Mark Freeman

Libraries and Heritage Services Manager

Borough of Stockton-on-Tees, UK

Stockton-on-Tees is a historic industrial community in the North East of England sitting astride the River Tees.  Formed of parts of County Durham and the North Riding of Yorkshire, the Borough has twelve libraries, a mobile, two prison libraries and a museum which make up its Libraries and Heritage Service.  The town and its surroundings have a long history with both Roman and Saxon sites.  It's probably known more widely as the terminus of the worlds oldest railway opened in 1825 by George Stephenson.

A day in the life of a Chief Librarian February 3rd 2012

The alarm goes off for me at 6.20am but I don't leave the house till about 7.40 - I need that first cup of tea of the day to ease me into another day.

I live about half an hours drive north of Stockton on the coast of County Durham, and my drive to work is always interesting as the views down from the crest of the hills where we live to the North Sea and the distant views of the North Yorkshire coast constantly change.  This morning its clear skies and a temperature of -3.5C - this results in a far ranging view of sea, lights, cliffs and tankers offshore waiting to enter the River Tees.

The main road to Stockton is always busy with workers heading for the industrial estates and sites of Peterlee and Teesside.  As I get closer to Stockton, the traffic increases and I slow down for the queue where three major roads merge.  We always creep forward past Billingham on the way into town and it's 8.30 when I arrive at the barriers the back of the Municipal Buildings where my office is and to which the Central Library for Stockton is attached.

Our main library has just been refurbished and we are proud of the result.  It reopened to the public on November 1st 2011 and since then we have had over 1500 new borrowers - it's become a place where people meet for a coffee, call in to use a computer, ask a question or borrow a book.  Thankfully, there are still a great many people who seem to want to do the latter.

My first task is to log my computer on in the morning and check what mail has arrived.  It's amazing how many people are still sending things between me leaving at 5 the night before and getting here for 8.30am!  Today there aren't many - it's a few things about the Society of Chief Librarians Seminar which I am helping to arrange in Warwick during May and some notes about a couple of reports I have written for the Heritage side of my job.  Our museum is currently closed as we are busy refurbishing it and completely restoring the house and grounds.  It is already beginning to look fantastic.

I head along the corridor to make a cup of coffee which I take back to my office.  I've only been in Stockton for four months having worked on Tyneside (forty miles north of here) for nearly ten years.  The view from my office is far nicer than one I had in South Shields and it's literally a few paces from the Central Library so it's particularly handy for the cafe on the first floor!

My day is usually spent between to two halves of my job - an early conversation with my Museums Development Manager about the new branding we are needing to agree with our Council for Preston Hall Museum.  We will need this to be able to market the new facility to local people both for tourism and visits and for weddings which is a growing income for us. 

Around 10am I am downstairs talking to the other members of my Senior Management Team who are based here with me and concentrate on the development and delivery of the library service.  There are six of them altogether but only four work in the same building, the others being based at the Museum a short drive away on the edge of town.  We have a short meeting during which we talk about the refurbishment project which will see our next biggest library revamped, hopefully during this year.  Our converstation covers all the challenges we face.  The building is leased to us and one of the conditions is that we remove all the asbestos in the building which is currently in place - although it's totally safe at the moment, we will need to deal with it before we can start the major changes we want to make to the library.  The building is an old supermarket on the High St in Norton and we want to change it from looking like a 1970s traditional branch library with straight lines of shelves to a colourful and more interesting space with RFID self service.  We have about £200,000 put aside for our project but we know that we need as much again, as well as a bit more for our ICT.  We are in the process of filling out the usual capital form to request the balance from the Council's capital pot.  So it will be fingers crossed that we can go ahead.

During the rest of the morning I answer emails from colleagues, mainly about targets and performance.  It's that time of year where we set out annual performance targets and develop our business plans.  We have been lucky - the new libraries we have opened have kept our visitor and book issue figures higher than in most places.  In Stockton we have had over 1000 new borrowers in the two months that the library has been open and although our issues figures for books have dropped slightly, they are not declining as much as the national trends would suggest.  We are also developing our E Books service now and a problem is highlighted to me which we need to try and sort out. 

At about 11.30, I ring one of my ex colleagues in South Shields to find out how they are dealing with the new E Books service that they are currently putting into place.  They are not as far along the road as us but they are using the same supplier so I am interested in knowing if they have been told the same story as us about not being able to separate out borrower types (such as children and adults).  I talk to my colleague for a short time but he is unsure of the way their system will be setup so he promises to send me more information later.

I spend some time putting more information into our Heritage Strategy before sending that off to my two colleagues at the Museum for some feedback.  We are charged with delivering the Council's Heritage Strategy which will mean collating all the actions we will be taking over the next few years to celebrate the history and heritage of the town. 

At about 12.30 I leave the building to go into town to get my lunch and to buy a birthday card for a friend.  The library is right in the town centre so it's just a short walk across the Parish Gardens by the church to the shops.  The town has suffered with the recession and many of the shops have moved to out of town locations and malls.  The High St is despite this a dramatic place.  It is the widest High St in the UK and the Town Hall is 18th century and an elegant building topped with a small white spire.

Back in my office I get an email from the Director of the UK Reading Agency who wants to have a chat about the Summer Reading Challenge which we all run in libraries during the school summer holidays.  The reductions in staffing and budgets in many of our library authorities have made this harder to keep running and she wants to talk to me about the possibities of putting in bids to our Arts Council to keep this going.  She rings me about 2pm and we chat for a while about the challenges we are all facing.  We discuss ways to help those services who do not have as many resources as they used to and are struggling. 

I spend some more time discussing the performance targets with my ICT and Performance manager - the target we gave to our Council performance team this morning has been queried and they want to clarify the way we have put it together.  This is because our main library has been shut for over six months whilst the refurbishment works have been taking place.  It's difficult to provide estimates for usage when this kind of work is going on and the impending project at our other library means we will have the same difficulty this year.

Friday afternoon in a Council office gets quieter and quieter as the time goes on.  Many people save up any time owing to them and leave slightly earlier on that day.  In the public library of course, they are there on duty to the end.  At about 4.40pm, I turn off my computer having been doing some work on our staffing structure to start to think how it might need to change as we continue working our way through a review of our services.  Unlike many places across the UK, we are not proposing wide scale closures of buildings although we probably will need to do in some cases.  If we do however, we are planning to replace them with staffed service points in community buildings.  We are not planning to hand libraries over to community groups in Stockton.

I leave the building at about 16.50 ready to drive the seventeen miles up the hill back home.  It's still extemely cold but, thank goodness, we have reached February when at least it's beginning to be light when you leave work.  I hate the Winter when you leave for work in the dark and come home in the dark......

Another day has gone by and added to the 36 years that I have been working in or around libraries.  I am passionate about the difference we make and although many voice the opinion the we are not long for this world.  We've been here before and changed and change we must to keep moving on.