The British Library, Staffing

Here's something that many Londoners don't know - The British Library at St. Pancras in London is a circa 1998 red brick building with reading rooms that look like this. Some people call the library building "The Factory" because of its massive brick facade complete with chimney stack and clock.

On the other hand, The British Library of public imagination is the traditional rotunda Reading Room at the British Museum, which used to house a part of the collection, but is currently full of Chinese Warriors. Check out the British Library's History page to get the full story on the collection and the arduous process of creating a coherent institution from the ink of the British Library Act of 1972.

Enough on what is, and what isn't, The British Library. I want to praise The British Library's front line staff - the people who working at the lobby information desk and the readers' registration center. Why are they so good, you ask? Well, my visits and chats with a couple of people who work there point to staffing practices and well thought out systems.

After the collection was assembled and the library opened in 1998, an staffing shake up took place. Staff were asked to reapply for their positions, and as part of the application took a personality test, the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, and had their participation in a group conversation evaluated by psychologists. I'm not sure whether the results were used to let staff go, to move staff to more appropriate jobs, and/or to indicate the need for training, but action followed. In any case, these evaluations, which reportedly still continue for new hires, demonstrate The British Library's commitment to finding staff that not only provide the best information possible, but make the interaction warm and fuzzy (in a quiet British kind of way).

When I worked in HR at a public library system, our tools for evaluating applicants for front line positions were traditional: a five page application form to be completed manually, multiple face-to-face interviews and reference checks. While the MBTI was ubiquitous at Strategic Planning sessions in the 1990's, the usefulness of the MBTI in helping to hire librarians never came up. Probably the HR world at large figured that librarians were outliers from the more usual types in any case, and unlikely to change.

Since that time, libraries have (mostly) realized that librarians and other library workers need to be perceived as friendly, in addition to being responsive and knowledgeable. That is where the MBTI might come in handy, in evaluating someone's potential to appear unfriendly. The MBTI might also quantify the likelihood of a candidate to be inflexible within an organization, which is a big negative in times of tight budgets and changing collections and services.

Personally, I think the MBTI is best used as a training tool, but I can understand that it may be helpful in supporting hiring decisions - more defensible than the gut instinct of even highly trained interviewers.

Postscript:
To cheer up anyone having issues with their ISP, I'll tell you that during my first visit to The British Library the overhead monitor noted that Internet connectivity was interrupted due to a problem with the Internet Service Provider. A man with various meters and a briefcase computer was sitting at at the base of a pillar in the library lobby apparently wrestling with the issue.

The British Library's Reader registration process is under review in my next post, and I'll let you know which item in the Treasures display made we want to weep. No, it wasn't the Magna Carta...