Employment

My career as a law librarian started with a serendipitous choice of law as my subject at library school. As an arts graduate, (I had taken joint majors in English and History), sciences seemed daunting so I plumped for social sciences and law as my main subject. Law proved to be a fascinating subject, but my first job was as a cataloguer for Roehampton University, where I built on my graduate trainee work experience year at Manchester Metropolitan University. There I had learnt MARC cataloguing and downloaded bibliographic records from BLCMP's union catalogue (a precursor to TALIS). At Roehampton I did more MARC cataloguing, downloaded records from the British Library and grappled with UDC. During my time at Roehampton I was Head of the Non-Teaching Staff Association, a kind of quasi-union consultative body.

After 18 months I obtained a job in my first law firm, which was a bit of a shock, moving from the rather protective arms of academia and into the commercial world. I found it hard that staff could be employed one day and not the next! After a huge cultural shift I found the commercial world suited me – out went the rigid job descriptions and graded posts and in came promotion on merit. If you could make a business case for it, you could do it and things happened much faster than in the universities where I had previously worked. All the academic theory and high standards of cataloguing were replaced by a much more pragmatic approach to library management. What mattered most was that you and the lawyers could find the library materials when you needed them. I missed being able to download catalogue records and it seemed tedious to catalogue books from scratch when I knew bibliographic details already existed. I left this job to have my first child.

After my maternity leave I got paid work doing indexing for Legal Journals Index and Christine Miskin was my boss. I collected the journals from the Document Exchange (DX), took them home, did my indexing and returned them via the DX. Working from home was strange, as there were all sorts of distractions and I had to create my own self-discipline and structure. During this period I learnt more about legal thesauri.

Back to employment in a law firm and this time commuting from the south coast and doing a three day week. The workload increased and I managed to convince my boss that a part-time manager with a full-time member of staff made good sense. I wanted to buy a library management system but instead was given the DataEase database package and told to write my own. I taught myself Structured Query Language (SQL) and DataEase programming. After that the firm asked me to write a database for the marketing department and another to keep track of wills. I was hooked on programming and really enjoyed it.

Self-employment

I had my second child and found myself wanting to spend more time with both children and so I started looking for more flexibility in my working life. This was in the days before flexible working was generally used. The result was that I became self-employed as a freelance librarian and consultant, working in different locations, mainly in London. I built up my own library system called PenLib and I constructed a database of pre-catalogued books within it, so that I could be quite competitive when bidding for projects which involved re-cataloguing the library. I also developed my own template for the consultancy work. I did some more computer database projects, which I could largely work on at home, during this period.

This worked well for a few years, but then I felt the need to find work closer to home, as commuting is time-consuming and energy sapping. The final push came when one of the firms for which I did regular library work closed their London office and made everyone redundant.

Finding a local job proved quite difficult. By now I was labelled as a “workplace librarian” and I didn't even get interviews at the local public library or at libraries in the education sector. I had bad experiences of employment agencies and encountered ageism (I was in my 30s!) and bias against working mothers. One local law firm asked me if I could catalogue and clearly hadn't read my CV. Nor could I get recognition and interviews as a programmer. Eventually I found local work with friends who were running their own business, but it was basically cold calling and I hated it, so I left.

At that point I was single, supporting two children, a debt and a mortgage – nothing quite focuses the mind on the need to earn money! I could have returned to a job in London as a legal librarian but, having been self-employed, it was hard to face commuting and employment again. Instead I put an advert in the local Friday Ad offering computer tuition and computer programming using Microsoft tools. To begin with this was not very effective. Although I was charging a good hourly rate I would get one hour's work in the morning and one in the afternoon, with travelling in between. I realised I needed to get more substantial work from business customers, rather than domestic customers and found some bigger contracts with local businesses. This was the beginning of Bailey Solutions – I was operating as a self-employed sole trader undertaking various database projects plus maintenance of those databases. It paid reasonably well and I even hired other freelance programmers to help me with bigger projects. It was hard work because quoting was a bit hit and miss. Many of my customers had never commissioned a database before and always wanted a price upfront, even though it was not clear at the outset to either side exactly what they would want. It was also a difficult way to make money, because I had to learn all about the business of my customers. These included a car parts supplier, a music supplier for insurance claims, an artist who ran tutorial courses, a personal injuries solicitor, a fortune teller and more.

Employer

I reviewed my skills and strengths: these included librarianship, management, good organisational skills, programming, a very good knowledge of library management software and of the workplace market sector. I had been involved in selecting library systems in my consultancy phase and had written my own system. I set about creating a different business model: one where I could write code once and sell it many times whilst at the same time using my extensive knowledge of legal libraries. I changed the legal status of Bailey Solutions to a limited company in 2002, hired a programmer and re-worked PenLib into a saleable product. The project work subsidised Bailey Solutions in the first year, but after that I turned down programming work in favour of selling our library system. PenLib was priced too cheaply at first, as I had rather naively not factored in the costs of selling and maintaining the product, but, once we added a web front-end, we had more scope and PenLib and the other two products, KnowAll and LookUp, are now profitable products.

Running a company entailed a number of big learning steps. Firstly, for me it was a huge psychological step to be additionally responsible for a second person's livelihood. It was quite a leap of faith in my capabilities. I took a part-time course at Roffey Park Management Institute to learn more about leadership and management. Taking on subsequent employees became a regular occurrence and I found myself leading a team.

I also had to learn to understand company finances and balance sheets. I found my legal and fiduciary responsibilities were relatively easy because I drew on my legal information retrieval skills. I wrote my first business plan which is now revised regularly. I hired a sales consultant to learn how to sell and later on a marketing consultant. One important thing I realised is that, although you are the one who has to make the final decision, you can get external advice. You don't have to have all the answers. Equally the team are a great asset and I hire people who are hopefully better than me at their job.

As an employer I find myself in a wonderfully empowering situation. You are able to shape the business and help develop people in their careers. You can also be the employer that I did not always find in my employee days. I put in place equal opportunities and diverse working practices which make good business sense. Employers and employment agencies who carry out prejudicial practices are throwing away good talent, which doesn't make sense when finding staff with the right skills is difficult enough. I have objective criteria using rigorous recruitment procedures.

I realise I am driven by software design and creating software that helps people to do their jobs better and this leads to huge job satisfaction for me. Founding the company has given me the opportunity to realise some of the ideas I had when I was employed/self-employed. For example, when I was working as a freelance librarian, I had my own database of pre-catalogued books because downloadable catalogue records weren't accessible to legal libraries. Bailey Solutions has developed a tool called AutoCat, which gives legal librarians the opportunity to download records from such web resources as Amazon, COPAC and Neilsen, with the availability of further sources of bibliographic data planned. Other menial tasks that I found frustrating can be made easier with good software design. We incorporate suggestions and ideas from our customers as I regard it as much their product as ours. In the UK and abroad over 110 legal libraries and a further 80 workplace libraries now use one of Bailey Solutions products.

A perennial thread during my career has been a continual re-assessment of both my personal and work situation. I have carried this through to the current business where I regularly review the activities that the team carry out and question if they can be done better or even out-sourced. Questions include: “Is this the most cost effective way to do this? “or “Who is the best person to do this task?” I continually seek improvement in myself, my staff and the company's performance. I have created a lifestyle and career that I enjoy: a job within walking distance of my house near the sea! In addition, from a position of having no job, I have created jobs for other people too and that, when you think about it, is no mean achievement.

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