The past is a foreign country (but you don't need a visa to visit)

My last post ended (rather suddenly; I was in a rush) with a 1956 film for the Sheffield City Council Libraries Committee entitled "Books in Hand". It's a film to which I regularly find myself returning, as a reminder of how library services aspired to be in the post-war decades, and how much our own aspirations coincide with those of half a century ago. There's emphasis in the film of looking bright and new rather than fusty and drab ("Here's a dreary lot in a library of yesterday... What a contrast with this typical bookcase in the libraries today"; "The old, restrictive, dull junior sections have gone; Today the policy is freedom of choice in an atmosphere of beauty"), and while the stress is on books, there's a determined effort to convey the full range of library services: reference enquiries, civic information, local history, filmshows, gramaphone recitals, theatre performances, and engagement with children (including information literacy outreach, storytelling, study classes and social activities) and the elderly.

It's useful to be reminded that our service and our aspirations are consistent with those of the past, and that our attempts at reinvention or innovation may not be as novel as we may sometimes assume. Perhaps there is also stuff which we were doing back then, which we may have stopped doing, for one reason or another, and which we would like to do again. In such cases, the past may have some crucial advice for us to take on board. It's a theme which, quite by chance (or by something in the water), @LibWig recently addressed in an effective manner in this 'blog post. And it's a theme which I shall continue to puddle here.

In academia we are generally taught to concentrate our research on recent history; perhaps the last ten years or so. Newer is better: currency is valuable currency when ascertaining relevance (that older items are less likely to be online helps a little, too). There's good sense in this approach, of course: it thins out our reading, and one might hope that any key knowledge of the past survives through chains of citations to the relevant present. But this is not always the case. There are gaps in our history: occasionally theories and ideas skip a generation and in such cases the wisdom of the past does not reach through to us. Two thirds of a century ago, a new technology allowed us to reproduce texts and documents in a tiny data format that could be stored on a small card or cartridge and brought up on a screen for reading. Millions of texts were copied into this format, allowing disposal of bulky originals in certain circumstances. The technology of microforming may be different to the technology of today's digitization projects, but some useful advice may lie buried in a journal article somewhere, perhaps on microfiche and therefore lying unread.

Or perhaps not. But surely it's worth a look (if you can find a microform reader to read it on).

Je m'en fiche...

The analogy of microform to digital extends beyond digitization. There was a real microform fever: at one extreme, microform catalogues, which I can only assume must have been a right pain in the bum; at the other end, photocharging: one of many attempts to replace Browne with something a little more hi-tech, in this case by taking a photograph of the book and the borrower's card when an item was checked out. Technology for technology's sake, to an extent, but it apparently sped things up whilever the machinery worked.

In the mid-1970s, as computers began to arrive in our libraries, a host of new technologies emerged, not least in bookcharging. The barcode systems of Plessey and their innovating competitors Telepen have become commonplace. In 1977 Telepen replaced Bookamatic (a system using carbon paper and embossed plastic cards for books and patrons, that emulated the paperwork methods employed in credit card transactions of the day) as the charging system at the institution where I currently work. Perhaps the most futuristic charging technology, though, was the ALS  label system. Perhaps it sounds familiar:

"book numbers are coded in the form of labels which are fixed inside the book... When an issue is made, the information encoded in the labels is read electronically rather than mechanically... the book label sensor (which is built into the counter) is capable of reading the label as the unopened book is passed over the counter top."

- Bramall, P.J.D. (ed) (1974);
"Lancashire County Libraries";
VINE 11 (November 1974), pp3-4

I'm pretty sure we had ALS  in Rotherham in the '80s, and those of you at the right side of Emerald's paywall can find a good description of it courtesy of the University of Strathclyde (1978). It worked along the same lines as RADAR, picking up the reflected signal of an encoded array of ≈1cm diameter aluminium dots within the label. While it therefore fell somewhat short of RFID in that the book had to be correctly placed over the scanner and only one book could be read at a time, there are clear similarities between the technologies. But in those days before self service, it was still necessary to open the book in order to stamp it with the due-date, and so it was that the black magic was wasted upon us.

On the subject of RFID, it's perhaps worth mentioning that the RF part of that technology has been a feature of libraries since the '80s (the shelves around me right now are stuffed with foxing labels containing the familiar square circuit of an RF antenna) as a security detection device. These tags are now largely obsolete; magnetic strips are a simpler technology and one more suited to self-issue (they lend themselves more readily to the desensitization and resensitization demanded of library stock control). Much of the deployment of RFID has neglected to acknowledge the similarities with past systems, and this can trigger cynicism in older employees who may think they've seen it all before. In many cases they have, and all too often we ignore them.

All books in the library are fitted with RF antennae
so that they may enjoy listening to Radio 4 LW.

RFID is new and exciting (although where I work it is employed in such a limited way that we may as well be using ALS) in the way that tags can be read (allowing 'intelligent shelving') and the way in which database cross-referencing determines security status (potentially permitting automatic bookcharging as we pass through the door). But not everything under the sun is as new as we might be led to think. Technology is, by and large, the safer bet with regards to novelty. Theory is often far less progressive. It is not unknown for a library manager to come into a library and implement a cutting-edge new form of counter service or an exciting new loan policy that is actually identical to a policy that was in place twenty or thirty years ago. The older library assistants shrug and tut. They've seen it all before.

Why did we stop doing six-hour loans? Why did we feel the need to reintroduce fines when in 1977 lending restrictions for patrons with overdue books were sufficient penalty? Before we abandon fines or reintroduce short-loan categories (I'm plucking these examples ad hoc and on the hop you understand), perhaps we need to look back and ascertain why and how we got where we are. The past may be a foreign country, but so are foreign countries, and we've learnt an awful lot from them over the years.

Circumstances change, of course; what failed thirty years ago may prove quite effective today. But that doesn't mean we should disregard that which went before. What works in the US may not be applicable to the UK but it doesn't stop us reading about it and considering the possibilities. A bit of wider, deeper research can only add to our plans or debates, and in the case of history it provides us with a reasonable context for where we are now. As was at the core of @LibWig's post, it's important for new staff to engage with their more seasoned colleagues. Not only do the newbies learn from the experience of the oldies, but the oldies feel included in and less jaded by the newbies' discussions and proposals, and the newbies avoid becoming just another load of fresh graduates walking into the mistakes of yesterday. As someone once wrote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". 

Mini Library Camp North West, MaDLab

After the amazing experience of Library Camp UK last October, I was really ridiculously excited about attending this mini event in Manchester. Even an England batting collapse an hour before the 'unconference' afternoon was due to start could not dampen my enthusiasm, and so it was that I was the first person there save the wonderful organizers, my special networking earrings dangling from my lobes.

In the weeks before the day of the camp I had considered pitching a session on the wiki, but a massive flurry of likemindedness had seen the site inundated with notions similar to those that had been swimming, ill-disciplined, within my head, so it felt unnecessary to add to what seemed ample content: the sessions grid was satisfactorily filled to the point that choosing which session to attend was never an easy choice. Presented below is a summary of the four sessions I attended (in no particular order), liberally and indiscernibly sprinkled with some of my own thoughts.

Session 1 - "We're all doomed! Sustainability literacy, ecoliteracy and resilience"

@danpgrace set things going with this session on community resilience that followed from his recent dissertation (as a starting point on the subject one might do worse than "Community Resilience as a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities, and Strategy for Disaster Readiness" by Norris et al). In short, when bad things happen, a community is more resilient to those bad things if its members have a sense of equality. From a libraries point of view this resilience can be supported via localized services, taking advantage of local knowledge and local coping strategies. Different areas need different things in their library, and the extent to which the library's provision matches those needs varies from place to place. A community's meagre capital is all too often lost to businesses from outside that community, and retaining that capital, be it financial capital or some form of social capital, is a key goal.

A local library for local people: we'll have no trouble here.

Where can one go to access the internet for free or find a quiet place to study? An internet café or a pub with free wi-fi will charge you the ground-rent of a cuppa or a pint. The library, on the other hand, is a free municipal study space offering an almost sacred peace and quiet in a secular public environment. The library is about much more than books: it's about learning and exploration. You might even envisage a library without any books: a community space determined by its users.

This got us to thinking about the place we were in right now: Manchester Digital Laboratory, aka MadLab. Here's how their website describes the venue:

"It’s a space you can get together with like-minded individuals and work on your urban gardening, crochet, hacking, programming, media arts, filmmaking, animating project without worrying that you’re in a library, coffee shop, pub or other unsuitable venue."

- About MadLab.

It's interesting to note that MadLab is trying to set up its own book collection having acquired a number of donated texts. You create a community space like this and people come to it. One of the ways you might expand it is through the addition of a library. Effectively this is the reverse of the process by which a library might develop into a community space. There's a circle here and it's a virtuous one.

At this point Dan brought us back down to Earth, invoking the social theory of Manuel Castells: global businesses pursue a one-size-fits-all model of delivery, and produce a kind of cultural homogeneity. The influence of such models extends within the library and may be seen as the inspiration behind projects such as the introduction of self-service technology (Tescos have this, so why don't we?). The problem is that such systems have a potentially negative impact upon the community being served: an effective function of the library is that people come in, talk to one another, engage with staff and build relationships (perhaps the only human contact they'll have all day). If they're coming in, interacting with a machine and not having anyone to talk to, that is isolating and detrimental to community adhesion. 

Such embracing of technology poses another problem: the more we switch to digital systems, the more we balance our libraries upon an inverted pyramid at the bottom of which sits our energy supply. Even a ruthless business looking to mechanise and de-staff cannot help but be alert to the rising cost of fuel. We must be aware of the potential for redundancy in new technology (material redundancy as well as staff redundancy): The 925 year old Domesday Book is considerably more readable than the 25 year old Domesday Disc. Faced with a course between the Scylla of digital rights and the Charybdis of an impending energy crisis, we should not rush to sacrifice our paper holdings.

By accident or design, the adoption of technology serves to alienate those who do not have access to that technology. This may be the same mentality that sees QR codes as a hip, cool way of disseminating information without considering the fact that much of the population do not own smart-phones and are therefore disenfranchised, or the more cynical attempts to enforce a 'progress' born of economic expediency (ending cheque payments or shutting down analogue radio services, perhaps). A particularly crucial example of this technological tyranny is the online job application. From my own personal perspective, online job applications have the capacity to be wonderful things: no longer do I have to print out an umpteen-page-long application form, work out the right postage, and allow a sufficient period of time for it to work its way through the Royal Mail; now I can do it online in my back-bedroom at the last minute. But then I am a pampered middle-class type with a back-bedroom and a computer and access to the internet. I've also grown up with information technology, having got my first 8-bit computer when I was four. For me, online applications are a convenience. For someone of lesser means they are a pain in the bottom, and a pain that, as we have already seen, requires the pile cream of a library. So it is that we have to facilitate what is in effect an artificially created need. Quite how we go about this was the subject of Session 3:

Session 3 - "Show or do?" 

@afeitar pitched this session which took its inspiration from a blog post by Simon Barron. Should we spoon-feed our patrons with all that they desire or leave them to fend for themselves?  When somebody who has never used a computer before comes into our library and asks us to sign them up for an email account, or do some internet shopping for them, or fill out an online job application, we are likely to refuse them: it would be immoral for us to fill in their job application given that its completion implies some level of computer literacy inherent in the application process, but even to help them do their shopping is an unjustifiable use of our valuable time. There are certain patrons who are very good at getting our attention, often at the expense of those less confident or less willing to request our assistance, but necessarily we must consider computer literacy in the same terms that we treat...um...literacy: if we are lucky there may be one-to-one computer lessons to which we can direct people, in the same way that we may be able to offer adult literacy courses.

But people may not be coming to the library in the hope of getting trained. They are coming to simply get something done. And if we cannot oblige them they are going to go away unhappy, chuntering to themselves and everyone they meet about how rubbish we are. And this makes us sad.

That problems of information literacy appear in the academic as well as the public sector seem to demonstrate a lack of adequate information literacy training in the crowded school curriculum. In a results-driven secondary education it is hardly surprising that students are failing to make what becomes a vast intellectual leap to independent thought. With all this in mind, we tried to come up with some ways in which we might infiltrate the education system:

• Get teachers on board during their PGCE, before their way of thinking has 'fossilized'.
• Manage and promote responsible use of social media within schools rather than merely blocking it and driving it 'underground'.
• Avoid the need for spoon-feeding of sources in research exercises by having pupils research easy-to-mark scientific facts rather than opinion-based humanities topics.
• Engage with local library services!!!

Alas, some schools seem utterly disinterested in the latter point. It can be hard to get past the school secretary, and one contributor's engagement efforts were so unrequited that it felt akin to stalking the Literacy Coordinator.

The environment has changed. A school research exercise on China, say, would have seen the pupils consulting the school library's one book about China (all very easy to assess afterwards). By contrast, typing China into Google produces a claim of "About 4,090,000,000 results" (considerably harder to mark). No real surprise then that there should be little appetite to address in a realistic way the complexities of information literacy in the internet age.

This dramatic shift in available resources is not merely a problem for information literacy tuition. It also raises considerable questions about the role of reference libraries, and that is what we discussed in Session 2:

Session 2 - "Public reference libraries of the future"

@bumsonseats opened this session, as we pondered on whether, in a world where a host of equal or superior reference resources can be found online, the public reference library is anything more than a holding pen for homeless people. There were some bleak landscapes painted: some reference libraries closed as redundant; others where people wee in the corner because the toilets aren't signposted. The duplication of print and online content clearly poses an issue (although we have already examined above how burning our Britannicas may not be the right course of action for our communities), and some suggestions were made about how we might address this:

• Replace standard reference texts with more specialized materials where the overlap with the internet is less profound, perhaps targeting special interest groups via social media and other means.
• Make reference stock loanable: material practicalities of expensive stock aside, there's nothing more infuriating than finding an interesting book and not being able to take it with you, and so much reference stock is actually pretty useless unless you can take it out. 
• Scrap the reference department altogether and become Wikipedia editors to ensure veracity of content. Less flippantly, facilitate sessions for contributing to Wikipedia and other web resources, and assist users with the creation of online content. 

There is no article on Bob Carolgees in the Encylcopædia Britannica.

The reference library isn't just books. It's a physical space; often the hallowed study environment we encountered in the first session. We can make use of that space in inventive and constructive ways: establishing non-fiction reading groups, for instance. This question of use of space was something we explored in more depth in Session 4:

Session 4 - "Library Spaces"

@trine3m introduced this final session, by which point we were all very stuffed with cake. Short of changing libraries into cake shops, what ideas did we have about the function of our library spaces? A collection of books, an archive, a repository; a study space, a community forum? I personally see a growing divide between the book side of libraries and the space side of libraries (a duality we encountered in the first session). This is, in part, informed by my experience of 24 hour opening in academic libraries: the attraction at night-time seems not to be the books so much as the spaces and the computers: the library becomes a hang-out, a study and a computer room, and one could envisage dedicated common-rooms, studies or IT labs being just as successful by moonlight. If we open, they will come.

Just as such academic libraries have gained a near monopoly on accessible campus study space, so public libraries hold a near-monopoly on free public space, and that's a nice thing for us to have. But public libraries are seldom as big as academic libraries, and are therefore unable to offer quite the same variety of environments. An academic library may have a silent study, a quiet study, group study rooms, expansive computer suites... a public library might be lucky to have two rooms.

How we use those rooms is the tricky bit. We might have a whole host of bold ideas about community engagement: bike fixing workshops, 3D printer clubs, computer courses, advice sessions for council services, clinical and behavioural therapy workshops and the likes, but we have to juggle them with the demand for a reading environment, study spaces and books. The aspiration is for a place where people feel comfortable and where they are given the confidence to explore new worlds: coming in and borrowing books, but then leaving their comfort zone and engaging in a spot of bicycle maintenance.

One contributor spoke of how their very traditional library had, as a consequence of spending restraints, drifted into being more of a community centre. Traditionalists had said 'this is a library: it should stay a library', although it was unclear if any of them were alienated by the changes. What was clear is that the new community centre model was a popular one, bringing in people who weren't coming in before.

I must confess that this concerns me. There is, after all, a baby in our bathwater. It appears that while communities may once have had a village hall, this venue has been lost in one way or another, and now the library is taking on that role. This is a good thing: village halls are a good thing; but we must be careful to ensure that while we assume the functions of a village hall we do not stop being a library. Libraries are important too. The value of the village hall was neglected, and the hall got sold off, but now perhaps the value of the library is being neglected too, and while the hall is just a space (a space that might well be aptly invented elsewhere), the library requires infrastructure: infrastructure that cannot so easily be acquired.

My local library, like many in my local authority, is part of a larger "Community Resource Centre": the one building combines the village hall (complete with bar and exhibition space), an activities room, and a lending library with all the usual bits and bobs of a local library. This is a good state of affairs: a purpose built combination of the library and village hall functions. It shows what can be achieved, although it requires the space to do it, and space costs money. There's a reason village halls were sold off in the first place.

Having depressed ourselves slightly with talk about the current situation in public libraries funding, we headed off to the pub, where I had some fantastic conversations (and several pints of beer) with the likes of @spoontragedy, @misswizzie (who, it turns out, works just up the road from me), and @theatregrad, among others. It was, as anticipated, a brilliant afternoon (and evening), and considerable thanks and plaudits go to  @bumsonseats, @shedsue, and @richardveevers for organizing it. 

I'll wrap up this post with a link to a film made for Sheffield City Council Libraries Committee in 1956, entitled "Books In Hand". A lot of what we discussed in the sessions about space and engagement put me in mind of this film, and it's a reminder that a lot of what we do or talk about doing is stuff that, to some extent or other, we've done or tried to do before...

LibDay8: Quiet in the Library

Last week I took part in Round Eight of the Library Day in the Life Project. This is the second time I've taken part in the Library Day in the Life Project; last time I was off work for the summer and busy with my librarianship dissertation (slightly frightening to think that that was half a year ago). Since then, I've graduated, and am currently looking for my first job as a qualified librarian. Meanwhile, I continue with the day job.

I've had the day job now for over six years. I'm based in an academic library in the wapentake of Strafford, Yorkshire, and my role is "General Assistant": a junior-grade Library Assistant. Above me are the "Information Assistants" who take the brunt of the counter services, while below me are the "Shelvers": elven creatures who flit about the stacks during certain phases of the Moon. 

It's been a varied job: varied in hours, in locations, in range of work, and in amount of work. But by default I work weekday afternoons at a leafy, squirrel-infested campus, currently populated in the most-part by trainee nurses and PE students.

Here's a pointless visual glance at how my working week worked out:

Each day has been reduced to a 24hr clock. Pink represents entertainment, grey is sleep, orange is the humdrum and the day-to-day, blue is travel, yellow is pissing about on the internet (or manning the returns desk, which tended to amount to the same thing this week), green is professional development activity of some kind or other, red is manual labour, and purple is office work or work-shadowing. 

Monday was surprisingly busy: the shelvers had failed to materialize over the weekend, so there was a backlog of shelving to be done. But books were returning quicker than usual too (presumably there'd been a hand-in or something). It was great: just like old times. We even had plenty of processing (new stock to be labelled and tagged) to keep us busy. However, by Tuesday the processing was beginning to wear thin (it comes up from the other campus in small bursts, and increasingly (and infuriatingly) arrives pre-processed from the distributor (who usually gets some aspect of it wrong)), The flood of returns had also abated. Some problems with a door upstairs kept me out of trouble for a bit, and after 3pm I am pretty much on my own on Tuesdays, so that helps with the workload too, but things were already beginning to look quite desperate. Wednesday was worse: I had to resort to tearing books apart and gluing them back together again (you can always find a few repairs if you look for them). After a while the silence became so bad that I decided to start working on (the third and final draft of) my last blog post. I would've employed some of my time doing a deep tidy of the collection had there not been a problem with the lighting in my area of the stacks.

Another sensitive restoration.
Gaffer-tape and PVA are our main weapons in our fight against decay.

Thursdays tend to be my busiest day as I'm pretty much on my own for most of the afternoon and there are trolleys to be made up for the shelvers who come in on Fridays. No matter how quiet a week might be, I can usually keep myself reasonably occupied on a Thursday, and so it was this week. Fridays too are quite planned out for me: two scheduled shifts on the returns desk (assisting with the self-issue machines and supporting the students' use of printers and binding equipment) push me effortlessly through the first half of the afternoon, and then there are more trolleys to be made up for the weekend shelvers. It used to be that this making up of trolleys (that is, sorting and ordering books onto a trolley in order for them to be shelved) was the main part of my job, but that was in the days when we had more books (before the other campus started stealing them all) and when we had shelvers here every day. Now they're just in on Fridays and the weekend, and so I must find other work to keep me busy during the rest of the week. This is usually a mix of sorting, processing, repairs, stock-tidying and generally assisting the staff and students. But this week students were for some reason in short supply and so thumb twiddling necessarily ensued.

How quiet is a quiet week? About a quarter of my time was devoted to manual labour, and another quarter to back-office work (and to work-shadowing one of the librarians). An eighth of my week was spent on the returns desk, which leaves about three eighths of my time at work spent struggling to find something useful to do. In that respect it represents the lower extreme of the varying workload we tend to get in our library. At least it means I had time to tweet about it! Come Easter we will be buzzing about the place, struggling to keep the books from piling on the floor, but for now we can sit back a little and savour the silence. Trouble is that too much silence can get a little tedious. You just have to keep busy as best you can.

Rough breakdown of my working hours this last week, showing just how dead things were.

Outside of work, what did I get up to? On average I spent nine hours a day in bed (to say I was sleeping would be an exaggeration, but it's the thought that counts), and eight hours a day being entertained in some other way (spoken-word radio and mp3s took up the best bit of three hours per day, music and telly about 1½ hpd each, computer Scrabble (my favoured game this week (I'm having a rest from Elite)) about 1 hpd, shopping about 40' per day, and social drinking about half an hour per day). I spent almost as much time indulging in 'personal development' activities (blogging, working on a cataloguing project, and applying for a job) as I did at work (about three hours a day), and only slightly less time was devoted to the mundane tasks of life (although three hours of that was spent in the bath, which is more an entertainment than an ablution). I spent 2½ hours of every day travelling (most of that on the bus, when I read, do crosswords or listen to the radio), and 1½ hours staring into the net.

I spent six hours this week researching job vacancies and completing an application (most of those hours lost negotiating drop-down menus on a particularly fiddly and draining on-line form). I spent a similar amount of time working on these last two blog posts. Now it's time to embark upon another one, because I've still to write up my trip to Mini Library Camp North West last weekend. Until then, here's a picture of a squirrel:

One day they'll train these things to handle books as well as nuts.
Then we'll all be out of a job.

CPD23:21;22 Are You Experienced? Volunteer Now!

Having graduated from Library School, it is time for me to become a Librarian. This is proving harder than I might've hoped. Fortunately I'm currently employed as an Assistant, so things are not too desperate, but it would be nice to have the encouragement of an interview soon: so far my applications are getting discarded before that hurdle.

Why?

In most cases it is probably a simple question of competition: I have been applying for very good-looking jobs and in that regard sheer weight of demand cuts down my odds dramatically. I do my best to make my applications stand out, while attempting not to go too far as being alienatingly unusual, but no subtle font selection or delicacy of prose can overcome that greatest of Catch-22s: the Question of Experience.

Collecting dust upon its hanger: my interview suit.

I have six years of library experience and an MA in Librarianship, but I am not a Librarian. A Librarian is somebody who has already been a Librarian. And in these days of immense competition for jobs it is such past experience that is all too often a defining criterion of selection. As someone who has never been a Librarian, I cannot, it seems, hope to equal the match of the Person Specification achieved by someone who is already doing that exact job (albeit at another establishment). So it is that Librarianship becomes a closed shop: a club which only admits past Librarians. 

This may not be a universal truth, but it was the fundamental reason given to me for my failure to secure a post in the same building that I currently work. While I believe that my Librarianship education and my 'para-professional' experience (along with my past employment experience) adequately equip me for the step up the job-ladder to Librarian, I cannot tick all the boxes with the same emphatic flourish as someone who's already on that rung. 

What is the solution to this problem? In part it may merely be a question of lowering my job-hunting sights a little: making a smaller step towards Librarianity: a senior Assistant or subordinate Librarian position, or simply something a bit less attractive. Or perhaps it's a question of just keeping on keeping on: waiting for all the Librarians out there to finish their games of musical chairs until eventually my application rises to the top half of the pile. In the meantime, I'm trying to squeeze all the experience I can out of the Librarians here at work. While it may be true that stones let blood more freely than some Librarians let me work-shadow them, I'm steadily extracting a gentle trickle of opportunities. I may ultimately have to press them a little harder in order to get myself some hands-on Librarian Action.

At times of high unemployment, the Question of Experience gets asked all the more often. It's an issue I feel quite strongly about, and this is my third attempt at writing this blog post. The previous two just descended into rants. Let us hope that this one does not.

(It will, CPD23 fans; it will.)

I recall a Library School exercise in which groups of about five acted as recruitment panels sitting in judgement over the CVs and covering letters of five fellow students applying for a fictional job. We recruiters had to narrow the pile down to two. My colleagues took their cue from the role profile, and so it was that the two candidates I considered least suitable were the two that went forward for interview. I had disregarded one candidate as intolerably smug (and clearly harbouring desires for my own position), and another as disinterested in the role (the application yearned desperately towards a different sector). Rather I thought the best candidate to be the one whose covering letter gushed with excitement and desire: who clearly saw this job as a vocation. It did not matter to me that she was in want of some experience: one has to start somewhere. What mattered was that her letter seemed genuinely enthusiastic: that her heart appeared to be in it.

Of course, this enthusiastic patter may just be a masquerade. The applicant may have been as disinterested or as avaricious (in the nicest possible way) as the two we ultimately put forward. But that would hopefully become apparent during the interview (by contrast, the candidate I characterized as grasping and smug proved to have a friendly and bubbly demeanour in the flesh, although I knew this anyway because the exercise in no way attempted to obscure the identities of our fellow students).

All of this subtly suggests that I am profoundly at odds with the rest of the world in my view of recruitment. As is often the case, I can't help but assume that I am right and the rest of the world is wrong in this regard. 

The candidate who I favoured took a while to find a real library job, and had to do voluntary work in the museum sector in order to finally get an amount of experience deemed acceptable by recruiters. This state of affairs makes me sad. It makes me sad that to be a Librarian one must spend several thousand pounds on an education and then potentially also have to do voluntary work; that is: working for no money. That's quite a deposit we're having to lay down.

There's always been a voluntary sector, rightly or wrongly. But there also used to be job progression: opportunities for promotion: a way up a career. The present culture of role profiling is increasingly a hindrance to such progression: a job at Spinal Point n is no kind of work for somebody on Spinal Point n-1 after all! The only way I can get some experience that will come close to matching the experience of someone else already in that role is to do some similar work for no pay (and hence no formal recruitment regime). There are two ways of looking at this: in one respect you might argue that voluntary work brings its own reward: the experience required to make the leap to the next level of employment, where the benefits will have a financial element as well as a vocational one: payment is in part received in a non-monetary 'experiential' currency and in another part deferred. Or, one might argue that work without direct financial recompense is unethical within a capital-orientated society.

There are subtleties to consider: education is fundamentally unpaid, and perhaps the voluntary role may be conceived in terms of an apprenticeship. There was once a time when an apprentice received pay, but then there was also a time when a student received a grant. Faced with the choice of nine grand's university tuition or an unpaid apprenticeship, the latter may appear the sounder bargain.

In such a way, volunteering becomes a form of practical further education. If it is reasonable to expect the applicant to have a graduate qualification (which in recent terms would have cost the applicant the best part of £4,000 plus expenses), then is it not far more reasonable to expect some voluntary experience (not nearly so expensive)?

There is clearly a dilemma here. One must be very careful. A graduate traineeship is one thing; unpaid work as a Library Assistant is very much another. Beware the internship as a mere means to free labour: if somebody gets paid for the same work you're doing for free, you're a) being robbed of pay under any system which is fair, and b) robbing them by effectively devaluing their job. It may be in our immediate self-interest to take on voluntary work as a means to experience, but it is to our long-term collective disadvantage if as a consequence of that voluntary work such paid jobs cease to exist.

Hot steamy action!

While some volunteering exists in a sector which is near-universally unpaid on account of being closer to a hobby than to a job (Steam Railway enthusiasts spring eagerly to the footplate of the mind) much unpaid work is to be found in the forgotten corners of our society that become the domain of charity. Charity exists where the state has failed to act. It patches up the holes that capitalist society steadfastly refuses to darn. It must exist whilever people of good conscience refuse to stand by and allow abuses to continue. But the existence of a voluntary sector within our economy poses a tacit risk to those at the bottom of that economy. It is a rare government that intervenes to replace a volunteer programme with a state-run body, because such intervention means an expense for that government. Once a sector becomes volunteer-run it is difficult to recapitalize (why pay for something that used to be done for free?).

This is not to criticize the principle of volunteering or the concept of vocation. One could speculate of a utopia where work is replaced by hobbies: where our debt to society is paid in a way we actively enjoy. But we do not live in such a utopia. Somebody has to clean the shit out of the sewers, and not everybody can sustain themselves as pop-stars (as Saturday night television consistently demonstrates). Hence remuneration.

But, points out our Prime Minister, bored middle-class housewives of a certain age can find great pleasure in maintaining for free what many state workers do for a wage. We do not pay the Steam Railway enthusiasts so why do we pay the Librarians? 

That we pay for footballers is a mute moot point, but one with some historical lessons: sporting professionalism stemmed originally not from greed but from need. Amateur Rugby Union was a game for rich public-school boys; professional Rugby League was for overworked factory-hands who could only afford to give up time to their beloved sport if they got some money in return. Vocations should not be the sole domain of the wealthy.

Local government spending restrictions are the national government's chief weapon in its attempts to bring about the Big Society. For "the Big Society" read "the wholesale dumping of state responsibilities upon the charitable sector". This is Thatcherism dressed (rather unconvincingly) as a provincial sort of socialism: just as privatisation of state industry brought in a quick fix of cash, the dismantling of the welfare state provides a quick-fix reduction in outgoings. This is revolutionary economics, albeit a seemingly retrograde revolution. I call it the New Feudalism (which in a way is unfair on feudalism).

The rot has always been with us: charity has been there mopping up society's piss ever since society was born. Voluntary work in that regard is a necessary evil. While such volunteering should not be necessary, the failings of our society make it necessary. But that does not mean that we should allow the rot to spread into areas of work that are traditionally paid. The fight for a decent wage has been long, hard, and in many cases violent, but it can be undone in a near-instant. To do for free what was previously done for money is not so much charity as robbery.

We must not rush to shout 'scab'. The work contract is between two people and it is the employer who is creating the position in the first place. What ire we bear must be cast in that direction at least as much as any other. When an authority refuses to pay its library staff, and lays down the Sophie's choice that either they work for free or the service is shut down, the real baddies of the piece are, of course, the authority. But knowing that doesn't help us any. We still have to choose between descending into charity or watching as a community suffers. At least as things currently lie, I believe the only responsible action is the latter. I believe this in part because I suspect the voluntary model to be ultimately unsustainable, but principally because I believe we have a collective responsibility to our trade on a broader level. The communities we serve can only prosper if we can afford to serve them.

Mind you, I'd've probably been a rattener back in the day.

Not that any of this stops me from work shadowing, and getting myself as much experience at my current place of work as I possibly can. I am lucky in as much as I was able to get into a library position six years ago when the economic situation was not so grim. In that regard I do not envy my younger peers.

And so it is that for now my interview suit continues to collect dust upon its hanger, and I keep on filling in those awful online forms, seldom receiving even a token rejection email for my efforts. It's dispiriting looking for a job, but it could be a lot worse:

At least it's not this bad.