Though each authority is different, every service is likely to have a range of libraries reflecting the size of its population, each with local studies materials covering their local area. The authority is likely to have small libraries which would primarily hold publications, a county service will have larger divisional libraries which will collect material in their section of the county and would include maps, photographs and newspapers, and there will normally be a central collection, often now housed with the county archive. These different tiers often mean that there is some duplication, whilst rarer material could be held in one of a number of places.
The role of co-ordinating local studies in a county library service has been traditionally carried out by a County Local Studies Librarian sitting at Library HQ, however the role is now also being undertaken by staff in County archives, shared between several officers or as part of a wider role.
Whoever co-ordinates local studies activities, there are core duties and responsibilities that need to be undertaken:
Leadership, planning and creating a vision
Co-ordinators should have a vision of where their local studies service should go in the longer term. Consideration should be given to the council and library/archive service’s objectives together with specific objectives relating to improving your collections. It will take time for those new to a co-ordinator’s post to evaluate the current situation, in terms of collection strengths and weaknesses, and the extent of resources and opportunities available.
It is important to keep up-to-date with the changes in technology and new innovations. New innovations may be able to work for your collection but also consider the robustness and longevity of emerging technologies and concepts to ensure you don’t waste resources unnecessarily.
Once a way forward has been found, the vision can be sold to those above, broken into sections for the annual library/archive plan and into short-term targets and individual tasks.
More information on this topic can be found in the planning and priorities sections of the toolkit:
Leading projects
Often the most effective way to meet organisational priorities is to create a project that attracts external funding. Through project work you can engage specific target groups within the community and employ a project officer. Outcomes of the project, whether they are oral histories, displays, booklets, films or photographs can be added to collections and members of the community invited to view the resources and continue to deposit material after the project has ended. See the Creating & running large projects section of the toolkit for more information.
Consistency
Whilst acknowledging that divisional and central local studies centres will have larger collections and may have library professionals to undertake local studies work, it is important to ensure that, as much as possible, local studies work and collections are consistent across the county as:
- customers should get the same level of service wherever they go
- it enables library staff, who increasingly tend to work at several library locations and who are less likely to build-up stock knowledge, to reuse their local studies skills
- it ensures that best practice is consistently applied.
However, the person co-ordinating local studies should be pragmatic. Since many local studies collections were not under county council control until 1974, there may be several different ways of organising material and, whilst several collections may be extremely well arranged, others may be poorly catalogued and indexed and have no finding aids at all. As it is a challenge to effectively use a badly arranged and listed collection, it should be a longer-term priority to improve the finding-aids and listings in weaker collections, however the days of reclassifying all book stock are over. In authorities where even getting local staff to create indexes is impossible, you can be creative when putting together project bids, after all a photographic digitisation project, perhaps using volunteers, must also be accompanied by cataloguing and indexing material.
As well as having less-developed local studies collections, weaknesses and inconsistencies can be more widespread. For example, it is becoming increasingly apparent that many collections do not adequately reflect the community they serve. LGBTQ, BAME and traveller communities are under-represented in many collections. Details of any such stock gaps and how to fill them should be incorporated into your collection development policy.
Though you should be pragmatic in tackling past problems, it is important to be consistent with new projects going forward, for example, you should have a consistent approach to outreach activities, such as those that build links with underrepresented communities and image projects [link to image section of the toolkit] should use the same rules to ensure that the material created can be easily re-used in future.
Staff training
Local studies users in branch libraries are often assisted by non-specialists so it is important to increase local studies knowledge at a local level, especially where specialist local studies posts have been lost through budget cuts, retirements or in areas of high staff turnover. Opportunities for physical countywide meetings are increasingly rare, so local studies librarians need to be innovative in how they deliver training. Training notes, quizzes, short induction films that can be viewed when staff have time off the library floor or at quieter times when on enquiry duty are all useful tools. E-learning using interactive PowerPoint presentations also work well and are relatively simple to produce.
Though innovative solutions are valuable, “What is where” tours of local collections will have the biggest impact and an induction tour of the central archive and local studies collection(s) will emphasise the key message for any staff training – making staff confident to refer customers onto specialist staff in local studies hubs at the appropriate time.
Centralised duties
Some areas of local studies work are more efficient if undertaken centrally for example:
- Preserving access to local newspapers through microfilming and/or digitisation – see newspaper section of the toolkit.
- Stock work – Purchasing material published in small print runs, self-published books or discovering unpublished written research is another key aspect of the role. A key is raising awareness of this amongst non-specialist staff across the county as it is they who are often better placed to identify publications produced by authors and organisations in the towns and villages across the service. The co-ordinator should also dedicate time to building contacts with local authors and members of the public who ask for help with their research – see users section of the toolkit, together with the sections concerning the collections policy and book stock.
- Conservation – this is another area of responsibility which requires specialist knowledge. See the conservation section of the toolkit.
- Policy work such as Emergency planning.
Marketing
Promotion of the collections is increasingly important, so having good working relationships with the media/communications teams working for your library authority and at the town/county hall are essential. During the pandemic many libraries raised the profile of their collections considerably by being active on social media sites and producing special online exhibitions and talks. Demand for such activities continue post pandemic and this may be a challenge in some libraries as normal services resume.
It is critical that you build links with the local community, local and family historians and other professionals around the country so that you can identify potential partners for project working, enquiries can be referred on, expertise or good practice shared or sought and links made to ensure the highest level of service locally can be provided.
Raising the profile of the collections internally within your service’s parent organisation is essential. This is partly to increase the perceived value of the collections and the service to the community when major budget decisions are made, but also to encourage colleagues to see that you are successfully addressing the authority’s priorities, the collections are a source of information for their own work and as a potential partner for future projects . As such, evaluating the impact of your work and of your collection is also important so that you have the ability to prove to stakeholders that your service matters.
For further details, see the following sections of the toolkit
- Virtual events
- Exhibitions
- Social media
- Evaluation
- Who uses a local studies collection
- Supporting community projects
Management responsibilities
The local studies co-ordinator may also be a member of an archive and local studies management team and groups of other senior librarians. In such forums you should champion local studies and take up opportunities to demonstrate how local studies ‘makes a difference’.
As a manager, you may line manage local studies librarians and other library staff.
The key?
Helping customers to find answers to the questions they have by making sure that material is available, accessible, knowing where the answer may be located, letting people know about the services available to them and working with others and your collection to forward the aims of your parent organisation are the ultimate aims of any librarian, and no more so than the officer charged with co-ordinating local studies.
Got something to add?
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CILIP Local Studies Group 