As outlined in this blog from GDS, when any elections take place in England, the civil service communicates less - in line with Election Guidance.
As the general election is now scheduled to take place on 8 June, you won't be hearing as much from us from today. That doesn't mean we're not doing anything. Our work will continue through the pre-election period. We just won't be talking about it as much in the run-up to the election.
During that time, we’ll also be unable to publish some of the material Taskforce members are working on. These are all listed in our action plan, and include:
- Taskforce / DCMS research into community-managed libraries being undertaken by Serio (Action 11)
- Progress Indicators, to measure how we are doing against each of the Outcome aspirations we set out in our Ambition document (Action 3)
- Toolkit on strategic planning of library services (Action 10)
- Self-assessment benchmarking tool for library services (Action 13)
- Taskforce’s latest 6 month progress report covering October 2016 - March 2017 (Action 23)
These will now appear after the general election.
Open surveys
We have a couple of open consultations underway at the moment. The first is our work to map available and planned research, as described in this blog post. The blog describes the survey about our future research programme (which is open until the 2 May), forms we created to gather information, and how you can share your views. The second piece of work is around the creation of a core dataset. We have created a survey to validate the work done so far - this remains open for input until 28 April, so there is still time to share your views on that too.
Finally, just a reminder that we’re running 2 Masterclasses on income generation and alternative funding for libraries. They’ll be held in London on 4 May and Nottingham on 12 May. Both events will run from 10:00 to 16:00 (registration will open at 09:30) and lunch / refreshments will be provided. We’ll be considering topics such as commissioning, entrepreneurship and alternative forms of funding. Our speakers will include Jessica Harris (Cultural Commissioning Programme Manager, NCVO), Sue Williamson (Head of Library Services, St Helens MBC), Caroline Brown (Head of Commercial Services, British Library), Charlotte Collyer (Enterprise and FabLab Devon Manager), Anne Hallinan (Libraries Business Manager, Brighton & Hove City Libraries) and Sue McKenzie (senior consultant, RedQuadrant).
We won’t be able to actively promote these Masterclass events from now on, but registrations will stay open - so please continue to share this information with colleagues at all levels who are involved in identifying, developing, marketing and delivering income generating opportunities and services, and please encourage them to come along.
If you have any questions about any of the projects mentioned above, please contact us via email at any time during the run up to the election.