Consultation

The request

One of the resolutions before the General Meeting at the end of November is

“That the Council undertakes a full consultation of all grades of the membership with respect to their expectations and requirements of a Library and Careers Centre at 4 Hamilton Place and to their views on the relationship between the Library at 4 Hamilton Place and the archive established at the National Aerospace Library at Farnborough.”

At its meeting on 7 September, as noted in the October issue of The Aerospace Professional, the Council passed three resolutions, one of which was

“The Council tasks the Library Working Group under the chairmanship of Dr Graham Coleman with providing the 9 November 2009 Council meeting with initial recommendations for the level of information service provision to be sustained at Hamilton Place inclusive of costed options. In providing its recommendations the Working Group should consult as widely as time permits.”

We explain below why we do not believe the process set in train by the Council resolution of 7 September will achieve the end sought in the resolution to be put before the General Meeting in November.

The Library Working Group

In the January 2004 issue of AP the Chief Executive said,

“I can also tell members that the preferred location for the headquarters of the new National Aerospace Library (the name has been registered as a limited company) is located within the Heritage area on the Slough Business Park at Farnborough. We are looking at two sites in this area and the detailed planning through a working party led by Dr Graham Coleman has begun.”

At the time, Dr Coleman was a member of Council and was based at Farnborough as DSTL
Chief Technologist (Air).  Other members of the Working Group also brought prior experience of the former RAE site to the task and in due course the Group’s work culminated in the agreement between the Society and Slough Estates, in the summer of 2007, to locate the NAL in the Farnborough Business Park in the re-modelled RAE Weapons Department Q134 building, now known as The Hub.

The Working Group has changed little since its formation in 2004.  Excluding the chairman and secretary, its six members at the time of the Council meeting in September 2009 included the Chief Executive, the Librarian, two current members of Council, one of whom is the Hon Treasurer, and two Fellows of the Society with local knowledge. Following the Council resolution, we expressed our reservations about the balance of the Working Group in relation to its task. In response to our requests, two additional members with appropriate experience of library use have been added to the Group.

  The consultation process

The Working Group has asked the Specialist Group Chairmen to submit their Group’s opinions on the following costed options:

OPTION 1

Provision of a facility at 4 Hamilton Place for the use of members, probably a room in the basement, with a data terminal, periodicals, reference material for which we have duplicates, and small amounts of additional material. Additionally, a member of the library staff based at Farnborough would visit, based on demand but no more than once a week.

Cost:  £3k

OPTION 2

Provision of all in Option 1, plus significantly more material which is not duplicated, combined with an extra part time librarian (2 or 3 days a week). There would be a need to move material between the Farnborough and Hamilton Place facilities on a regular basis.

Cost:  £25-30k

OPTION 3

Moving back to Hamilton Place a similar quantity of material to that recently dispatched to Farnborough from the third floor library and placing it in a facility at Hamilton Place with a full time librarian.

Cost:  £85-90k

LIBRARY STOCK FOR OPTION 3

There would be a wide range of authoritative books and other material covering the technological and other disciplines relevant to aerospace. Stock selection would be aided by consultation with Society Specialist Groups. Total volume of material would be up to that of the Hamilton Place Library prior to the August 2009 move to Farnborough. Facilities for handling digitised material would be available.

A NOTE ON COSTINGS

Additional costs to the Society would need to be met either by increased income generation or by cost savings. For example, if option 2 were preferred and the costs had to be met from subscriptions, the implied annual increase would be ~ £3-4 per member on average.

Commentary

We are critical of the above questionnaire. The costs contain no breakdown to enable the Groups to know what each option contains.  In particular, they have not been told that Option 3 includes the recruitment of a further, full-time librarian at Hamilton Place, with the present librarian continuing to work at Farnborough even after the books have been returned to London.  This cannot in any way be justified and makes the declared costs of Option 3 quite unrealistically high.

We are aware that our action in stimulating the requisition for a General Meeting has generated a good deal of opposition, even hostility, among some Council members. We are also aware that there have been briefings to Branch Chairmen, possibly others, to the effect that there is no possibility of the Hamilton Place Library being restored to its previous state. We understand that some briefings have included reference to us as septuagenarians - someone with access to the membership files has calculated that the average age of the Past Presidents behind the requisition is 72 and one of us has been told this to his face – and we therefore do not see this consultation being conducted in a neutral atmosphere. Further, the haste in which it is being conducted has not enabled all Group Committees to meet to discuss the matter properly and some of the responses may therefore reflect the views of one or two individuals rather than the considered view of the Group as a whole.

We are confident that all members of the Library Working Group will act in good faith, but the balance of opinion on the Group will inevitably be slanted towards the position that the Council has now taken.  We do not believe that the Chief Executive’s view will be influenced by his role as Chairman of the Hampshire County Council Policy and Resources Select Committee but we do believe that his passionate attachment to the development of the NAL at Farnborough, combined with his forcefulness in meetings, will make it difficult for the Group as a whole to arrive at an objective conclusion. It is our belief that, if the options had been more realistically defined and costed – in particular, if our specific request for the restoration of the status quo ante had been included, without the recruitment of an additional librarian – the overall balance of the responses would probably have been significantly different. Working with a set of options that we do not regard as presenting an appropriate range of choices, and with a very high cost attached to Option 3, we think it unlikely that the Working Group will recommend the return of the Library to Hamilton Place.

Appendix 2A The history of the RAeS Library
Appendix 2B Hampshire County Council records
Appendix 2C Information to Society members
Appendix 2D Visiting historians
Appendix 2E Consultation
Appendix 2F Hamilton Place Library – a look ahead