A letter to the President of the Society

On 11 February Frank Armstrong and John Green met the President and Past President, Mike Steeden and David Rowland, to discuss the way forward following the decisions at the General Meeting on 30 November 2009.  The meeting was cordial but the President re-stated the legal position as set out in the report on the meeting in the January 2010 issue of Aerospace Professional, namely that, “while the result of the vote at the meeting cannot be binding on Council ....... it should be given due and serious consideration in informing any decisions to be made by Council on the way forward.”  The Council will consider its response to the General Meeting vote when it meets on 8 March.

After the meeting, John Green wrote to the President to respond to and re-emphasise some of the points raised during the discussion. A slightly abridged version of his letter is reproduced below.    

Dear Mike,

First, let me express our appreciation of your giving up your time on Thursday to discuss the way forward following the General Meeting. I hope you found the discussion helpful.

We agreed on the importance of clarity in communication. My ‘not negotiable’ – meaning to imply that, with 200 signatures calling for a General Meeting, we had no mandate to negotiate – was misconstrued as an ultimatum and perhaps gave rise to some of the hostility that we have faced. I hope we can avoid any repeat of that sort of thing.  Going forward, the Council has to consider its response to the resolutions passed at the General Meeting and all I can do here is offer some thoughts.

I will refer mainly to the restoration of the Library to Hamilton Place, which I think is the most difficult issue.  You spoke appreciatively on Thursday of Section 8 of our paper to the September Council meeting and I attach a copy of it as an annex to this letter. It sets out our future vision for the Society Library and is captured in the amended resolution passed at the General Meeting.  The second paragraph, which you highlighted during the discussion at the September Council meeting, expresses our position exactly and would, I believe, be supported by all the signatories of the requisition.

We spoke on Thursday of the strategic vision – the Society in 2020 and beyond. I assume the Council will include in this its view of the future of 4 Hamilton Place. Is it to be the Society’s long-term home and is it envisaged in 2020 as housing only the Society, or will some of its prime accommodation still be occupied by semi-permanent tenants?

The Council will also presumably take a view on the long-term location of the member-facing services.  We believe that these should all be in Hamilton Place, including – arguably above all – the main interface between members and the core working library as outlined in the attachment. 

The main library archive is well housed at Farnborough.  Although there is still a large amount of material in boxes in the 24ft tunnel, the space currently leased might be sufficient to accommodate all the existing stock if the core material is returned to Hamilton Place. How much spare capacity there would be for further additions from orphan collections is unclear, however. I believe that, wherever the core library is, the strategic plan needs to address the long-term future of the archive and its staffing and space requirements.

We hope the Council will include in its long-term thinking a return to the original vision of the Turner committee in which the Society takes a lead role in the creation of a true National Aerospace Library.  This would be a network in which all the main collections are linked, with the Society acting as catalyst rather than funder, and with itslibrary an important node giving access to all the major UK collections. 

In coming to its decisions, we hope the Council will give due consideration to the question of the recruitment and retention of members.  Why do they join the Society, why do they renew their subscription each year, why do they leave? We believe that a consequence of the move of the Library and Careers Centre to Farnborough will be some loss of members in both the short and longer term. It is difficult to quantify this but there are several factors underlying it – the move of the two functions, the displacement of member-facing functions to make room for a tenant, the fact that the tenant is a casino, and the abrupt and unannounced change in policy with respect to the Hamilton Place and Farnborough components of the library. I believe that some of the short-term loss – probably the greater part – will be determined by the Council decisions in March and will manifest itself as a drop in renewals at the end of this year.  In addition, and more importantly for the future, the absence from Hamilton Place of these two services will reduce the Society’s access to potential new young members in the large student population in London.

 My main point about recruitment and retention is, however, the wider one of what it is that the Society provides for members that justifies their subscriptions.  A large part of the benefit comes, I believe from the quality of the Society’s output – publications, conferences, lectures, support for professional development – and this depends to a great extent on the quality and willingness of the members that voluntarily contribute to it.  Excluding the Branches, there are approaching 400 of these on the various committees and bodies that sustain the Society’s intellectual life and output.

The membership includes a long, relatively passive tail of members who are content to do little more than pay their subscriptions and glance though the journals, a rather smaller number of members who attend Branch events, a similar number who attend main events at Hamilton Place (Conference Department has a mailing list of about 3,000) and then the 400 or so who provide the vision and drive that helps to keep the passive tail paying its subscriptions. 

 These people, particularly the committee members, are regular users of 4 Hamilton Place. Many of them, I know from the responses of the requisitioners, are unhappy with the events of last year, consider Hamilton Place impoverished by the moves and would like to see the services restored. They would prefer their Headquarters to be a welcoming place, with a useful library and helpful librarian, rather than a building with offices and meeting rooms but little else to offer.  I believe, in considering the views of the membership and the wider questions of recruitment and retention, the Council should give due weight to the views of this constituency and the importance to the Society of sustaining the loyalty and willingness of such members to give of their time.

As we emphasised on Thursday, we are as anxious as you to avoid a further crisis as a result of the decisions Council makes on 8 March.  We hope this will be achieved by the Council deciding to initiate a study of the actions needed to respond fully to the first resolution of the General Meeting.  At all costs, we hope the Council will not be ruled by those voices asserting that it is time to draw a line under the affair and move on without further ado.  To do so would in our view be most unlikely to draw a line under the affair.

We would not expect the final report from Graham Coleman’s committee to provide a basis for closing the matter because its consultation, inevitably done in some haste, contained unrealistic costs and, in particular, seriously overstated the cost of responding to the General Meeting resolution. Three options were offered, of which full restoration of the Library was costed at £85-90k – based on the addition of a second Brian Riddle to the Society staff. In the appendix to the report, however, the cost of restoration was given as £44.8k without the extra librarian. Although the [then] Chief Executive insisted on retaining an additional, highly paid librarian in the Option 3 costs used for the consultation, restoration of the core library to Hamilton Place would restore the situation as it was in early 2009 and would not justify any increase in library staff.

I hope these comments are helpful to you.  For us the key 2020 questions are:  What will Hamilton Place offer the members – particularly the active 400 – by then? What will there be at Farnborough and how many visitors will it receive? What will be the balance between written and digital information provided by the working library?  Will the vision of the Frank Turner committee have come to fruition and, if so, will the Society have a central role?

With best wishes

John Green                                                                                                                               16 February 2010

ANNEX (EXTRACT FROM PAPER TO 7/09/09/COUNCIL MEETING)

8. FUTURE LIBRARY SERVICES AT HAMILTON PLACE

Despite previous assurances by the Chief Executive, such as “I think it is important to emphasise that the Library on the third floor here at Hamilton Place will remain fully operational, to allow members to borrow books and to carry out research” and notwithstanding our appeals to the President for a stay of execution, the moves have gone ahead. We do not know whether or not a contractual commitment to the casino has already been made but we may well find that casino staff are already installed on the third floor by the time of the Council meeting. 

A new situation has been created and, whilst the first resolution calls for the Council to restore the status quo ante of July 2009, we do not think it necessary or appropriate to interpret the phrase too literally. The key question is what level of future library provision at 4 Hamilton Place would we, as Past Presidents, consider acceptable, both in our own judgement and in the eyes of the supporters of the requisition.  The moves have created the opportunity to make a fresh start.

In our view, to provide the level of service, facilities and convenience of geographic access appropriate to the library of a national learned society, our headquarters library needs to continue to provide for the following:-

   (a)  Research in aid of preparation of papers, reports and other professional-level serious publications on
         aerospace science and technology, operations, economics, etc.

   (b)  Consultation of up-to-date books and other literature by members needing to keep abreast of
           recent advances/current issues (commonly now called ‘professional development’).

   (c)  Student-level study, covering typical range of aerospace technologies.

   (d)  Historical research, in aid of papers, lectures, etc.

Effective fulfilment of these functions requires:

   (i)  Hands–on access to currently relevant textbooks, journals, conference proceedings, to allow
         exploratory browsing and selection of items for close study.

   (ii) Face-to-face interaction with a knowledgeable librarian who can help with searches, give advice,
         contact other sources if necessary, etc.

   (iii)  Up-to-date catalogue facilities, photocopying equipment and electronic information transfer facilities.  

     The development of networking between important centres has been a vital aspect of the NAL concept. Equally, however, it is clear that this development will take considerable time and effort, and much literature stock will not be available in digital form for many years to come, thus limiting the practical scope for ‘consultation at a distance’ in the near future.

Over recent years, the Hamilton Place library has managed to provide a service along the above lines which approximates to that available at sister institutions such as the other CEI bodies.  However, both staffing and space are distinctly more limited at the RAeS and the situation is often marginal*. 

It is highly desirable that a restoration of the library operation should not be merely at the same level as previously, but should include some enhancement in these aspects. The restored library needs to provide a pleasant environment for members to sit and work, a stock of books and journals similar to that which was shipped to Farnborough in August and computer terminals providing access to the NAL and other linked libraries. The latter need not be implemented immediately, but the restored library and such links should have the potential to develop into a fuller and more capable service than has existed to date.  

We believe that the Society should establish a strategy for the long term development of its library services.   We believe that this could be best done by a committee charged with oversight of the whole library/information services activity, ie, the RAeS headquarters library, the NAL and its development, links (electronic and otherwise) between these libraries and with other aerospace libraries, and with responsibility for ensuring an integrated approach to dealing with all these topics. This would need to be chaired by a respected RAeS 'insider' with plenty of experience of aerospace and RAeS matters, and the committee members should include RAeS 'library users', familiar with the needs for study of up-to-date material, research for papers, lectures, etc, student study, historical work.  It would presumably report to (or perhaps 'through'?) the Learned Society Board and thence to Council.

* We have heard it said that the Library at Hamilton Place is little used and that the NAL now attracts more visitors. This impression may arise from the fact that the great majority of visits to the Hamilton Place Library are made by members who are in the building for some other reason and do not register in the visitors’ book as Library visitors. The visitors’ book gives a seriously misleading indication of calls on the Library and we ourselves include regular users of the Library who can testify that at times there is standing room only