librarians to classify or cluster documents which can then be viewed in context to visually extract and display the strengths and weaknesses of collections.

That is, library staff will be encouraged to add new technological skills to the arsenal. "Content expertise alone will be increasingly less useful without the "deeper" technological proficiencies needed to provide effective access to information and help users work with it in a variety of formats".[6]

As Richard Danner has observed:

"as we near the start of a new century, in which content and access are less easily distinguished and when successful information seeking will require increasingly sophisticated technologies, librarians need to think hard about re-entering the tool-building arena. Human judgment will come to the fore.

"If librarians truly are experts in the human elements of information-seeking process, as well as the content of information, we need to become more involved in tool building in order to be sure that content is accessible in ways that are meaningful to users."[7]

Public sector librarians who succeed will have acknowledged influence on the knowledge management process.

Mark Veynet from Westpac at the Online conference earlier this year defined information as "white slime" - useless in itself. Value and knowledge come from the evaluation, assessment, analysis and distribution of information.

"Companies that isolate knowledge management risk losing its benefits, which are highest when it is coordinated with HR, IT and competitive strategy. When CEOs actively choose a knowledge management approach - one that supports a clear competitive strategy - both the company and its customers benefit".[8]

It is time to reinvent information services, reorient priorities and the way librarians market their services.

Increased technological expertise cannot be at the expense of abandoning the roots of the profession which is service-oriented, client-centred, meeting client's needs as the client sees them.

A keen service orientation predicated on the need for the library team to continually invigorate and challenge itself to continually improve will be the key to success.

Danner warns "If librarians think of themselves as managers (or see management as a career goal) more than they think of themselves as librarians, they risk becoming increasingly more distanced from the knowledge base of their profession just as that knowledge base needs to be reconsidered and expanded. As a result they will be well be less able to provide the context that will be needed by information seekers.

"Developments in information technology will continue to impact librarians' relationships with clients and others in the workplace, regardless of whether the profession attempts to control and manage those changes, or merely responds to them."[9]

I will let Mairead Brown have the last word. In her article, "Threat or promise? The information society and the information profession" written earlier this year, she states:

"...Mediation is no longer a unique function since the loss of the library's monopoly in information provision.... if we bury our heads and pretend that our monopoly on information practice is extant, then it is without doubt a threat of monumental proportions. But if we seize the opportunities in information which have opened in ways never before experienced in history we, cannot but go from strength to strength."[10]

Footnotes:

1 Dallas, Sally (Online currents v.14 no.1 Jan/Feb 1999) p.2 in her overview of Online and On Disc 99
2 Paul, Meg "On the necessity of being political' The One-Person Library 15(9) pp3-4;
3 McIntyre, Barry "The paradoxes of our timidity: library funding models and advocacy for libraries" ALR 9,2 (1992);
4 Paul, Meg "Robbing Peter to pay Paul" New Librarian, May 1994 pp.7-8;
5 Whitman, Marina "The upside of downsizing" CIO Enterprise February 15, 1999 p.58-63;
6 Danner, Richard A "Redefining a profession" Law Library Journal v.90 (3) Summer 1998 pp.315-356 @ 350; See also Campbell, Jerry D "Choosing to have a future" 24 Am Libr 560 (1993) p.562 - who observed: "Increasingly, librarians need deep technical proficiency. Without it, we are a step removed from being able to conceptualise, design and re-engineer the information and knowledge delivery systems of the near future";
7 Danner ibid
8 Hansen, Morten T "What's your strategy for managing knowledge?" Harvard Business Review March-April, 1999 p.106 at p.116;
9 Danner
10 Brown, Mairead "Threat or promise? The information society and the information profession" Australian Library Journal 48(1) February 1999 p.26,31

Biographical

Sue's 24 year librarianship career has spanned the local, private and public (state and commonwealth) sectors. In her 16 years' law librarianship since first embarking on her chosen speciality in 1983 as Library Manager of the NT's Department of Law, Sue has seen considerable change. A five year stint at Feez Ruthning (Now Allen, Allen and Hemsley) 1986-1991 highlighed the commercial realities of business in the '90s. This knowelege has served her well in managing the Queensland Department of Justice and Attorney-General's Library over the past seven years against a backdrop including downsizing, a portfolio libraries review and Crown Law's increasing "commercialisation". Sue is currently the Book Reviews column co-ordinator for the Australian Law Librarian.