International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

The Art of Controlling Demand

Claire Hudson

Theatre Museum, London

Winds of Change - New Technology

21st International Congress

Helsinki, 31 August - 6 September 1996

Although it's nice to be wanted, many of our UK SIBMAS members feel that they've had too much of a good thing, and are suffering from ever-increasing demands by users. The education sector was recognised as being the major source of increased demand, caused by a growing emphasis on student assessment by course work, projects and dissertations rather than by examination. This issue led us to organise last September's conference on the theme of controlling demand.

We were insistent that the conference should look exclusively at the Arts subject area because most of the work already done on information broking looked only at information for business and industry. However, although we were interested in the subject of charging for information services as a means of limiting demand and for income generation, this was only one of the rationing measures which were considered.

Speakers were drawn from a variety of arts organisations which had implemented new policies and practices in response to rising demand, and were in a position to provide interesting case studies. The British Film Institute, the BBC, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the University of London Library, the Laban Centre and the National Art Library presented a wealth of views and advice on this issue.

The full conference proceedings, giving a report of each speaker's presentation is available. This paper simply distills some of the most useful points and suggestions made in the course of the day, and picks up one or two developments which have arisen more recently.

Charging for information and for use of a library or collection is often introduced by organisations at the behest of the managing committee. Such committees often comprise leading individuals from the commercial world who see charging as a natural and obvious means of income generation, without necessarily grasping the difficulties of levying charges on such a nebulous commodity as information. However, in these cases the librarian or archivist has no choice but to carry out the committee's instructions, implement a system and make sure it works as well as possible.

In many ways, being compelled to introduce charges presents a simpler problem than its opposite scenario: The opposite situation to enforced charging is where a librarian or archivist sees the need to limit a service in order to prevent it from becoming unmanageable, or recognises an opportunity to generate much-needed income but is expressly forbidden to charge. Inevitably, this leads to piecemeal restrictive policies being introduced in an attempt to keep control over rising demand.

Resistance to the idea of charging is not based entirely on an altruistic desire to protect the public's right to free information. Many organisations are nervous about the possible repercussions of charging for information which might later prove to be misleading or inaccurate. They may also fear negative publicity from the media if it is suddenly expected to pay for a service it has hitherto enjoyed at no cost. A further obstacle can arise in complex organisations which contain several information units which may not all enjoy the same staffing levels or degree of organisation. The fear that different departments might provide differing standards of service and therefore varying degrees of value for money might act as a strong deterrent to the introduction of charging. For example, at the Theatre Museum in London, my request to introduce charging resulted in a working party which was formed to consider the issue of charging for information across the whole Victoria & Albert Museum, our parent organisation. The outcome was a decision not to charge but to work towards standardising all the museum's information services.

However, most of the conference's case studies looked at organisations for whom charging has become a way of life. The following points and pieces of advice emerged as a form of Ten Commandments for libraries, archives and museums planning to introduce charged services

1. Make a charging policy and stick to it. One library reported an earlier, doomed attempt at charging which had exempted so many of its users from paying that the end result was a very complicated system and negligible earnings.
2. Charging can actually benefit certain users by opening up access to a wider group of users. For example, the University of London's vast library collections can now be used by anyone, not just students, as long as they can pay the annual subscription of around 㱰0.
   
   Certain types of enquiry work can also be undertaken by libraries as long as their time is to be paid for, and this has the effect of broadening the range of services which can be offered.
3. Not all users require an expensive, high quality information service. For example, the London Transport Museum has introduced an information desk to the centre of the public galleries, even though it also has excellent library and archive collections. This facility can be used by visitors who have fairly casual enquiries or need only a single fact. A range of reference books and handouts is used by the staff, and only the more advanced, research level enquiries are referred on to the library. The information desk also handles letters and phone calls from schools and colleges, and although these will often be dealt with by sending out information, they may also result in a group visit to the Museum being arranged, thus generating more income. An even more cost-effective version of a first-line information service is the interactive terminal, supplying information and print-outs on demand. Once museum catalogues are fully automated and incorporate digitised images, a ready-made database will be available, making interactive gallery displays considerably easier and cheaper to produce.
4. The benefits of charging are not necessarily merely financial. One other obvious advantage is that charging helps to eradicate the more frivolous requests for information, cutting down on the workload, and most of the delegates applauded the deterrent effect which charging can have. Many of the speakers stressed that the introduction of charging could increase the library's credibility within an organisation if it was seen to be running a business operation efficiently. It was also more likely to get a sympathetic response to requests for increased resources or other improvements if it was shown to be contributing to income.
5. Introducing charges usually involves retraining for staff who may be violently opposed to the concept. It is certainly alien to many librarians to have to cost the help they give, but it is essential for charges to be applied consistently if the system is to appear fair to users.
6. Use a charging system which works well for you and your users. If it's practicable, a subscription may be far easier to administer than a charge per use. One library applied a combination of both, with an initial annual subscription entitling the member to a certain amount of assistance. When this allocation expires, a further sum can be paid to recredit the account.
   
   Many organisations for which a subscription system is not appropriate charge a flat fee for answering enquiries, often with a higher charge for business users. For example, the National Maritime Museum charges 㬵 to private enquirers and 㴵 to companies; this fee provides up to an hour of work, and the user agrees to the charge before any work commences.
7. Charging mechanisms which attempt to accurately quantify the work done require sophisticated management systems to make the administration as efficient as possible. The BBC had a software package specially created which allows detailed statements to be produced for clients. This Enquiry Logging System, ELSY, is to be marketed to other organisations.
8. If an information service is run as a business, it has to adopt business practices such as monitoring users' satisfaction and their changing needs. It has to know who its users are, and make sure they remain members by keeping in touch and updating them about new services.
9. There has to be investment in marketing a charged service, running user surveys, and providing regular mail-out to clients. There also has to be funding to pay for stall-up systems, management software, stationery, and so on, and to cover the initial period when no service can be profitable.
10. Someone has to keep an eye on the market. If the most profitable area of your service is undercut by a competitor or replaced by a new on-line database, it can completely undermine the viability of your organisation.

Not all the means of controlling and capitalising on demand suggested by the day's speakers were based on charging for services. Libraries were employing many mechanisms for both limiting demand and improving efficiency;

• Restricting access by age limit or a minimum educational qualification - a well-used ploy, but one which needs to be flexible in its application if really deserving students are not to be excluded unfairly.
• Introducing readers' tickets which allowed a maximum number of visits. For example, the National Art Library uses a five-visit pass for most students, which encourages users to visit the NAL only when they have exhausted their own university library, rather than using it habitually.
• Cutting opening hours or the times at which a service is offered; one very over-subscribed public reference library uses a sophisticated phone system which, after noon each day, answers only calls coming from within its own local authority area.
• Limit the time spent on each enquiry; if this is not already a policy in all libraries, it probably needs to be.
• Designating certain types of enquiry which are not answered. For example, many UK libraries now decline to undertake family history enquiries. Genealogy is an increasingly popular pastime and we receive many letters from enquirers who have discovered a theatrical forebear. Our view is that the research is usually very narrowly focussed and tends not to add anything to our knowledge of the past. We therefore decline to carry out work on these enquiries and instead send out an information sheet about doing family history research in our subject field.
• Prioritising - at least one library reported that, once its reading room is full each day, it gave priority to those users whose activities increase the total resources available (e.g. researchers, historians, writers) or those who will pass on their research to others in the classroom (teachers, academics).
• Publishing, in various forms, is an activity which can significantly improve efficiency. The simplest form is the use of pre-prepared standard replies, information sheets and bibliographies. The British Film Institute goes a stage further by publishing many reference books which researchers can either buy or consult in their local reference libraries, thus reducing the need to contact the Institute direct. It will also soon be launching its databases on the Internet.
• Cooperation between libraries allows them to share responsibility for a subject area and prevent duplication of effort. it also allows them to know when to refer on an enquiry to an alternative organisation which is better qualified to handle it.

The panel discussion which ended the day included a user - a representative from the education sector which is the source of many of our over-use problems. It was very interesting to hear what steps the universities are already taking to alleviate the problems of expanding student numbers and shrinking resources. Much of the emphasis will be on using the Internet and electronic document delivery to improve access to teaching materials for their students. And this approach has not simply been forced on universities through lack of traditional materials - the rapidly changing syllabuses and broad scope of project work means that it is often not worth buying hard copies of books, or continuous runs of journals, when they may be required only for very specific needs which are unlikely to recur.

Many of us here at this conference represent very rich collections, often of unique material which is of enormous value to researchers. In the past some of us may have feared the consequences of promoting and publicising our research collections to the extent that they deserve. There is no doubt that the electronic storage and dissemination of museum and library data offers us enormous potential to open up access to our collections without dreading the consequences of trying to meet unmanageable demand.

21st Congress

URL: http://www.sibmas.org/congresses/sibmas96/hels10.html