"Today’s anti-hubbers may come to look as foolish as those 19th-century segregationists and pamphleteers do to us".
This quotation comes from a thoughtful article from December's Guardian, by Lucy Mangan. She doesn't mean it as a compliment, but I've decided to embrace the word "anti-hubber" (and yes, I do know that using labels such as this is meant to belittle). I consider myself to be a proud anti-hubber: here's why:
I think it's a fad. It isn't a recent one, of course: under another name, I first came across it as one of the ideas of Dame Shirley Porter, who was, oh younger readers, Leader of Westminster City Council, where I both worked and lived in the 1980s. Do feel free to Google her: I won't say anything more about that, other than to point out that that association might just possibly have coloured my opinion, and, again, it isn't a new idea.
I think it's a fad with a purpose: to save (minute amounts of) money, to de-professionalise the staff, to take over the nicer library buildings and subvert them to another purpose, to get rid of those library buildings which are in need of investment.
I think it is also an umbrella term for many different things. I've been challenged on my obvious reluctance to embrace the brave new world of hubs by one member of the library profession who says that, if library-led, a hub can be a vibrant new thing which can breathe new life into the library service. That would be great (although I have my doubts): but then I haven't seen anything like this in practice. With the right input perhaps the library model can be adapted: but, how often are these proposals library-led? and, what exactly is meant by a hub?
I have been asked "what is a hub?" many times recently, by people who are puzzled by the term. In Cardiff we have just been through one of those "consultation" processes which included a page and a half of options for changing libraries into hubs, moving library services into different areas and amalgamating with other services, &c. &c.. One person said to me "I want to keep my library, but if a hub is the only option I would rather have that than nothing, but then I don't know what a hub is!" Another, who was a Welsh-speaker, assumed it was connected to the Welsh word "hybu", which means "encourage", or perhaps "inspire". If you read the Guardian article mentioned above it seems to be implying that it means having a cafe on site (the context is the Sieghart report on England's libraries). In Cardiff it seems to mean a building in which any other council functions might also take place, in particular housing or benefits advice. Cardiff has some "hubs" which do not include library services, so you could not assume that a "hub" would always have library services in it. At the moment Cardiff's libraries are in a council portfolio dealing with social issues ("Community, Development, Co-operatives, and Social Enterprise") - at least, I think that's what that means - so the proposed new "hubs" reflect that. They have also in the past been in the education portfolio (at which point it was suggested at least by one person that they should be located in schools) and, more recently, in leisure services (when it was suggested rather more frequently that libraries should be in leisure centres or swimming pools). At one point they were joined with bereavement services, although locating libraries in cemeteries mercifully doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone. In some other local authorities they are in "enterprise hubs", which are more like business information centres - which used in fact to be not uncommon in public libraries. Other ideas mooted elsewhere have included library services being run from a variety of buildings which are not part of the relevant council, such as pubs and police stations.
The trouble to my mind with all of these suggestions is that I do really believe that a library should be - neutral isn't possible, but as neutral as it can be. There are lots of people who really would not want to go into a building shared with a police station or a religious institution. Plenty of people don't like the idea of going into a pub. Others would hesitate to take their children to a building which is also the main point of assistance for ex-offenders looking for help with housing: victims of circumstance the majority may be, but there will be some who are not, and surely I don't need to point out all the potential problems which might arise? It works the other way round too: if you are going to register a death, do you really want to do it in a public library, which is not only public but might be full of children having a merry time just when you least want to be confronted with that? In Kent, you might have to. Closer to home in Cardiff there are serious questions about confidentiality in those buildings which have combined a library service with social help. Where is the confidentiality, if you have a housing problem which might be caused by your domestic situation, and you are expected to broadcast this to your neighbours in the middle of a public library?
The advantages of co-locating services are clearly mainly to save money, as the state, even at the local level, retreats. Fewer buildings (and staff) mean lower overheads. Perhaps the "hub" concept actually can mean expanding services in some areas (the social services-type hub, not the posh-cafe hub). Around 18 months ago, for instance, Cardiff closed its much-loved branch library in Ely, a relatively deprived area. Ely Library was a lovely purpose-built library, designed by staff and students from the Welsh School of Architecture. (How I wished, when I was the branch librarian at more affluent but less well-provided-for Rhiwbina, that I could have uprooted this delightful building and moved it to north Cardiff!) Library services were moved across the road to "The Hub", and, according to the Minister, it was a great improvement. I have to accept that his statistics are correct, but I find this astonishing. A 60% increase in users? If true, that is splendid, and I eat my words (but can it be?)
The closed Ely library had no notice on it telling people that there was still a library service in the area - only a brief note to say that there was nothing worth stealing left in the building, or words to that effect. From the road, there is no clue that there is a library service inside The Hub, but at least The Hub does still provide a library service in an area where it is sorely needed (another branch library in the vicinity closed some years ago). Other "hubs" proposed are to take the place of existing libraries which will close, and are not necessarily in the same areas as those libraries.
These examples are all at one end of the spectrum, but the article in the Guardian seems to be envisaging something quite different: a smart coffee shop with books. The idea of income generation has been put forward in Cardiff too. This raises one other awkward thing: the relationship of the public and private sectors. Local small businesses can be very supportive; a public facility such as a library draws customers to the area and there is a certain amount of mutual interdependence. One wonders whether that would survive the library becoming a competitor. This all might depend on the location of the library, of course.
A hub, then, can mean whatever you want it to mean. One essential seems to be that the word "library" must not appear anywhere in its vicinity. (Why? Has it become toxic?)
Once libraries lose their separate identity (apart perhaps from those which have successfully transformed themselves and remained under the aegis of something that is recognisably still library-controlled) they are at the mercy of the services with which they have been co-located. We have already seen this in a way in Cardiff, with local libraries which were located in small suburban shopping precincts in the 1960s and 1970s for what would have seemed at the time to be forward-looking reasons: taking the libraries to where people were, taking advantage of the footfall of the shopping centres to encourage people into the libraries, and vice versa: but as those same shopping centres declined, the libraries were left stranded and blighted with them. If the whole concept of the "hub" falls out of favour, what happens to the library services then? What happens if there is a political change in the relevant authority, which leads to different priorities?
It is so easy to criticise doubters as being Luddites, opposed to change, stuck in the past, and so on. It's a very difficult charge to counter. "Change" has been the mantra of the past 30 years. People my age have not only lived through a lot of change, we are even beginning to see some of the same ideas come round again, dressed as new concepts. It would be nice if someone, occasionally, would listen to the voices of experience who already know what hasn't worked before, and why.
Showing posts with label public libraries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public libraries. Show all posts
Monday, 26 January 2015
Monday, 12 January 2015
Public libraries: victim of local government reorganisation?
The current plight of public libraries in the UK is by now recognised even outside the profession. The last five years have seen an unprecedented attack on them, sparked off or at least given wings by a consultants' report by KPMG in 2010 which claimed that librarians were "over-skilled" and that one way forward was to take public libraries out of local government control and let them be run by volunteers (if at all).
I am not going to rehearse all the arguments and the various attempts across the UK to reduce the public library service here, but one factor which hasn't had much attention strikes me quite forcibly: that this has come about largely as a result of the reforms in local government which took place in the 1990s, in particular the introduction of the cabinet model.
At one time, local councils split their various functions into small, discrete, manageable chunks. Education, clearly, was always a large and important department, as was social services. Other smaller services though also had their own committees, with their own dedicated council member who chaired the committee and a number of other councillors who took an active part. With the introduction of cabinet-style government, the functions were rationalised, no doubt getting rid of some unnecessary bureaucracy in the process. In the case of libraries, though, the old system worked fairly well and in their favour. The library committee was a rather nice committee for a councillor to be on; there was usually a Chief/County/City/Town Librarian with senior status who could develop a relationship with this committee, in particular with its chair. Once that was swept away, the close relationship was lost: there was no obvious portfolio holder who could give libraries so much attention (as they now became part of a much bigger set of services); with that went the loss of status and influence for the senior librarian, and, I would guess, this often led eventually to having fewer senior posts and the downgrading of remaining ones. Ultimately this led to a situation in which there were few influential voices to be heard in support of libraries at a senior level in the council, whether from elected members or from officers.
Cardiff's current difficulties arise partly from this by now historic shift, I believe. I am not singling Cardiff out in particular to suggest that it is any worse than others, only because I know a little of its recent history. The question which was never satisfactorily resolved at Cardiff was, where, in the now limited number of "cabinet portfolios", should libraries be? Other councils have had their own answers to this, and they are not without their problems either. One fairly common solution is to place them with leisure services. In the current climate, this might mean that the whole library service is to be outsourced along with the rest of leisure services (as proposed in Hull, and discussed by Alan Wylie here). Elsewhere, they might be in an education department, which some may think fits the libraries' purpose better, but can be difficult financially (and in terms of getting the relevant councillor's attention, and competing for resources with schools). If the council has a museum or an archive service it might belong with those in a "cultural" portfolio (not an option for Cardiff, whose museum became the National Museum of Wales long ago, and whose archives are part of the historic county's inheritance). Cardiff has in fact been in what seems like a never-ending state of reorganisation ever since coming into existence in 1996, and libraries have been passed round like a hot potato from one place to another. There was a brief pause of a year or so after 1996, and then the "pass-the-parcel" game began, with layers being peeled off each time the music stopped. In the last fifteen years libraries have been in at least five different parts of the structure, starting with education, then leisure, and then various combinations of other things, some of which overlapped while most did not. At the moment the cabinet member responsible for them holds the portfolio for "Community, Development, Co-operatives and Social Enterprise", with an assistant cabinet member for "Young People & Learning (including Libraries)". This all sounds quite woolly and difficult to get a handle on from outside the structure. There has not been a "Chief Librarian", as such, for over ten years: whatever else reorganisation does, it doesn't bring clarity in terms of job titles which can be easily understood by the general public.
Whichever department libraries were moved to, the senior non-library staff seemed to have in common:
1. No previous knowledge of or interest in libraries
2. No idea - often literally not a clue until told - that libraries are a statutory service protected by an Act of Parliament, which states among other things that the basic service has to be provided free of charge (an unwelcome shock to some!)
3. A desire to make libraries be more like whatever else was in the portfolio
4. A desire to make libraries serve the other part of their portfolio to the exclusion of other things (again, something which is incompatible with the Act, which states the local authorities must provide a "comprehensive" service)
5. Co-locating libraries with whatever else was in their portfolio
The combined effect of all of this has been to leave libraries vulnerable to every organisational change, to have no long-term planning (because who knows whose portfolio they might be in next time?), no overall vision for libraries, certainly no succession planning. Overall decisions are made from outside the profession, according to the agenda of other services (but not necessarily the same ones from one year to another). The loss of status of the professional library staff, leaving a very few trying to implement policies which are not library-led, also weakens a service overall. Again, I am not particularly singling Cardiff out: I think the problems are common to many other places.
Libraries have not been served well by the fragmentation of responsibility which has happened due to constant reorganisation, lost in having to compete for attention and resources with bigger and more vocal services (and, in the case of Cardiff, frequent changes of alignment). Small sometimes really is best!
I am not going to rehearse all the arguments and the various attempts across the UK to reduce the public library service here, but one factor which hasn't had much attention strikes me quite forcibly: that this has come about largely as a result of the reforms in local government which took place in the 1990s, in particular the introduction of the cabinet model.
At one time, local councils split their various functions into small, discrete, manageable chunks. Education, clearly, was always a large and important department, as was social services. Other smaller services though also had their own committees, with their own dedicated council member who chaired the committee and a number of other councillors who took an active part. With the introduction of cabinet-style government, the functions were rationalised, no doubt getting rid of some unnecessary bureaucracy in the process. In the case of libraries, though, the old system worked fairly well and in their favour. The library committee was a rather nice committee for a councillor to be on; there was usually a Chief/County/City/Town Librarian with senior status who could develop a relationship with this committee, in particular with its chair. Once that was swept away, the close relationship was lost: there was no obvious portfolio holder who could give libraries so much attention (as they now became part of a much bigger set of services); with that went the loss of status and influence for the senior librarian, and, I would guess, this often led eventually to having fewer senior posts and the downgrading of remaining ones. Ultimately this led to a situation in which there were few influential voices to be heard in support of libraries at a senior level in the council, whether from elected members or from officers.
Cardiff's current difficulties arise partly from this by now historic shift, I believe. I am not singling Cardiff out in particular to suggest that it is any worse than others, only because I know a little of its recent history. The question which was never satisfactorily resolved at Cardiff was, where, in the now limited number of "cabinet portfolios", should libraries be? Other councils have had their own answers to this, and they are not without their problems either. One fairly common solution is to place them with leisure services. In the current climate, this might mean that the whole library service is to be outsourced along with the rest of leisure services (as proposed in Hull, and discussed by Alan Wylie here). Elsewhere, they might be in an education department, which some may think fits the libraries' purpose better, but can be difficult financially (and in terms of getting the relevant councillor's attention, and competing for resources with schools). If the council has a museum or an archive service it might belong with those in a "cultural" portfolio (not an option for Cardiff, whose museum became the National Museum of Wales long ago, and whose archives are part of the historic county's inheritance). Cardiff has in fact been in what seems like a never-ending state of reorganisation ever since coming into existence in 1996, and libraries have been passed round like a hot potato from one place to another. There was a brief pause of a year or so after 1996, and then the "pass-the-parcel" game began, with layers being peeled off each time the music stopped. In the last fifteen years libraries have been in at least five different parts of the structure, starting with education, then leisure, and then various combinations of other things, some of which overlapped while most did not. At the moment the cabinet member responsible for them holds the portfolio for "Community, Development, Co-operatives and Social Enterprise", with an assistant cabinet member for "Young People & Learning (including Libraries)". This all sounds quite woolly and difficult to get a handle on from outside the structure. There has not been a "Chief Librarian", as such, for over ten years: whatever else reorganisation does, it doesn't bring clarity in terms of job titles which can be easily understood by the general public.
Whichever department libraries were moved to, the senior non-library staff seemed to have in common:
1. No previous knowledge of or interest in libraries
2. No idea - often literally not a clue until told - that libraries are a statutory service protected by an Act of Parliament, which states among other things that the basic service has to be provided free of charge (an unwelcome shock to some!)
3. A desire to make libraries be more like whatever else was in the portfolio
4. A desire to make libraries serve the other part of their portfolio to the exclusion of other things (again, something which is incompatible with the Act, which states the local authorities must provide a "comprehensive" service)
5. Co-locating libraries with whatever else was in their portfolio
The combined effect of all of this has been to leave libraries vulnerable to every organisational change, to have no long-term planning (because who knows whose portfolio they might be in next time?), no overall vision for libraries, certainly no succession planning. Overall decisions are made from outside the profession, according to the agenda of other services (but not necessarily the same ones from one year to another). The loss of status of the professional library staff, leaving a very few trying to implement policies which are not library-led, also weakens a service overall. Again, I am not particularly singling Cardiff out: I think the problems are common to many other places.
Libraries have not been served well by the fragmentation of responsibility which has happened due to constant reorganisation, lost in having to compete for attention and resources with bigger and more vocal services (and, in the case of Cardiff, frequent changes of alignment). Small sometimes really is best!
Saturday, 8 September 2012
Judging (Welsh) books by their covers
If the death of the physical book ever does happen, I suppose the question of book covers may become redundant. For now, however, they are still really important, and don't let anyone persuade you otherwise!
In academic libraries they mean little: the one where I work actually throws the paper covers away (this is a bit upsetting when they are particularly attractive!) A recent technological innovation borrowed from the world of bookselling, the facility to display images of the covers next to the catalogue records, has caused some confusion - the image is meant to help the user locate the book easily, but that doesn't work if the pretty cover has been chucked out. On the whole, though, users in academic libraries are more interested in the contents than the superficial appearance of books.
This is not so in bookshops, where a good cover judiciously displayed can make a difference to sales. In my public library past we were well aware that the same thing applies to the lending of books. Face-on displays of books made a big difference to borrowing figures. You could more or less manipulate what got borrowed by your choice of items for display, and that choice was I fear very often determined by the quality of the covers. However well-written and interesting a book is, it will not be borrowed by casual library users if it has a plain or boring cover. Sad, but true.
Living in a part of Wales where Welsh-speakers are not well represented among library staff, I tended to keep an eye out for the Welsh books arriving in my branch when I worked in the public library; I don't work there now, but I do use a different branch as a regular borrower, and one thing that caused problems then still seems to now. I would often find myself trying to persuade my colleagues that a particular book, despite its bright jolly cover, was actually a novel for adults; and now as the parent of a Welsh-speaking child in primary school I equally often find racy adult fiction categorised as children's stories, again probably because of the covers. I can only really comment on the Welsh ones, but of course the library has a collection of books in other languages which the staff also don't speak, so the same may be true of those too.
I wonder whether the artwork on Welsh book covers is different enough to be confusing? There are quite a few adult novels concerned with childhood (but from an adult perspective), and these are the ones which are most likely to have illustrations reminiscent of children's books on their covers. Thus, books retrieved from the children's section include Lleucu Roberts' Iesu Tirion and Angharad Tomos' Si hei lwli (both of which have the titles of children's songs - a hymn and a lullaby respectively - as their titles). These books are not meant for young children!
How do we judge what the content of a book may be, especially when we have no plans to read it ourselves? and, moreover, do not speak the language? The artwork on the cover is not always the best way - but perhaps we are so used to judging by image that we have forgotten this.
In academic libraries they mean little: the one where I work actually throws the paper covers away (this is a bit upsetting when they are particularly attractive!) A recent technological innovation borrowed from the world of bookselling, the facility to display images of the covers next to the catalogue records, has caused some confusion - the image is meant to help the user locate the book easily, but that doesn't work if the pretty cover has been chucked out. On the whole, though, users in academic libraries are more interested in the contents than the superficial appearance of books.
This is not so in bookshops, where a good cover judiciously displayed can make a difference to sales. In my public library past we were well aware that the same thing applies to the lending of books. Face-on displays of books made a big difference to borrowing figures. You could more or less manipulate what got borrowed by your choice of items for display, and that choice was I fear very often determined by the quality of the covers. However well-written and interesting a book is, it will not be borrowed by casual library users if it has a plain or boring cover. Sad, but true.
Living in a part of Wales where Welsh-speakers are not well represented among library staff, I tended to keep an eye out for the Welsh books arriving in my branch when I worked in the public library; I don't work there now, but I do use a different branch as a regular borrower, and one thing that caused problems then still seems to now. I would often find myself trying to persuade my colleagues that a particular book, despite its bright jolly cover, was actually a novel for adults; and now as the parent of a Welsh-speaking child in primary school I equally often find racy adult fiction categorised as children's stories, again probably because of the covers. I can only really comment on the Welsh ones, but of course the library has a collection of books in other languages which the staff also don't speak, so the same may be true of those too.
I wonder whether the artwork on Welsh book covers is different enough to be confusing? There are quite a few adult novels concerned with childhood (but from an adult perspective), and these are the ones which are most likely to have illustrations reminiscent of children's books on their covers. Thus, books retrieved from the children's section include Lleucu Roberts' Iesu Tirion and Angharad Tomos' Si hei lwli (both of which have the titles of children's songs - a hymn and a lullaby respectively - as their titles). These books are not meant for young children!
How do we judge what the content of a book may be, especially when we have no plans to read it ourselves? and, moreover, do not speak the language? The artwork on the cover is not always the best way - but perhaps we are so used to judging by image that we have forgotten this.
Wednesday, 1 February 2012
Library day in the life: round 8, day 2 (Tuesday 31st January 2012)
Subject librarian day today, with odd little bits of cataloguing in passing. The main item on the "to do" list was to see whether it was going to be possible to copy the Welsh play needed by students, requested yesterday. Publishers have refused in the past, but, oh joy! Gwasg Gomer couldn't have been more helpful, and I soon had permission both verbally and in writing (by email). Even so, the early birds among the students nearly thwarted us, as two out of our three copies had already been borrowed by the time everything was in place. The remaining book was put aside for copying and with any luck all will be well. Even with permission you still cannot make unlimited numbers of copies: I am sure the students would like one each, but there is a maximum permitted number which is well short of the number of students taking the module.
Apart from that, the day was spent catching up with queries including book orders, hunting for missing books, deciding whether to replace them or not, and working on the first phase of the reclassification project which is coming up (which also throws up cataloguing questions and more evidence of missing stock). The library is quite quiet at the moment, so not many enquiries from students, and a bit of time to talk to a retired member of staff (who has been lured out of retirement recently to take part in a general introductory course on Welsh culture for the first year students).
Late in the afternoon, a member of staff with an interest in the history of Cardiff reported that many copies of "Cardiff Yesterday" are missing from the shelves. I was instantly transported back to my public library days, as "Cardiff Yesterday" was kept under lock and key in the public library due to its tendency to disappear. It is a series of 36 books which came out in the 1980s and 1990s, containing old photographs of Cardiff, and in Cardiff it is right up there with Archbold's "Criminal pleading and evidence" as the book most likely to be stolen from a library, that is, of which a library may be permanently deprived with intent (I know my legal definitions!). I checked the shelves and could not find one of the 22 volumes which are not on loan. Too late now, but I played with the idea of making it compulsory for staff members to borrow them and keep them safe in their own homes. We could at least recall them from there if needed!
Apart from that, the day was spent catching up with queries including book orders, hunting for missing books, deciding whether to replace them or not, and working on the first phase of the reclassification project which is coming up (which also throws up cataloguing questions and more evidence of missing stock). The library is quite quiet at the moment, so not many enquiries from students, and a bit of time to talk to a retired member of staff (who has been lured out of retirement recently to take part in a general introductory course on Welsh culture for the first year students).
Late in the afternoon, a member of staff with an interest in the history of Cardiff reported that many copies of "Cardiff Yesterday" are missing from the shelves. I was instantly transported back to my public library days, as "Cardiff Yesterday" was kept under lock and key in the public library due to its tendency to disappear. It is a series of 36 books which came out in the 1980s and 1990s, containing old photographs of Cardiff, and in Cardiff it is right up there with Archbold's "Criminal pleading and evidence" as the book most likely to be stolen from a library, that is, of which a library may be permanently deprived with intent (I know my legal definitions!). I checked the shelves and could not find one of the 22 volumes which are not on loan. Too late now, but I played with the idea of making it compulsory for staff members to borrow them and keep them safe in their own homes. We could at least recall them from there if needed!
Sunday, 6 November 2011
Thing 20 : library roots and routes
Thing 20 asks us to blog about our library roots (how we got into libraries in the first place) and routes (our career paths to date, and to add the story to the Library routes project wiki.
I have already talked about how I came to be a librarian here, and my early experience up to chartership here, so I won't go over it all again. While all this was going on, I was on another trajectory, towards ordination in the Anglican church, which ultimately came to nothing but is relevant here because it was the main reason for my switch from academic to public libraries. My Oxford degree and academic library job didn't press the right buttons in the church at the time, so while jumping through various hoops I also changed from full-time to part- time work so as to gain experience as a lay assistant in a parish (as a volunteer), and from the so-called "ivory tower" (ha!) to more immediate contact with ordinary Londoners through working in a busy central London reference library. The public library post outlasted my attempt to become ordained, and eventually needing more than a part time income I obtained an even more part-time post back in the University of London which I fitted round my public library job. The main purpose of the second job was to edit the annual "Theses in Progress in Commonwealth Studies", which has only this year gone online only, and to do some cataloguing at times of the year when there was less to do for "TIP". Although my reason for doing it was not the usual one, I think a lot of people, particularly women, end up working part-time in librarianship, which can change the course of your career. I was ready to return to full-time work at a time of cuts in the public sector (plus ça change ...) and in 1991 the university post came to an end and the public library one was scaled back to the half-time hours I had originally been employed on (trying to remember now what was going on in 1991 - probably much the same as today!) This left me with no option other than to seek a full-time job elsewhere (astonishingly, people do need money to live on - coming to that in Thing 22).
My next move was to the English-Speaking Union, where I was Librarian & Information Officer for two years. Being a solo librarian is another interesting experience! I was rather isolated in the organisation, and I certainly needed to be an advocate both to members and to other staff. I needed to get out to promote the library, but if I did that it meant the library was unstaffed and there was nobody to do the day-to-day work, which wasn't ideal. I did get out to lots of other organisations, and I was also involved in the ESU's literary lunches and evening events. I wasn't there long enough to make a real difference, but I did unearth details of the defunct Travelling Librarian Award and revived it in 1994. There was a little hiatus after I left but I'm glad to say my successor picked it up again and it is now flourishing once more in association with CILIP.
"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life ..."
I don't think I was tired of life, but I was very conscious that if I stayed in London I could look forward to many more years of bedsits and rooms in shared houses belonging to other people, and I wanted to see some of my own possessions again. All this time I had still been gently moving towards another shot at selection for ordination, but in 1994 the parish I was attached to imploded (nothing to do with me, but it resulted in the sudden departure of my sponsoring vicar and it meant I was back to square one). I was particularly, though not exclusively, looking for work in Wales, and the opportunity that came up was, once again, part-time, with the then South Glamorgan County Council, for which the writing was already on the wall with local government reorganisation scheduled for 1996. My post was as a Senior Branch Librarian in the north Cardiff suburb of Rhiwbina (a garden village), as a job-share. The post survived the reorganisation when it was transferred to the new unitary authority for Cardiff. With this post I filled a number of gaps in my experience - some very worthwhile and some not so much fun. Lending experience, and stock selection for it, were really useful, although we soon lost the latter to supplier selection (somebody please tell Tim Coates that this has been going on for years!), also lots of hands-on children's activities, story times and author visits. Less appealing, though doubtless useful experience, was the daily struggle with the timetable, trying to cover the opening hours with not enough staff and negotiating endless requests for relief from other branches trying to do the same thing, and, even worse, anything to do with the boiler or the roof. How I sympathise with Philip Larkin's boiler experiences in his first (public library) job! How I grew to hate that (oil-fired) boiler! The library was at the heart of the community in Rhiwbina. I seriously hope that the rumours currently circulating about the possibility of a volunteer-run library in Rhiwbina are misinformed.
I stayed there for eight years job-sharing with the same job-share partner, but I also, in the year after arriving in Cardiff, managed to get part-time work on the retroconversion project at Cardiff University, specifically to catalogue the Salisbury Library (the Welsh/Celtic/Border Counties collection), so once again, as in London, I was splitting my time between the public library and an academic library, sometimes on the same day. The retrocon project was for two years, but I was kept on on a number of very short term projects and then became a permanent cataloguer at the university. When my son was born I knew I would find it difficult to do both, and I had to think carefully about which one I should relinquish. The public library job was on a higher grade and I liked the branch and the area, but it did involve Saturdays, and, early as it might seem to anyone wanting to use it, late nights (6 pm and 7 pm) are very late if you need to look after a small child. Formal childcare ends at 6 pm, which means collecting child and therefore leaving work before that - and that is without all the extra times when you are summoned earlier because of child illness (I hadn't got as far as thinking about school holidays and INSET days!) It was already difficult covering the opening hours of the public library with the staff we had, and in fact I and my job-share partner did a higher proportion of late nights between us than a single full-time librarian would have done. I could foresee problems if I were simultaneously the person needing to leave early and the person trying to make other staff stay on later than they had been expecting. The thing that really swung it in the end was a silly bureaucratic thing - my baby was born 11 weeks early, which according to the rules meant that my maternity leave also began early. The rules therefore expect you to return to work earlier than you were originally planning even though you have had a baby requiring hospitalisation (whereas, if the threatened early birth had not happened but I had been sent home and told to stop work and stay in bed for 11 weeks and had the baby at the appointed time, I could have stayed off as planned). A baby born that early does not come out looking like a full term baby, whatever the date on the birth certificate, and in the early days you cannot be sure what additional problems there may be. I had no child care in place for an early return and in any case it was not appropriate. The council stuck to the letter of the law and said I had to come back early, although I could have taken the four weeks' emergency leave allowed with a child under 5 in one go to defer the date (but what would I have done if I had had an emergency after that?) whereas the university allowed quite a long period of unpaid leave to be added to the statutory six months. It has, of course, all become a bit easier since then!
That is how I ended up jumping off the fence on the academic side, since when my cataloguing post has been upgraded and I have also acquired additional subject liaison responsibilities, so I am no longer "only" a cataloguer. There is obviously a consistent pattern though - I may only have one employer now but once again I have two roles and I am not in the same building each day!
I have already talked about how I came to be a librarian here, and my early experience up to chartership here, so I won't go over it all again. While all this was going on, I was on another trajectory, towards ordination in the Anglican church, which ultimately came to nothing but is relevant here because it was the main reason for my switch from academic to public libraries. My Oxford degree and academic library job didn't press the right buttons in the church at the time, so while jumping through various hoops I also changed from full-time to part- time work so as to gain experience as a lay assistant in a parish (as a volunteer), and from the so-called "ivory tower" (ha!) to more immediate contact with ordinary Londoners through working in a busy central London reference library. The public library post outlasted my attempt to become ordained, and eventually needing more than a part time income I obtained an even more part-time post back in the University of London which I fitted round my public library job. The main purpose of the second job was to edit the annual "Theses in Progress in Commonwealth Studies", which has only this year gone online only, and to do some cataloguing at times of the year when there was less to do for "TIP". Although my reason for doing it was not the usual one, I think a lot of people, particularly women, end up working part-time in librarianship, which can change the course of your career. I was ready to return to full-time work at a time of cuts in the public sector (plus ça change ...) and in 1991 the university post came to an end and the public library one was scaled back to the half-time hours I had originally been employed on (trying to remember now what was going on in 1991 - probably much the same as today!) This left me with no option other than to seek a full-time job elsewhere (astonishingly, people do need money to live on - coming to that in Thing 22).
My next move was to the English-Speaking Union, where I was Librarian & Information Officer for two years. Being a solo librarian is another interesting experience! I was rather isolated in the organisation, and I certainly needed to be an advocate both to members and to other staff. I needed to get out to promote the library, but if I did that it meant the library was unstaffed and there was nobody to do the day-to-day work, which wasn't ideal. I did get out to lots of other organisations, and I was also involved in the ESU's literary lunches and evening events. I wasn't there long enough to make a real difference, but I did unearth details of the defunct Travelling Librarian Award and revived it in 1994. There was a little hiatus after I left but I'm glad to say my successor picked it up again and it is now flourishing once more in association with CILIP.
"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life ..."
I don't think I was tired of life, but I was very conscious that if I stayed in London I could look forward to many more years of bedsits and rooms in shared houses belonging to other people, and I wanted to see some of my own possessions again. All this time I had still been gently moving towards another shot at selection for ordination, but in 1994 the parish I was attached to imploded (nothing to do with me, but it resulted in the sudden departure of my sponsoring vicar and it meant I was back to square one). I was particularly, though not exclusively, looking for work in Wales, and the opportunity that came up was, once again, part-time, with the then South Glamorgan County Council, for which the writing was already on the wall with local government reorganisation scheduled for 1996. My post was as a Senior Branch Librarian in the north Cardiff suburb of Rhiwbina (a garden village), as a job-share. The post survived the reorganisation when it was transferred to the new unitary authority for Cardiff. With this post I filled a number of gaps in my experience - some very worthwhile and some not so much fun. Lending experience, and stock selection for it, were really useful, although we soon lost the latter to supplier selection (somebody please tell Tim Coates that this has been going on for years!), also lots of hands-on children's activities, story times and author visits. Less appealing, though doubtless useful experience, was the daily struggle with the timetable, trying to cover the opening hours with not enough staff and negotiating endless requests for relief from other branches trying to do the same thing, and, even worse, anything to do with the boiler or the roof. How I sympathise with Philip Larkin's boiler experiences in his first (public library) job! How I grew to hate that (oil-fired) boiler! The library was at the heart of the community in Rhiwbina. I seriously hope that the rumours currently circulating about the possibility of a volunteer-run library in Rhiwbina are misinformed.
I stayed there for eight years job-sharing with the same job-share partner, but I also, in the year after arriving in Cardiff, managed to get part-time work on the retroconversion project at Cardiff University, specifically to catalogue the Salisbury Library (the Welsh/Celtic/Border Counties collection), so once again, as in London, I was splitting my time between the public library and an academic library, sometimes on the same day. The retrocon project was for two years, but I was kept on on a number of very short term projects and then became a permanent cataloguer at the university. When my son was born I knew I would find it difficult to do both, and I had to think carefully about which one I should relinquish. The public library job was on a higher grade and I liked the branch and the area, but it did involve Saturdays, and, early as it might seem to anyone wanting to use it, late nights (6 pm and 7 pm) are very late if you need to look after a small child. Formal childcare ends at 6 pm, which means collecting child and therefore leaving work before that - and that is without all the extra times when you are summoned earlier because of child illness (I hadn't got as far as thinking about school holidays and INSET days!) It was already difficult covering the opening hours of the public library with the staff we had, and in fact I and my job-share partner did a higher proportion of late nights between us than a single full-time librarian would have done. I could foresee problems if I were simultaneously the person needing to leave early and the person trying to make other staff stay on later than they had been expecting. The thing that really swung it in the end was a silly bureaucratic thing - my baby was born 11 weeks early, which according to the rules meant that my maternity leave also began early. The rules therefore expect you to return to work earlier than you were originally planning even though you have had a baby requiring hospitalisation (whereas, if the threatened early birth had not happened but I had been sent home and told to stop work and stay in bed for 11 weeks and had the baby at the appointed time, I could have stayed off as planned). A baby born that early does not come out looking like a full term baby, whatever the date on the birth certificate, and in the early days you cannot be sure what additional problems there may be. I had no child care in place for an early return and in any case it was not appropriate. The council stuck to the letter of the law and said I had to come back early, although I could have taken the four weeks' emergency leave allowed with a child under 5 in one go to defer the date (but what would I have done if I had had an emergency after that?) whereas the university allowed quite a long period of unpaid leave to be added to the statutory six months. It has, of course, all become a bit easier since then!
That is how I ended up jumping off the fence on the academic side, since when my cataloguing post has been upgraded and I have also acquired additional subject liaison responsibilities, so I am no longer "only" a cataloguer. There is obviously a consistent pattern though - I may only have one employer now but once again I have two roles and I am not in the same building each day!
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Thing 16 (part 1) : Complacency, advocacy and activism
This subject seems to have roused some surprisingly strong reactions, possibly because the distinction between advocacy and activism has become blurred for some. Johanna Anderson has covered this subject fully in her blog here, including definitions of the words.
It might be apposite to remember that CILIP has a code of professional practice which "applies ethical principles to the different groups and interests to which CILIP members must relate", and its section D, "Responsibilities to society" begins: "One of the distinguishing features of professions is that their knowledge and skills are at the service of society at large, and do not simply serve the interests of the immediate customer." Of course many people working in the field of librarianship are not members of CILIP and are free not to consider themselves bound by its ethical code. The implication is clear, though: no librarian is an island!
Advocacy can take the form of speaking for the profession outside it, promoting your own service to your immediate users, and promoting your part of it to those who make decisions about your service.
As a subject librarian in a university, I need to connect with staff and students, to promote the collection I'm responsible for and help people to get the best out of it. As a cataloguer, traditionally my role is more hidden than that. For years cataloguers at my place of work have been literally hidden away, first in a basement and now in a different building located at a distance from most of the site libraries. We are much better integrated than we used to be: at one time we were not included in meetings or really in any of the activities other professional staff took part in. Even so I think that much of what we do and how we do it is a mystery to some of our colleagues. Obviously it is important that we communicate better what we do and how it is changing, because in a financially uncertain world if we are not valued we are vulnerable. If we think that what we do is worthwhile, we need to promote ourselves, as we cannot rely on other people agreeing with us. Cataloguing has had an image problem for years - or, as someone once put it to me, "People think librarians are odd but even librarians think cataloguers are odd" (thanks for that!) It's certainly still true - a recent post on LISNPN here ruffled a few feathers ("Is there any position more dreaded ...") and drew this response on the High Visibility Cataloguing blog (set up recently with just this advocacy role in mind). Outside libraries, the role of cataloguer is even more derided - Tim Coates, library campaigner and consultant, reserves his deepest contumely for cataloguers (although I think he excludes academic libraries from that).
As I've worked in special, public and academic libraries, I'm well aware that there's an element within librarianship which looks down on public libraries - I've seen it from both sides of the fence and it has surfaced occasionally during the discussion on advocacy. It is hardly surprising that public libraries are vulnerable to outside attack if they cannot depend on support from within their own profession. Although I work in an academic library now, the years I spent in public libraries were a very important part of my career. I didn't expect it to be like that (I'd listened to too much negative publicity!) but I learned a great deal about librarianship there and it informs everything I do now. (Sweeping generalisation coming up) I think that on the whole those who say they do not use the public library service fall into the category of young/youngish people in full time employment. A word to the wise: being young and in full time work does not last forever!
Advocacy, or at the very least absence of negativity about different spheres of library work, is surely essential. Gone are the days when we can hide away in the stacks and take for granted that everyone will continue to value what we do and fund it. Activism is what happens when advocacy has failed, or when there has been too much complacency (and there have certainly been senior figures in the library profession who have been happy to bend to whatever wind blows for short term advantage without apparently considering the long term for their service). Active involvement in campaigns to save library services is not for everyone, and happily it is not needed everywhere - yet - but one would hope that at least moral support and an understanding of the principles at stake would be forthcoming.
It might be apposite to remember that CILIP has a code of professional practice which "applies ethical principles to the different groups and interests to which CILIP members must relate", and its section D, "Responsibilities to society" begins: "One of the distinguishing features of professions is that their knowledge and skills are at the service of society at large, and do not simply serve the interests of the immediate customer." Of course many people working in the field of librarianship are not members of CILIP and are free not to consider themselves bound by its ethical code. The implication is clear, though: no librarian is an island!
Advocacy can take the form of speaking for the profession outside it, promoting your own service to your immediate users, and promoting your part of it to those who make decisions about your service.
As a subject librarian in a university, I need to connect with staff and students, to promote the collection I'm responsible for and help people to get the best out of it. As a cataloguer, traditionally my role is more hidden than that. For years cataloguers at my place of work have been literally hidden away, first in a basement and now in a different building located at a distance from most of the site libraries. We are much better integrated than we used to be: at one time we were not included in meetings or really in any of the activities other professional staff took part in. Even so I think that much of what we do and how we do it is a mystery to some of our colleagues. Obviously it is important that we communicate better what we do and how it is changing, because in a financially uncertain world if we are not valued we are vulnerable. If we think that what we do is worthwhile, we need to promote ourselves, as we cannot rely on other people agreeing with us. Cataloguing has had an image problem for years - or, as someone once put it to me, "People think librarians are odd but even librarians think cataloguers are odd" (thanks for that!) It's certainly still true - a recent post on LISNPN here ruffled a few feathers ("Is there any position more dreaded ...") and drew this response on the High Visibility Cataloguing blog (set up recently with just this advocacy role in mind). Outside libraries, the role of cataloguer is even more derided - Tim Coates, library campaigner and consultant, reserves his deepest contumely for cataloguers (although I think he excludes academic libraries from that).
As I've worked in special, public and academic libraries, I'm well aware that there's an element within librarianship which looks down on public libraries - I've seen it from both sides of the fence and it has surfaced occasionally during the discussion on advocacy. It is hardly surprising that public libraries are vulnerable to outside attack if they cannot depend on support from within their own profession. Although I work in an academic library now, the years I spent in public libraries were a very important part of my career. I didn't expect it to be like that (I'd listened to too much negative publicity!) but I learned a great deal about librarianship there and it informs everything I do now. (Sweeping generalisation coming up) I think that on the whole those who say they do not use the public library service fall into the category of young/youngish people in full time employment. A word to the wise: being young and in full time work does not last forever!
Advocacy, or at the very least absence of negativity about different spheres of library work, is surely essential. Gone are the days when we can hide away in the stacks and take for granted that everyone will continue to value what we do and fund it. Activism is what happens when advocacy has failed, or when there has been too much complacency (and there have certainly been senior figures in the library profession who have been happy to bend to whatever wind blows for short term advantage without apparently considering the long term for their service). Active involvement in campaigns to save library services is not for everyone, and happily it is not needed everywhere - yet - but one would hope that at least moral support and an understanding of the principles at stake would be forthcoming.
Thursday, 7 July 2011
Thing 3 (Part 3) : Work and play : Never the twain shall meet?
I don't make any attempt to separate the professional and personal sides of my life. I take the view that as a whole person, all the parts are the sum of the whole, and I would find it difficult to keep them completely separate. Unless you do succeed in keeping the different parts of life firmly in their boxes, one effect of social media is to blur the boundaries. Colleagues have no doubt recently discovered things about me they might not have guessed, and I've certainly had new light shed on the working lives of some friends and family which I would not have known much about before. I try to behave online in the same way I do in real life, which mainly means not swearing in public, and not necessarily sharing political and religious opinions with all comers (but I do have some and they are not all secret!)
As one whose career began in the days when The Librarian was a distant figure who swept past you in the corridor without apparently knowing your name, I rather like the "levelling" aspect of social media: some senior figures in the profession engage readily with those at the beginning of their careers. That's not without its dangers, particularly within an institution: imagine having to sack someone who was a Facebook friend, or a disciplinary issue with someone you have been chatting to on Twitter! Could social media distort a recruitment process? Make difficult decisions at work more difficult? I'm not in a position of having to supervise staff much now (been there!), but I can see the potential pitfalls.
My Facebook page is fairly bland: I took the opportunity of the recent profile changes to remove educational details, &c., because I was getting some pretty silly targeted advertising, but it wouldn't be hard to work out where I've been and what I've done. For sentimental reasons, I'm clinging to my film camera - ah, those far-off days twiddling things in liquid and the magic of watching the picture slowly appearing on the film! I know this can't go on forever, I admire the photos which others share, but as I haven't yet succumbed to the digital age there are not many images of me out there. I suspect that a lot of the sensitivity around about Facebook is about photographs.
The Welsh-speaking world is quite small: we brush up against each other in more than one sphere and the idea of completely separating work and the rest of life is even more difficult among the Cymry Cymraeg, especially in smaller places - I bet anyone from Aberystwyth could tell you the religious affiliation of lots of people they know professionally, for instance. (Interestingly, sometimes this world does exist in a separate dimension: you might have a Welsh-speaking neighbour or colleague and never realise that within that Welsh world your neighbour is a famous poet or singer!) Other things can undermine any hope of separating life at work and life outside, too. If you have children, you are thrown together with other people who have children the same age (who could be colleagues, senior or junior, academic staff, or students). My comments refer to academic libraries, as that's where I am now, but for anyone working in a public library and living in the community they serve the boundary can be more of an issue, even without the additional social media factor.
Privacy is maintained by a certain amount of self-censorship, and I'm lucky enough to work somewhere where secrecy is not necessary. On the whole, I think I'm happy to stick with my mixed approach, while bearing in mind the things that might derail it.
As one whose career began in the days when The Librarian was a distant figure who swept past you in the corridor without apparently knowing your name, I rather like the "levelling" aspect of social media: some senior figures in the profession engage readily with those at the beginning of their careers. That's not without its dangers, particularly within an institution: imagine having to sack someone who was a Facebook friend, or a disciplinary issue with someone you have been chatting to on Twitter! Could social media distort a recruitment process? Make difficult decisions at work more difficult? I'm not in a position of having to supervise staff much now (been there!), but I can see the potential pitfalls.
My Facebook page is fairly bland: I took the opportunity of the recent profile changes to remove educational details, &c., because I was getting some pretty silly targeted advertising, but it wouldn't be hard to work out where I've been and what I've done. For sentimental reasons, I'm clinging to my film camera - ah, those far-off days twiddling things in liquid and the magic of watching the picture slowly appearing on the film! I know this can't go on forever, I admire the photos which others share, but as I haven't yet succumbed to the digital age there are not many images of me out there. I suspect that a lot of the sensitivity around about Facebook is about photographs.
The Welsh-speaking world is quite small: we brush up against each other in more than one sphere and the idea of completely separating work and the rest of life is even more difficult among the Cymry Cymraeg, especially in smaller places - I bet anyone from Aberystwyth could tell you the religious affiliation of lots of people they know professionally, for instance. (Interestingly, sometimes this world does exist in a separate dimension: you might have a Welsh-speaking neighbour or colleague and never realise that within that Welsh world your neighbour is a famous poet or singer!) Other things can undermine any hope of separating life at work and life outside, too. If you have children, you are thrown together with other people who have children the same age (who could be colleagues, senior or junior, academic staff, or students). My comments refer to academic libraries, as that's where I am now, but for anyone working in a public library and living in the community they serve the boundary can be more of an issue, even without the additional social media factor.
Privacy is maintained by a certain amount of self-censorship, and I'm lucky enough to work somewhere where secrecy is not necessary. On the whole, I think I'm happy to stick with my mixed approach, while bearing in mind the things that might derail it.
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