Reading aloud

I read a chapter or two of a chosen book (often chosen by me, admittedly) to my child, aged 10, every night. I really enjoy this time for winding down at the end of the day. It's a chance to introduce him to books he might not otherwise think of trying. I was much read to as a child myself, well into my teens. It was a family tradition: my grandfather, who did not have the advantage of a university education but was nevertheless widely read, loved reading the works of Dickens aloud (doing all the voices). I didn't benefit much from that as he died when I was quite young, but the habit persisted. It is probably the way I encountered quite a few of the classics. Good writing stands up well to being read aloud: in fact, whether something sounds good read aloud is one yardstick for measuring good writing, I think.

It is several years since I first had the surprised comment from another parent, "Oh, are you still reading to him? Can't he read yet then?" Even a relative who is a retired teacher has said something along the lines of "I don't remember anyone ever reading to me, but of course I could read by the time I was 3". It seems a pity that reading aloud should be seen as something you only do for those who can't read for themselves. You can read books which may be a bit beyond a child's own reading age: that's how you can expand their vocabulary, and that's how they pick up the rhythms of the language (or, in our case, two languages). It's also a chance to share and enjoy both old and new favourites together. I have only one child, so I don't have to juggle different ages/reading ages/bedtimes, which must make the whole bedtime-reading venture a bit more complicated.

Choosing the right moment to introduce a book can be a bit of an imprecise art. I've abandoned one or two temporarily and returned to them later with more success. We have many (old) books at home, and I am greatly enjoying revisiting some childhood favourites, but we also benefit hugely from having the wonderfully refurbished Cathays Library within walking distance to provide new authors to stretch our horizons and to fill the gaps where something from the past has escaped the net. Recent successes include "The secret garden", which I loved in childhood and which my son also enjoyed, and Dodie Smith's "101 dalmatians", which somehow passed me by as a child so that was new for both of us (I didn't even know it was a Christmas story, so that was an added bonus!). At the moment we are reading "The borrowers afield", having read the first book some time ago and then having recently enjoyed the rather different TV adaptation with Stephen Fry at Christmas.

I doubt whether many children today (with honourable exceptions, of course) are ever likely to be the natural readers my generation was, as we had fewer other options for entertaining ourselves. That makes shared reading all the more important, in my view. I hope to fit quite a few more good books in before it's deemed to be "not cool".

How reliable are our reference sources: or, how old was Bernice Rubens?

'As a child I was simply a liar by nature ... I was happily at home with mendacity. It was less boring than the truth. My natural home lay in fiction.' - Bernice Rubens, "When I grow up" (Little, Brown, 2005), pp. 2-3.


We cataloguers spend a lot of time trying to identify authors, usually by using dates of birth to distinguish them from others with the same name. I sometimes wonder whether we worry too much about this: some users do not want this level of detail. On the other hand, it is useful to be able to attribute works to the right author. We use Library of Congress authority records where possible.

The whole vexed question of dates of birth and age seems to be a much more sensitive issue to a previous generation. A few years ago when I was the branch librarian in a northern Cardiff suburb a new system was introduced and we were asked to add dates of birth of our users. What a can of worms that opened! The reason was to get a picture of which groups of people were using the library, either as a prelude to reaching out to less well-represented groups or, if that were not possible, to concentrate suitable resources on those who were using it. We were also discussing what age-specific discounts or benefits could be offered to those over 60, and we needed to be able to identify who was and who was not 18, for permission to use the Internet (new to us then). We were not interested in individuals’ personal details, and, as librarians among you will know, librarians do not ever give such information to anyone else. Several people refused point blank to give their date of birth, some left never to return in a rage at being so insulted, one man shouted “so how old are you then?” and looked flabbergasted when all the staff in turn told him their ages. (Far more men than women objected). One lady told me she was 46, which I duly recorded, and then, overhearing me explain to someone else that there was no charge to the over 60s for a particular service, she suddenly aged by 15 years.

Another former Cardiff resident, the author Bernice Rubens, who died in 2004, is recorded just about everywhere, including obituaries in The Times and The Guardian, as having been born in Cardiff on 26^th (or sometimes 28^th) July, 1928. She attended Cardiff High School and what is now Cardiff University, where she read English. The Library of Congress gives two references for the source of her date of birth: Who’s who (1983) and the Jewish Yearbook (also 1983).  These seem to be cast-iron authorities: but are they? Who is the source of dates in such books? Should we really regard such works as authoritative?

Elderly current and former residents of Cardiff alive today will indignantly tell you that Bernice Rubens was older than she said she was, that they remember her at school/synagogue/locally and that they are sure that the 1928 date is wrong. After her death, one such gentleman wrote a letter to The Times, setting out his recollections of her as a child older than he was, giving his own date of birth as 1926, and challenging The Times to prove that the birth date in her obituary was correct.

Among items recently added to stock in Cardiff University Library are copies of the school magazine of Cardiff High School in the 1930s, and the one for 1938 caught my eye, as it contains an account by Bernice, surname spelled Reuben, Form VA3, of a school trip to Dunkirk (“not particularly famous for anything” at the time). It does not read like the work of a 10 year old!

It may seem trivial to bother about a harmless lie, but she did upset her school contemporaries by claiming in interviews that they were anti-Semitic. There certainly was an anti-Semitic element in Cardiff (as elsewhere) and no doubt there were indeed some misguided girls at her school. In the same 1938 magazine, another girl describes attending a summer school in Berlin, arranged by the local government union NALGO – “as guests of high officials of the Nazi regime”.  The propaganda speeches are duly reported, with admiration for the “wonderful physique” of the German people. The previous year’s magazine, however, had included an article on Zionism by another Jewish pupil, of whom there were many at the school at the time.

If you are going to drop a few years from your age you would be better advised not to make public allegations about your classmates: those years may not seem significant in the great scheme of things, but it means you are talking about (and upsetting) a completely different cohort of people. A few years is a long time in the life of a school, and attitudes did change between the late 1920s/1930s and the 1940s.

I am a great admirer of Bernice Rubens’ work, so when her posthumous memoir, “When I grow up” appeared in 2005 I read it with much enjoyment. With the Cardiff rumours at the back of my mind I wondered how successfully she could publish a memoir without specifying her age (especially difficult if wartime comes into it, as that is a watershed event for most people who lived through it). She does manage to write her story in a way that would not lead readers to question the chronology, unless they had reason. The timing of her period at university is the main weak point: she completed her three-year course, graduated and went to teach in Birmingham before the end of the war by her own account, although a birth date of 1928 would have meant that she was only 17 in 1945. She also includes a photo of a page from a newspaper article about "twenty-three years old Bernice Rubens" - it's undated, but she supplies the date, 1946.

I’m an amateur genealogist in my spare time, and with access to the indexes of vital records through the CyMAL-funded public library subscription to such tools as Ancestry (library edition) and Find My Past, I thought I would try to prove the truth of the rumours one way or another. I had already failed to find evidence of her date of birth, but now I tried again, armed with the extra “e” and without the “s”.  Her  name at marriage in 1947 is registered as “Reuben” (in her memoir in fact she says that her father's surname was Reuben); she and all her siblings were registered at birth as Reuben. It took me just a few minutes to track down her birth in 1923 – not only 5 years earlier than every source states, but also not even at the same time of year (unless her parents were very late with the registration), as the birth is registered in the last quarter (Oct-Dec).  Splendid – not only did she shed five years, she also acquired a summer birthday! (Why didn’t I think of that? My birthday is in gloomy November!) Surprisingly, her date of birth given at the time of her death according to the index is the 1928 one, so she really did succeed in rewriting her own history, if I and older Cardiff residents have got this right!

Intriguingly, in her novel “The elected member”, for which she won the Booker Prize in 1970, the main character, Norman Zweck, is a linguistically talented young Jewish man whose mother lies about his age to make his gifts look more impressive, even delaying his bar mitzvah for three years. Was this Bernice Rubens’ own private literary joke, or a clue for her readers?

Words in vogue : whinge

Whinge : to whine, to complain peevishly; an annoying complaint
Whine : a shrill protracted cry, to cry in a subdued plaintive tone
(OED)

Whingeing (or whinging - but I think it needs the 'e') and whining is what many of us, me included, accuse our children of doing all the time. (How do they learn so young how to strike that particular high tone and falling note? It gets attention but it's surely so irritating as to be counter-productive!) There's also, of course, that antipodean insult, "whinging Pom" - the Brit who is never satisfied with anything, and always complaining.

It's a word which seems to be getting a lot of airing at the moment. If anyone protests about anything, they can expect some commentator to describe them as "whingeing". I am thinking particularly of it in relation to protests at library closures, but I've seen it recently aimed at a wide variety of others too. It seems quite inappropriate to me, as angry people protesting at perceived injustices are not usually peevish or whiny, they are merely expressing a different point of view from that held by the insulters. We do, after all, still live in a society in which people are free to express a variety of opinions.

I don't mind the "whingeing Pom" jibe, but I do mind the spreading practice of dismissing legitimate complaint and protest. The clue as to why it is an unpleasant insult lies in what I said about children. It's an attempt to belittle others (by the implied likening of them to whiny children). Let's all agree to disagree without these unlovely attempts to disparage the views of others. I'm going to try not to use it at all - even under duress from child!

Punctuation as a weapon : or, the inverted comma rampant

I've been becoming increasingly conscious recently of the use of language to make a point. I don't just mean the actual words used, but their context. Anyone with an Internet connection can broadcast their views to the world at the press of a button. I'm all for free speech, of course, but I'm not so keen on reading a lot of spitefulness.

One thing which seems to be happening quite a lot is the use of the inverted comma (quotation marks, sadly also known as "quotes" - ugh) to belittle and demean whichever group of people are the target of scorn. Thus, James Delingpole on public sector "workers" here and Tim Coates on the "profession" of librarianship here are trying to convey the ideas that people in the public sector do not actually do any work, librarians are not worthy of the adjective professional, &c.. Jacob Rees-Mogg's articles are chock-full of inverted commas, to the extent that it's quite difficult to see which bit of what he is saying you are not supposed to be taking at face value. (He sounds cheerful enough, though, so perhaps he isn't really having a go at anyone!). This blog by "categorically not the other one" captures his habit nicely.
Has the inverted comma become the weapon of choice in the blogosphere? Has it replaced terms such as "so-called"? I'd be interested in any other examples people come across - I've only mentioned a few which spring readily to mind, and I'm sure there are a lot more out there!

Thing 23 : reflection - what next?

So here is the end of CPD23 (but, of course, it's only the beginning ...)
I'm a bit late finishing, but I hope I've still done enough to get that certificate! It's been an interesting experience, and I have really appreciated the chance to do a free course which hasn't tied me down with specific times (I registered for the ECDL a few years ago and I've never managed to fit that in to my timetable!). There's enough flexibility for the time challenged (I wish I had kept up as it went along though!)

The big thing which it has got me doing is the blog, although it is still very basic and I haven't yet strayed beyond CPD23. I'm hoping that I will keep it up now the programme has finished. I'm still conscious of the rather self-indulgent aspect of talking about yourself in public a lot (hence the title of the blog), and I'm aware that I am slipping into anecdotage at times. Still, perhaps the recent and not-so-recent library story has value for new professionals too, to understand how we have got to where we are now. I intended to make the blog look more interesting but haven't yet mastered my anxiety about using images, something I must do as blogs with pictures look so much more appealing. Watch this space!

Some of the tools we have looked at have great potential for me and I hope to revisit them one at a time and get to know them better (I'm thinking of Dropbox and Evernote in particular). Some of the others will be less relevant but at least I now know about them, and I may find a use for them. One really surprising outcome is that I'm definitely going to revert to the written appointments diary which fell by the wayside a while ago due to a combination of unexpected events and our getting an electronic calendar at work. Also, although it's an online programme, another unexpected result was actually meeting others locally and getting to know people better.

I don't think I'm going to share a formal analysis of my strengths and weaknesses with the world, but I'm hoping this element of "thing 23" will help with the ghastly and ever-evolving appraisal form I struggle with every year. (An aside - all the emphasis on goals and outcomes can sometimes have a knock-on effect on other people. I am behind with everything at work partly because there are lots of things which need to be done because they fulfil somebody else's goals and outcomes!)

Thank you to all those who put the course together and planned it so well, and made all these "things" so accessible.

Here's my six-word story:

Still got a lot to learn!

Thing 22 : volunteering

Can't get a job without experience, can't get experience without a job : it's an old problem. So why not work for nothing for a while to accumulate some experience (and perhaps to try out different types of work to see what suits you?)

I have to accept that some new professionals are saying that volunteering has been a help to them and has led to employment opportunities. That's great, if so. I've got a lot of reservations about this, but obviously it does get you that experience without which so many doors seem to be closed. I also know a number of young recent graduates who lead a double life: there's the work they get paid to do (shop assistants, barmen, waitresses) and then there's the thing they trained to do or the thing they aspire to, which doesn't pay (historical textiles, art history, fashion, playing in a band). Major couture houses rely heavily on interns, television companies and political parties use the free labour of eager aspirants hoping to get a foot on the ladder. There are far more young people working for free in some of these industries than there are ultimately opportunities for paid work. I wouldn't like to see libraries fall into this category.

People with private means are free to work for nothing, but that creates a difficult precedent for everyone else. With all the KPMG-inspired talk of volunteer-run libraries, a new strange attitude seems to be emerging: nice people don't expect to be paid for what they do, nice people wouldn't greedily insist on money for themselves to keep a service going, nice people offer their time. We all know, of course, that we need money to live on, and with that money we pay taxes and buy goods and services. Paid employment is an essential for most of us. The generosity of wealthy people with their time can have the effect of shutting other people out. If there is a plentiful supply of free labour, it may be that the employer will never need to offer paid work, which would create a vicious circle: you may gain experience but never then get the chance to get a paid job using it.

I qualified at a time when it would not have been expected or really acceptable to undertake voluntary work for any length of time. Quite a lot of contemporaries got into the workplace eventually after year-long low-paid placements on government-backed job creation schemes (e.g. the Manpower Services Commission). Some of these projects were very worthwhile, and while they were usually finite they sometimes led on to other things. I did work for the Church of England for nothing for experience for quite a while, at its request, but on reflection, while it was valuable experience, I am not sure that it did me any favours. That which is freely given is not always appreciated, and of course it may not be what is wanted - in which case it is much more difficult to tell someone so!

So, on the whole, I have deep reservations about voluntary work within a profession, except as short-term focused placements for those trying to acquire experience at the start of their careers. Voluntary work outside the profession is quite another thing, and there are lots of ways in which people with time to spare can make themselves useful, putting something back into society and gaining experience and some gratification at the same time.

Thing 21 : job applications and interviews

Just thinking about this one makes me feel miserable. So much hangs on successfully finding a suitable niche for yourself, and yet at times it can seem an almost impossible task. Fortunately it's a long time since I have had to go through this horror, and I am very much hoping it won't ever be necessary again, but you never know, especially given the current economic climate. I do not have a current CV, and I think I would need to start from scratch again if I had to do one now. I did at one time have the art of the written application so finely honed that I got a high proportion of interviews. Sadly if you are no good at interviews you don't get any better at it as time goes by - if anything I have found that you get worse ("that answer must have been the wrong one, I must find another one").

The interview process can have its lighter moments. *whispers* some people are not very good at conducting interviews - some consolation perhaps!  Most memorable disasters included the library which had summoned all the candidates for a day which was to have included a tour and sessions with current staff. The library had flooded in the night and everyone had been sent home, so we spent the whole day shivering in a different part of the campus which was deserted as it was out of term time, and never saw the library or met the staff (but had to hang about all day just the same!) At another interview candidates were given lunch, plate in one hand and glass in another, and then invited to traipse up some narrow stairs, through numerous doors and across a courtyard. Maybe that one was a test of social skills! Most annoying was the university library whose interview process required two days, with a shortlist of five being whittled down to two before lunchtime on the second day. Only as we three who did not reach the final cut set off to the station (without any lunch) did the box-ticking nature of this exercise become apparent. Out of five candidates, there were three white people and two from ethnic minorities, three men and two women; so, two white men, one white woman (me), one man and one woman each from other ethnic groups, thus exactly complying with an HR target of a 3:2 m/f and white/non-white ratio. No prizes for guessing which the final two were. This simply made me feel that I had been wasting my time: I don't want to be a token female (and I did really want the job!) On another occasion I tentatively asked a County Librarian of a public library service whether there were any plans to automate, and got the answer "over my dead body!" (This was in the 1990s, so it was not an unreasonable question!)

I could go on, but I won't: dwelling on this sort of thing embitters the soul and gets you nowhere. It's an employer's market at the moment (for those who are able to recruit at all), so things are not easy for those who are looking. Best of luck to everyone at the start of their careers, and even more luck to the older ones, because whatever equal opportunity policies are in place it does not become easier when you are older. I am going to take on board all the good advice in the cpd blogpost, and I may update my CV, but I am not going to spend too much more time thinking about this topic unless or until it is forced on me, as I think I've done my share.