Staying ahead of the curve with Northamptonshire Libraries
Northamptonshire’s LibraryPlus service has always embraced new technology, bringing innovation to its locations across the county and widening digital access for all.
So what are they working on at the moment and what does the future look like?
Jaisant Patel, Libraries Systems Co-ordinator, explains.
Tech for all
My ultimate vision is to be a forward-thinking library service when it comes to technology, make things more accessible for everyone and to make people more digital-savvy when it comes to accessing information and e-media online. Whether it’s supporting them with online learning, their wellbeing or for pleasure.
We know there's a need in Northamptonshire to provide options for people who can't get online for one reason or another. That really became evident during the pandemic.
Sharing innovation
We have been offering self-service kiosks access, where library borrowers can complete their library transactions and pay their charges, since 2008. This service was enhanced further in 2020 when we started to offer card payments as this was something our library borrowers had requested. We have been offering free wifi in our libraries since 2013 before many other library services across the UK had been offering access.
Since 2016 we have been offering public guest printing to our library users. This service enables them to print documents from their own devices and collect their printouts at a time that suits them from any of our libraries that offer public print facilities. This service has grown over the years and is a key income generator that enables us to continue to offer the “Plus” services of LibraryPlus.
We've always been ahead of the game and we want to stay ahead of the game. I'm not a big fan of playing catch-up. Of course, this is only possible when we form strategic business partnerships with companies that share similar goals to us.
Hublet power
One of the recent innovative technologies we have been promoting is our Hublets.
These are loanable tablets that enable both library borrowers and staff to access preselected apps, library e-resources and websites.
This helps us to further showcase the different services offered by the library service, our council and strategic business partners.
One of the key features of this service is that when you return the tablet to the docking station, all data entered and sites accessed by the previous borrower are wiped ready for the next borrower, avoiding any GDPR issues.
We are currently exploring other ways we can utilise the Hublets, whether it is for coding clubs or for people doing job interviews. Not everyone has access to the kind of setup you need for a virtual job interview, which is becoming more and more of a requirement, so you could do a mock job interview virtually in the library, or even do the real thing as the majority of our libraries also offer meeting spaces.
As the use of Hublets has been a bit of a gamechanger for us in libraries, I’m keen to share our experience with others. I’ve supported the Finnish company behind the Hublet solution in demonstrating Hublets to potential customers in Australia and New Zealand, showcasing how we're using them in Northamptonshire.
Upskilling staff in digital
During the pandemic, when we realised we were unable to offer physical events in libraries, we started doing more virtual events and creating our own digital content to replace physical events. This was key for us as we wanted to continue our library offer, but in digital format. We achieved this through investment in new digital hardware and upskilling the staff in order to get the most out of it. All the main libraries now have a Canon camera, a laptop and Adobe software so they can make their own content.
We're also supporting our community managed libraries. We sometimes struggle to get everyone trained up in so many different locations across the county. We are therefore going to use our cameras to make our own digital content and set up a learning platform so that all our community managed volunteers can access the training.
Bringing innovation to community libraries
We have close to 300 volunteers in our community managed libraries and that brings its own challenges when it comes to technology and getting people trained up. They've all adopted it really well and we want to continue to assist them when technology changes.
We’ve noticed once our volunteers feel confident in using the technology in libraries, they help library users to become more confident too, which is a win-win situation for all involved. We've always said whichever library you go to, you'll get the same level of service and that's something we're really keen to keep pushing. If we get technology into our libraries we want it accessible to everyone.
The future of borrowing
We're working with our current self-service kiosk provider on their next version of the kiosks.
Sustainability will be a big thing for libraries as we try to reduce our carbon footprint.
Can we produce a kiosk that has the same functionality but doesn't require the same level of hardware?
That is the desire, and we’ll be doing a live pilot at Northamptonshire Central Library to explore that further over the coming months.
We’re always looking at ways of increasing income that the library service generates to offset ongoing costs, or funding new digital projects.
Anything where we used to take cash, we're now looking at digital ways of achieving this.
We successfully implemented taking payments via our self-service kiosks and our online library catalogue web portal over the years but there are still a number of ways we want to explore further.
We're also working with our app supplier, where customers will be able to scan their library items on their own device to issue them.
When they return them, they have to be within a Bluetooth beacon area in the library which will recognise who they are and allow them to return their items without the need for staff to be involved.
The pandemic has helped with channel shifting library borrowers from using shared touchscreens to using their own devices, because people don't want to touch a screen someone else has touched. Pre-2020 we had 63 kiosks. We now have 46, because we knew the mobile self-serve solution was coming.
In our 2020 kiosk refresh we moved to a cashless system, which has been a big help for staff as it has reduced the time it takes them to manually cash up money from the kiosks. It is also a saving to the council budget on hardware costs that come with having a solution involving cash. But most importantly, it was a request our library borrowers had asked for as it is their preferred payment method.
What’s next
If we can get funding for VR headsets, we can bring different experiences to you in your local library. So that's my long-term aim - to do more interactive work with other strategic partners not just in Northamptonshire, but across the country and the world. The key things for us are the technology and the costs - I want to tap into potential partners out there and ask how they can help us to achieve our goals.
As a service we're particularly keen to work with partners developing cloud-based products that can help libraries become more digital.