house of lords committee papers - parliament · 30 october 2013, 2nd meeting, session 2013–14,...

Committee PapersHOUSE OF LORDS

2nd Committee Meeting of Session 2013-14

30 October 2013, 4.15pm

Committee Room 3A

Agenda

Minutes

Summer Seminar: Library Developments

Summer Seminar: Are the Lords Listening?

RESTRICTED ACCESS-COMMITTEE USE ONLY Information Committee 30 October 2013, 2nd Meeting, Session 2013–14, Committee Room 3A, 4.15pm

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AGENDA

Summer seminar: Public engagement of the House of Lords (continued) 1. Minutes of meeting held on 24 July

2. Thematic presentations [30 minutes]

Short presentations will be given on the following areas:

• Members’ information needs 2020 – James Tobin [5 minutes]

• Library developments – Ian Cruse [5 minutes] Document enclosed: Developments in the Library’s Information Management Services [INFO/13-14/07]

• Questions and Answers project – John Vice [5 minutes]

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• Data.parliament – Simon Nicholls [5 minutes]

• Bills and Acts – Simon Burton [5 minutes]

• Broadcasting – John Angeli [5 minutes]

3. Discussion on priorities and initiatives in public engagement [45 minutes]

The Chairman will lead a discussion session focusing on priorities in public engagement and follow-up to Are the Lords Listening? Paper by Liz Hallam Smith [INFO/13-14/08 – RESERVED]

4. Date of next meeting

23 October 2013

Megan Conway | Clerk | 020 7219 6772

mailto:[email protected]

RESTRICTED ACCESS-COMMITTEE USE ONLY Information Committee 24 July 2013, 1st Meeting, Session 2013–14

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MINUTES

Present: Lord Aberdare, Lord Best, Lord Haskel, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (Chairman), Lord Lipsey, Earl of Lytton, Baroness Massey of Darwen, Lord Maxton, Baroness Rawlings, Lord Rennard, Baroness Seccombe with the Clerk of the Parliaments

Apologies: Lord Black of Brentwood and Baroness Stedman-Scott.

Formal meeting

Notices

The Chairman noted that Megan Conway would take over as Clerk to the Committee from November.

1. Minutes of meeting on 24 April

The Committee agreed the minutes.

2. Parliament Week video series and Chamber event 2014

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Seonaid Whitley introduced the paper [INFO/13-14/01]. The video series would contribute to the broader Parliament Week initiative, which sought to engage and connect people with parliamentary democracy. One of the themes of the week would be ‘Women in democracy’; as such, the video series would highlight the contribution and impact of female members of the House of Lords, particularly those working in the field of equal and women’s rights. The initiative would be promoted through the website as well as social and traditional media. The project fell within existing budget limits.

Only one bid had been received for the 2014 Chamber event: an intergenerational debate between the Pensioners Convention (NPC) and the National Union of Students as to whether there were educational or generational divides. The NPC would provide funding alongside funds from existing Information Office budgets. One member suggested that training should be offered to those debating, as had been the case in previous years. Another member suggested that due diligence should be undertaken to ensure that those offered debating time in the Chamber were representative of their respective demographics; the Chairman said that this would be borne in mind.

The Committee took note of the proposals.


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3. Information Committee tablet device policy

The Reading Clerk introduced the paper [INFO/13-14/02]. The policy would formalise the Committee’s system of working following the end of the tablet pilot period and clarify the budget lines for replacement devices.

A member asked whether replacement devices could include an iPad mini; it was confirmed that they could.

The Committee agreed that:

• The Information Committee formally adopt a paperless system of working;

• New members of the Information Committee who already had a maximum allocation of ICT equipment would be loaned tablet devices by the House for the duration of their time on the Committee;

• No Member would be entitled to have more than one tablet device provided by the House;


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• Existing tablet devices, provided from the PICT budget, would continue to be used until no longer functional or compliant with network security requirements. Any further devices issued would be provided from the Members’ ICT budget, held by the Reading Clerk;

• All devices would be reclaimed when Information Committee membership ceased and reallocated to new members where they remained functional; and

• Mobile device management would be installed on all tablet devices used for the purposes of the Information Committee.

4. Press engagement – work of the Press and Media team

Owen Williams introduced the paper [INFO/13-14/03]. The paper set out the work of the Press and Media team, which was divided between proactive and reactive work. Reactive work related to media interest in the work of the Administration and the activities of members. Proactive work focused on Select Committee work and business in the Chamber such as balloted debates. The increase in ad hoc committees provided benefits in terms of media interest, but also contained challenges in responding to


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that interest without a persistent staff. Elsewhere, the team had increased its presence on social media, and had developed more sophisticated analytical tools to gauge the reach of material in the media.

The Chairman said that the paper set the scene, and made clear that reputational risks needed to be managed. One member suggested that there would be merit in establishing an informal committee to liaise with the Press and Media team and then report back to the Committee. Benet Hiscock said that structures were already in place to coordinate messages between the Administration and political groups. The Chairman said that there were issues of balance and fairness in the constitution of any such group, but that the idea would be brought to the Committee for further consideration in the autumn.

The Committee took note of the update.

5. Any Other Business

The Committee noted that the Library’s pilot for revised opening hours had been successful, yielding savings on late night transport costs and avoiding disruption to work patterns and rotas caused by very late sittings of the House, while maintaining full services to Members. The Library had received no adverse feedback on the pilot.

The Committee agreed that the revised opening hours should become permanent.


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Informal seminar

6. Introduction

The Chairman introduced the seminar. The Committee had focused on services provided to members and had yielded some exciting opportunities as a result. It was therefore appropriate to shift focus onto how the House of Lords engaged with the public, with the Committee’s previous Are the Lords Listening? report used as a framework. The Committee would be asked for its views on public engagement priorities.

7. Are the Lords Listening? Follow-up

Liz Hallam Smith introduced the paper [INFO/13-14/04]. There had been much progress since 2009 in some areas, with less in others. The landscape in terms of digital developments had changed, which meant that some priorities may have shifted accordingly. The paper set out possible areas of focus, including Member-led engagement and the development of digital services, about which Member feedback was desired.

8. Thematic presentations

Information Office


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Benet Hiscock gave a presentation. The Information Office focused on promoting understanding of the work of the House and raising public awareness. That work included the Enquiry Service, which answered questions directly. The service received and responded to around 8,000 phone calls a year and about 3,000 emails. The House of Lords Outreach Team was also based within the Inforamtion Office. It delivered corporate marketing functions for the House, such as publication production, outreach events and digital communications. Lords social media channels had been developed to further engage the public and raise awareness of the House. That work had been successful, with 18,000 people following the corporate Twitter account. The Press and Media Team, also part of the Information Office, promoted the work of the House to the media.

Challenges faced by the office included dealing with the increased rate of select committee activities, continued media interest relating to the activities of members and the size of the House, and tackling entrenched cultural attitudes among the public to the House; all would take long-term work to overcome. Members were asked for thoughts on any short-term actions that they thought could be taken. The Information Office also wanted to develop Member-led engagement, but wished to hear how best to drive up participation levels.

Outreach


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Clare Cowan gave a presentation. Outreach was a shared service that worked throughout the United Kingdom. Established in 2008, it had been fully staffed since 2011. It employed two methods of increasing public understanding and participation: regional outreach and campaigns and events management. The service was also active on social media.

Its regional outreach work delivered around 500 information workshops and seminars to over 20,000 attendees. It also used a “training the trainer” model to maximize the reach of the work. There were 180 trainers certified to deliver materials, each of whom were estimated to reach approximately 440 others. The activities of the service were monitored and evaluated to develop them further. In terms of campaigns and events, the core work featured Public Bill seminars and thematic events, at which both Members and staff of the Lords had been engaged.

The service also worked with universities via an open lecture series, bursaries and teaching resources. It had also developed a Parliamentary Studies module, which would be rolled out at 13 universities from September 2013 after a pilot programme at Sheffield University.

The team were interested to hear more as to how to raise awareness of the service among Members, and how to increase the level of participation in its work.

Education Service


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Edge Watchorn gave a presentation. The aim of the service was to inform, engage and empower young people. There were two key drivers: the entitlement of young people to engage with Parliament; and the need for educational work to have a broad reach. The work of the service was on an upward trajectory: there had been 47,000 visits to Parliament, training had been provided for 1,300 teachers and 500,000 people visited the Education Service’s website. However it was important to develop educational outreach work in parallel, as there was limited capacity for visits.

The Education Service was shifting towards delivery through partners. That included a theatre project developed by Norwich Theatre and delivered through workshops in schools afterwards, and the development of a “loan box” of Parliamentary educational resources.

In future, the young people’s aspect of the service’s website would be split off from the areas delivered teaching materials to make the site more user-friendly. There were also ongoing discussions regarding an Education Centre within Parliament.

2014 and 2015 events

Tom O’Leary gave a presentation. Parliament would be celebrating several significant anniversaries in upcoming years: the centenary of World War I in 2014 (and onwards), and then in 2015 there would be


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both the 750th anniversary of Simon De Montfort’s Parliament and the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta. A member advisory group had been established to provide feedback.

The aim was to enhance public engagement using those anniversaries as a focus. The programme was expected to be announced in late 2013, and would focus on ceremonial, showcase and educational events. The events would seek to give the public information to understand and appreciate the work of both Houses in order to make the parliamentary process accessible and interesting to a range of audiences. The Parliamentary Archives would play an important role.

Web and Intranet Services

Tracy Green gave a presentation. Digital resources were increasingly at the heart of engagement efforts. The Web and Intranet Service (WIS) supported both Houses by developing new content. There were well over 1 million visitors to the website each month; 60% of the traffic came from Google, and 37% of visits were from the general public. A monthly user survey provided feedback on how to improve the service provided. WIS also managed corporate social media channels. There were 171,000 Twitter followers, and more than 3 million people had watched Parliamentary videos on Youtube.

Since Are the Lords Listening?, Member pages had been overhauled to provide better links to Parliamentary contributions, and closer integration was being sought. The select committee pages had also been


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reconfigured, efforts were underway to make material on the intranet more searchable, and WIS also organized regular hack weekends to seek more effective ways to use Parliamentary information. With the House of Commons, a public reading stage had been organized for a Bill going through Parliament.

Looking ahead, further work would be undertaken to improve the functionality of select committee pages. The major theme would be to optimize the content available on mobile platforms, such as with the business papers application in development.

Parliamentary Archives

Mari Takayanagi gave a presentation. The Archives was not a practical destination for visitors, so engagement was pursued in different ways. That included social media: the Archives had 3,500 specialist followers, and also used Facebook and Youtube. Work was also underway to move to digital catalogues, including in digitizing the book of remembrance to commemorate the centenary of World War I. The Archives was a popular destination for filmmakers as well; it had entertained 59 visits by film and television crews in recent years. It undertook work at a local and regional level, as well as further afield, most notably in loaning the Stamp Act to a museum in New York.


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The Archives led the Living Heritage stakeholder group, to lead work across departments to promote the heritage of Parliament. That had included the Arts in Parliament project, and work on the “Parliament and votes for women” theme of engagement. Feedback had been positive.

9. Discussion of priorities and initiatives in public engagement

The Chairman invited the Committee to outline thoughts on public engagement. The following points were raised in discussion:

• Member-led engagement was key and had to be improved. More efforts had to be focused on increasing the range of those taking part and leveraging the impact of “celebrity” members being involved.

• More links had to be developed between both Houses, and between the Information Committee and other select committees. One particular candidate in that regard was the Works of Art Committee.

• Many Members had regional links that should be employed in outreach work.


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• Thought should be given to developing a pilot scheme where various activities from across services in a single region were brought together.

• Members needed to be made more aware of the public engagement activities that were undertaken. One way would be to publicise the content of the presentations given to the Committee during the seminar.

• The politics of engagement activities could not be ignored

• More digital resources, including a dedicated House of Lords mobile application, would make public access quicker and easier.

• The legislative functions of the House were crucial and needed to be featured more prominently in engagement activities to develop public understanding.

• Thought should be given to combining outreach activities with those of the Electoral Commission to highlight the importance of registering to vote.


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• The relevance of the work of the House, which often debated many of the topical issues of the day, had to be brought to the fore during engagement work. That included to professional audiences as well as to students.

The Chairman thanked the Members for their thoughts, which would be considered further by those who had given presentations.

Next meeting

The Committee will next meet on Wednesday 30 October at 4.15pm in Committee Room 3A.

24 July 2013

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Information Committee

Developments in the Library’s Information Management Services

Ian Cruse, Head of Information Services, House of Lords Library

This paper sets out recent developments in the Library’s Information Management Services and its plans to continue exploiting the potential of new technology in the delivery of information and research services to Members, aligned with the priorities set by the Information Committee and feedback from Members generally. The Committee is invited to take note. 1. The Library’s Intranet Pages.

The Lords Library’s revamped intranet pages went live on 20 May following their demonstration to the Information Committee earlier in the month. This was followed by an internal communications exercise which promoted the improved pages across various parliamentary newsletters and intranet pages. The Library also carried out a survey to elicit feedback regarding the new pages and to gauge whether their promotion had been successful. The feedback revealed that 67% of respondents were aware that the Library had improved its intranet pages. Of those responding: 75% of respondents agreed that they could quickly find what they needed on the Lords Library’s intranet pages; 92% agreed that the content on the pages was easy to read and 62% agreed that the pages were easy to navigate. Work has carried on within the Library to ensure that the pages continue to be developed and optimised for users. Feedback is very much welcomed on the pages.

2. Head of Information Management.

A new role has been created within the Library – Head of Information Management. The post, which started on 7 October, is a new senior post with strategic oversight of the Library’s delivery of e-services coupled with a key role working with the House of Commons, WIS and PICT on information management, particularly the Information Services Programme and its links to procedural developments. The role will seek to enhance the Library’s web and intranet services and exploit opportunities for tailored personalised services across multiple platforms. The post will also be responsible for collating and analysing various metrics indicating how the Library’s services are being used. The latter will be used to ensure that Library services are optimised and honed around Members’ information needs and that opportunities for cross-promoting Library services are maximised.

3. e-Books

http://intranet.parliament.uk/research-online/lords-library/

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The House of Lords Library has completed its pilot of eBooks from two suppliers - Dawsonera and EBL. The feedback from the trial was generally positive. Users found the e-Book platform relatively easy to use and valued the search function when looking for sections of text within specific eBooks. Users also reported that they found the range of content helpful. In terms of next steps, the Library will seek to trial a number of other e-Book providers before making a final decision on whether to sign up to a service or services on a more permanent basis. As well as functionality and ease of use, future trials will explore the different ranges and types of content and their relevance to the Library’s core functions and user base.

4. Personalised Services

The Library is currently exploring a number of services that may allow a more tailored and personalised provision of services to users. One long-term aspiration is a portal that will allow Library users to mould information resources around their parliamentary work and interests. Thought this approach to information provision will primarily help support and inform Members’ parliamentary work it will also assist in enabling them to participate in various engagement activities. At present the Lords Library generally arranges its resources on its intranet pages around the business of the House and around specific types of information, while bicameral intranet pages allow searching of some materials by subject, such as the briefing papers application and parliamentary search, which allows facet searching across parliamentary data. The Library will seek to explore ways of bringing a fuller range of materials together in one place so that users can track developments across specific policy and subject areas.

Such an approach will build on some existing online services that the Library hosts that can already be personalised. For instance, NEXIS (news sources) and LEXIS (legal sources), which the Lords and Commons Libraries subscribe to, allows users to set up accounts that can save searches on specific areas and create alerts which can inform users when a new item of interest has been added. These services depend on users setting up accounts with user logins and passwords. One of the difficulties facing users is the creation of multiple login personae and the Library is looking at ways in which this can be simplified. The Library will promote these services to users and offer training and guidance so that their benefits are fully realised.

The Library is also looking at the use of “discovery interfaces”. Discovery interfaces are platforms that sit on top of library catalogues, e-resources and online databases and allow the user to search across multiple sets of material instead of using individual searches for each separate information resource. Such platforms also offer the possibility of saving searches and setting up alerts to notify users when new resources which match their search criteria become available, for example by subject or author. It is hoped that joint procurements with the House of Commons, in areas such as e-journals and Library Management Systems, will allow a wide range of e-resources, books and monographs to be accessed and “pushed” in this way. Importantly, it would allow Library users to shape the way they use information resources to support their parliamentary work and interests.

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At present there are a number of apps associated with third party products that are available on the Lords Library intranet “apps” page. However, the Library is beginning work to investigate the potential to create new “apps” that draw upon in-house Library resources. This is very much at the exploratory stage and the present focus is on creating “user stories” as to how an app could be used and how it will add value to an existing service. It is hoped that this will lead to an eventual app but importantly it can act as a valuable learning exercise for the Library in identifying opportunities for “apps” and the processes and relationships by which they can be realised.

Finally, the Library is considering a number of interactive innovations to communicate with users. This includes the use of social media to push new Library products, services and events and to line it up with existing and future Lords corporate social media strategies. Library staff are also examining the potential of a Library “chat” approach to users. This would offer the functionality of Office Communicator, which is currently available on the parliamentary network, and mirrors the approach of many public and university libraries.

Ian Cruse Head of Information Management 21 October 2013

http://intranet.parliament.uk/research-online/lords-library/ejournals-ebooks-apps/apps/

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