Write more; get involved; be more assertive; generally get stuck in...
At the risk of pre-empting the twitter conversation, here's how I think I did:
Write more...
This is my 18th post of 2013, compared with 21 posts in 2012, so I've not written more here. Have I written more elsewhere? I've not crunched the Twitter numbers, but I expect they're healthy. And I've got published in print without doing an awful lot, so that was nice. It's a start, and not too bad considering I've had two house-moves and two different full-time jobs this year to keep me busy. I think that's a fair excuse.
Get involved...
Not as many Library Camps this year as last, but I got to three. I also attended a Northern Collaboration event and the 50th birthday bash at Sheffield's library school. I'd call that treading water, really. I've maintained my presence in the library world. But I've been too busy settling in with new work colleagues to dedicate much time further afield. One thing I have done is taken more notice of matters CILIP, and I suspect I'm not alone in this regard (see previous posts). As a consequence of the whole name-change thing, I've voted in two CILIP plebiscites, and followed the coverage / live-streaming from two CILIP meetings. That's two more of both those things than I've done in previous years. I might even be tempted to get involved with something CILIP-y if there was anything CILIP-y to get involved with around here. Might. There are probably better causes to assist, and I do so enjoy my own time...
Be more assertive; generally get stuck in...
I'm sticking these two together because I see them as part of the same thing. It was that prize cock Steven Morrissey who, in one of his saner moments, sang "Shyness is nice but shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you'd like to". I continue to be too wet for my own good, though now and again my bushel gets too hot and starts smoking, attracting some attention. I seem to get by on such smoke-signals, but my reticence remains an obstacle. I have to learn to be able to talk without the aid of half a bottle of wine. Writing's a different matter: I have time to develop my buzzing thoughts and overcome inhibitions. But my brain doesn't seem to cope so well at speaking-pace. Part of that's speed-of-thought, but most of it is a lack of confidence, or an unwillingness to chance my ability to wrangle my thoughts into some sensible utterances (which amounts to much the same thing). The more I get to know people, the more at ease I become, mostly, I think, because I better know how they work and what their reactions might be to whatever I end up saying. But this character judgement takes far too many months and in the meantime I suspect I end up looking aloof. This remains a frustration to me and I don't suspect there's a quick and easy way to overcome it short of plugging away bit by bit and learning that I'm perfectly capable of holding my own. I'm not sure I've made an awful lot of progress in this regard this year (a disastrous job interview didn't help my confidence any, either) but I just have to keep plugging away. Or pre-loading on gin (probably not the answer).
In conclusion, then, I've not really met these self-imposed objectives in any truly satisfactory way. I've been too busy hopping from one temporary job to another and trying to find a firmer foothold from which to preach. But at the same time it's not been an utter disaster. I don't think I've lost much if any ground, and so it is that they stand for another year. Here's hoping I'm in a better position to act on these resolutions in 2014.
Happy New Year, and may it be full to brimming with wonder and joy enough for us all!
Last week was the third national Library Camp. This time we were in the new and distinctive Library of Birmingham: a place full of books, escalators and ideas. I thought it would be interesting, after this summer's fun and games, to pitch a session dedicated to coming up with good ideas and inspiration for the future direction of CILIP. The aim would not be to rehash the old moans, which are now pretty well rehearsed, but to come up with some positive ideas about the way CILIP should be heading, and how it might better prosecute its cause. The results are presented below.
In the main body text we have an account of my scrawled notes, wrangled into some sort of sense, and not nearly as glossed as my Library Camp write-ups usually are: this is, I think, a fair summary of what was said, made slightly more comprehensible to an outside observer, and in some places re-ordered in the interests of a less tangled narrative.
On the right, a little way below the side-bar stuff, is a Storify summary of relevant tweets gathered using a search for cilip AND #libcampuk13 . If you have a tweet in there and you'd rather it wasn't, let me know and I'll gladly get out the scissors.
Let's start, then, with the first idea that was pitched, and work our way through from there...
We should take the example of free student membership and extend it to, for example, one year's free membership for para-professionals; one year's free membership for all first time members.
Get them in, get them hooked. Admittedly, CILIP is hardly crack. But hopefully some value can be demonstrated in those 12 months of freedom. There's still probably a need to make the first step into paid membership a little less sheer (those pay bandings are still bizarre), but we're here to make new suggestions and not get bogged down in the old standards.
Ok, so what wonders can we offer in this gratis year? What can we give that will be worth the fees once the novelty's worn off?
Most of the people attending this session were CILIP members, but we were here giving up our Saturdays for a library conference thingummy so maybe we're naturally that way inclined. The reality beyond the golden lattice of Brum is a little less rosy, with membership at an all-time low. Why do so many of us feel it's just not worth joining? Is it simply a recognition that accreditation lacks the degree of importance it has in certain other professions? We don't need the accreditation and hence we don't need the professional body? And while we may be put off applying for a job that doesn't ask for a library qualification, in the current climate perhaps we lack the luxury of being so choosy. To this end...
CILIP needs to be an advocate for the profession to ensure a) an appropriate professional standard and b) its own relevance.
One avenue that might be exploited is LIS Job Net: the main route through which our profession advertises its vacancies. It currently charges its advertisers, which doubtless has certain financial benefits for CILIP, but how about if we...
Make it free to place an ad on LIS Job Net, thereby increasing interest, creating an industry standard platform, and allowing proper monitoring of pay and standards within the profession.
One of CILIP's difficulties (though also a potential advantage in other respects) is the diversity within the profession(s) it exists to support. CILIP needs to be able to operate across this segmentation while catering for each slice accordingly. Perhaps the one unifying demand from across the sectors is this appeal for greater advocacy, but joining everything up seems to be a struggle. Maybe we need...
Some sort of coordinated Advocacy Toolkit to promote knowledge and develop our skills base.
There are plans and hopes for online training and MOOCs, and a space to pool stories of good practice and impact. This sounds like a good platform from which to build.
CILIP also needs to bang some heads together in local authorities, of course. Maybe our services are such a pervasive, ubiquitous thing that they blend in and become part of the furniture. We therefore need the occasional bit of waving and shouting. To enjoy the living room, you need a really good settee, and it's easy to forget that detail until the springs go and the stuffing falls out, or the thing gets repossessed. CILIP needs to be pointing this out, albeit on a metaphorical level (we've dabbled enough in home furnishings for one year).
We want CILIP to be louder!
Some of us would even quite like a Library Workers' Union of sorts, though given current membership of both CILIP and the unions it would take a lot to set such a thing going. Maybe a spot of gentle, coercive rattening would bump the numbers up for CILIP??
CILIP is felt to have moved away from a unionish role (for "unionish", I suspect we are to read "militant", "protectionist" etc.) in its efforts towards advocacy, and that it now stands at something of a crossroads: is the "soft" advocacy working, or do we need to get angry?
CILIP should be more controversial!
The no-confidence vote in Ed Vaizey is seen by some as a much-needed exclamation of serious disquiet, and by others as a retrograde step that complicates essential diplomacy. The truth is that we want CILIP to be promoting our interests in all directions: leading a good librarian / bad librarian assault. Good advocacy takes time: softly softly catch a politician and all that. CILIP is proud of its deep advocacy and the results it produces (an example was given of a school libraries promotion) but it can only do a couple of such projects at any one time, and the process is far from dramatic. It can all too easily look like we're doing nothing very much at all while Alexandria burns.
CILIP is not a union, it's a charity. And it has always worked tirelessly behind the scenes on advocacy projects, in the interest of the public good, or education and of libraries. But we expect it to do more. We see wholesale dismantling of our public libraries and we say "surely CILIP could be doing more to stop this?!"
CILIP is not Ridgmount Street. We are CILIP. And if we don't like it we need to change it.
In a way, maybe the membership question (the lack of membership question) is a white elephant. Certainly, more members will produce more money with which to fund more projects, but the reverse is also true. Part of the membership problem is the cost, but the other part is the benefit. Maybe we're not showing our worth at the moment...
We, the members of CILIP (and recall that the vast majority of the people in this session were current members), are CILIP. If CILIP isn't offering us anything, part of that is down to us, because ultimately we do the offerings. We need to be coordinating local meetings, putting on development events, getting out there and doing. We have to put things in to get things back. And if we build it, others will come...
So why aren't we? It's not purely indolence (we've all given up our Saturday, remember; we've all come here of our own accord, spent money on transport and accommodation; dug into our pockets to help fund Library Camp; maybe even helped with the organization on some level). There's a blockage in the pipes, somewhere. To put it crudely, why are we at Library Camp and not at CILIP Library Camp? There is something wrong with the internal structure of CILIP (which current plans will hopefully soothe).
CILIP is not Ridgmount Street 2: London is a long way away for many members. We need to decentralise, and we need to have more going on in other parts of the country.
Yes, the AGM was in Birmingham this year, and yes there have been other major events in Manchester and other reaches. These are Good Things. But there is a definite imbalance. It's inevitable that CILIP uses its HQ for things, and so it should, but sometimes it does so without adequate notice (cheap train tickets need prior planning). There is a perceived dearth of activities in the North, and even in the Midlands. More problematic is that while some local groups are lively hubs of excellence, others are mere zombies. There's a real lottery according to where you live.
There needs to be more interaction between branches, and more equity.
Does that lead to duplication of effort? Is that a problem? The money / bums on seats equation is certainly a problem. And it is a self-perpetuating one. A person may want to get involved, but if there's nothing to get involved in then they don't. It's ok to say "if you want something, do it yourself", but most of us need some sort of structure to support that ambition. An active group can offer that support, creating a healthy turnover of participants; a dead group cannot. How do we shake this up?
Increased canvassing in Library Schools.
So we've got the students interested with the free membership, now let's get them involved. Go into the universities and say hi. Promote the possibilities. Some of our biggest Library Schools are in some of the least active CILIP regions. That's partly a problem, but maybe it contains the germ of a solution too? There's much-needed experience to be gained, and students are (necessarily) into the experience-gaining game.
Try asking your local network for some pennies.
Fancy organizing a Library Camp? Maybe CILIP can help. It's worth a go, at least. But how do you get involved in your local CILIP group even if you want to? We're Librarians so we should be able to find it out, but it's the weekend and the last thing we want to do is struggle with the CILIP website. Therefore:
Create a simple route to involvement: an idiot's guide.
And once you are involved, it pays to keep others informed. Again, some of this comes down to just being bothered enough to read the right things at the right time (something I'm particularly guilty of not doing). But there are a lot of special interest groups out there, and most of us will only be a member of two (such is the way it works). Maybe, in the interests of unity (and promotion) we could be promoting the activities of all the groups to all the members a little more effectively than we do right now:
Produce a digest of special interest group news and activities.
...just a case of creaming off the best of what each group's been up to and sharing it (say in Update) to advertise and to inspire.
Speaking of inspiration, my favourite suggestion of the session:
CILIP should propose a name change every year.
Let's face it, I doubt this session would've happened without that particular debacle.
So there we have it: a handful of ideas to hopefully offer some inspiration for the future. We did fall into the odd spot of moaning now and again, which is probably inevitable, and while the presence of @johnrdolan permitted some discussion of practicality, context, and current practice, it might have limited opportunities for a more fanciful unleashing of our imaginations. Maybe that's something to try in a future session!
Thanks to all who took part, and if you feel I've missed anything, do add any suggestions or clarifications below. x
I'm getting worse. It's nearly two months since Radical Library Camp. It's taken me far too long to write this thing up. But at last I have. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from Radical Library Camp. My initial impression was something involving skateboards and neon, or perhaps something like this:
On further inspection, it became apparent that we were talking anarcho-syndicalist Radical. Given that librarians have a (not necessarily militant) tendency to swing to the left, was this just going to be Library Camp but shoutier? I brushed up on the lyrics to the Internationale and O Tannenbaum, just in case they might be needed, and hopped on the train to Bradford.
This post employs my usual blend of notes, reportage and personal opinion. The sessions we'll be looking at are Space, Crisistunity, Copywrong and Supporting Activism, should you want to skip down the page.
Space…
“You
said you wanted some space… well is this enough for you?”
@librarygirlknit
set us going on a subject very much to my interest: library spaces.To inspire our chatter she had us draw our
ideal library. This is something I’ve been working on for some time, but
unconstrained by space and budget I usually end up with piles of ridiculousness.
This time I kept it provincial, with a four-cell branch of scribbled vagueness.
We then set about describing our plans, and immediately we hit the enquiry
desk.
The
desk has been kicked about a bit in academic libraries for a good while now. Converged
counter services; low-level desks; to have a librarian or not to have a
librarian; to have a desk or not to have a desk…
Is the
desk a barrier? A great wall of formality at the gateway to the books? Does it
perpetuate an unhelpful schism between library staff and library patron? Or is
it a useful box to sit at and store bits and bobs? An obvious port of call for
those in search of help and information?
I
don’t really have a problem with an authoritative enquiry desk, though I can
see how they might seem formidable if you were unsure of the value of your
query. Personally my biggest reason to avoid the desk would be the queue. The
truth is that different people like different mediums. Some like self-issue and
some like librarian-issue. Some like queuing up at a desk and some like
chatting on the internet. Some might fear the barricade; others might get the
willies from polo-shirted floor-walkers stalking the stacks with their
here-to-help handbags. But a counter takes up quite a lot of real estate (it
was about an eighth of my impromptu design), even as a panoptical hub rather
than as a wall of chipboard. That said, it’s also a handy storage space for all
manner of bits and bobs, a useful leaning space for filling out forms or making
notes, and a fitting place to do some work at quieter moments.
That’s
not to say that a roaming, counter-free service-desk model can’t actually have
some tables, chairs and storage somewhere in the room: “break-out spaces” or
“hubs” or whatever you may wish to call them. I picture coffee tables,
staff-room seating and little shelf-stack islands topped with spider-plants and
filled with ring-binders, but then I’m a child of the ‘80s. I quite like such
an image, pretty much as much as I like the omniscient oracle at the enquiry
desk. Pros and roundabouts. What is
beneficial, whether you have someone at a desk or you don’t, is tablet-touting
floor-staff with answers at their fingertips. Library users ask floor-staff
questions. They do this because a) they don’t differentiate between grades of
staff, b) they want a quick answer and don’t want to queue. Most staff in this
situation will be able to help, too. Especially if the library has a catalogue
terminal to hand. But giving them a tablet in a handbag opens up new levels of
potential support: especially if the library management system (LMS) is in
there too.
This
raises a potential problem of staff grading. Shelvers know many things and
answer many questions. But they probably aren’t being paid enough to operate an
LMS, and in such cases we are faced with a two-tier roaming service. I’m not
sure it’s good practice to have library assistants crawling everywhere, touting
for enquiries without being given an interim task like shelving, tidying or
harvesting holds. A loitering librarian is a potentially suspicious creature.
Much better to anchor them to some clearly defined point of reference. It seems
to me that you should either scrap bottom-end shelvers and incorporate shelving
into a roaming service model, or retain bottom-end shelvers as your directional
roaming support and escalate more demanding enquiries to a fixed point of
contact. The best approach would very much depend on the scale of your
institution. A one-man school library needs its desk because that’s where the
librarian lives. A college library might be able to operate effectively on an
ungraduated roaming model where all the library assistants muck in and do their
bit on the floor, and carry a computer with them on their trolley. A much
larger place, reliant on casual shelvers, might need to think about how it
approaches a roaming model.
That
said, I’m not sure that any model is fundamentally broken, and having to
escalate to another roaming librarian is only problematic if they are either
sufficiently low in number or lack a parking location of default. So long as
you can point to them; so long as you can find them, all is well in the stacks.
Teeside University have taken something of a lead in this approach and it seems
to be going well. They also approach it with the mindset that if any part of it
isn’t going well, they are allowed to
change it: the furniture is not fixed. Sensible Teeside. And being able to take
the LMS, the catalogue, the website and all the databases with you when you go
to help someone is amazing in itself. This is the future and it’s smeared with
fingerprints.
The
session wasn’t entirely taken up by
the to-desk-or-not-to-desk question, though it doubtless dominated proceedings.
We discussed the lack of good studies on what sort of space users wanted.
Again, some users want one thing and some another. There remains a strong
demand for the traditional study space within many a refurbished library, along
with the demand for the trendy new bits. The bigger the library, the easier to
cater for every taste, but even a small pub can have a tap-room and a lounge.
The
first proper essay I did at library school was on the history of Sheffield’s
university libraries. Sheffield Uni went from a locked cupboard in the main
hall to a panopticon that was already too small by the time it was built, to a
gorgeous light-box with air-conditioned shelving and plenty of room but
completely unsuitable for the unanticipated arrival of computers, to a
glare-free (therefore dingy) box of computers (but not enough of them), to a
tall and funky (but compromised) space full of noise and coloured settees.
Sheff Hallam designed a too-expensive glass ski-slope and instead built a
windowless carpark which only now, after finally getting some paint and light
and internal soundproofing, is realising its potential. Building libraries is a
tricky game, made all the more so by architects obsessed with atria and the
simple truth that no matter how hard you might try to futureproof something,
futureproofing will be the first thing you scale back when the budget starts
over-running. Hindsight is a wonderful wonderful thing, and no matter how much
of it we factor in, we will be left short. It’s all part of the joy of it!
@DanPGrace opened the gateway to Hell that we might peer inside and
pluck out the eyes of hope from its smouldering remnants. We're oft told to see
the opportunity in a crisis: e.g. your newfound unemployment is a great
opportunity for you to develop your job-application skills and your abilities
to survive under a reduced income (and a great opportunity for me to give
myself a nice meaty bonus as reward for my cost-cutting successes). But are
there any genuine (non-soppy) opportunities to be plundered from the current
decimation of public library services?
“I’ve
got the brains, you’ve got the Braun, let’s make lots of burgers.”
Kids
use public libraries... kids and old people. Do not forget this. Public
libraries do not, by and large, cater for the working adult, at least not with
regards to their book-lending services. Working adults can buy their own books,
if they find time for such fripperies. Children and pensioners have the time to
develop greater book-reading appetites, and while books these days are cheaper,
tis true, a reading habit can mount up into an expensive thing were one to go
out and buy this stuff.
But
it's not all about the books. We are information centres catering to broader
information needs than the latest western or picture book. We do have things we
can offer the working adults (and not just those interested in the contents of
our metals database [Sheffield reference reference]). Why can't our paymasters
see the value of our service? Because the state sees its primary role as
encouraging economic growth. It's all about the growth. It's the growth stupid.
Can we help grow things? We can help grow tiny minds. And even big minds. Is
that the growth you're looking for? We can and do serve the economy (cop a feel
at our metals database, etc.), and today's inspired children are tomorrow's
grasping hedgefunders. But nobody likes a long-term gain in a politics of
five-year plans. What else have we got?
We're
a place to access council services online! Government can't get enough of
sticking stuff online, but not everyone has a computer and an internet
connection. It's a good fifteen quid a month for that privilege. So the council
needs to provide some sort of cybercafé for the un-networked masses, and ooh,
look, they've already got one. Perhaps we should advertise the service?
God,
no... the People's Network is creaking enough as it is. It cannae take any
more. And in a small library being all things to all patrons, a room full of
studious referees, excited children, and befuddled job-seekers struggling with
inadequate technologies and poorly rendered council websites is a recipe for
pain.
Striking
a balance can be really tricky, but we specialise at our peril. One
"ailing" library revamped, ditching its adult lending service to
become a children's library and PC room: a process which apparently killed it.
The remnants were farmed off as a commercial enterprise in cooperation with a
private school and a church. They hire out the hall to make the money to pay
the wages of the staff. This is a template being offered for many a community
project solution to the Library Question, though it smacks somewhat of
enclosure.
Beancounters
will be relieved to be rid of the public service liability that is the library,
so how do we 'evidence' its value and prove community need? Bloody metrics.
Given that a national audience share greater than EastEnders appears
insufficient libation, an appeal to more qualitative benefits seems hardly
worth the effort. The state as currently governed does not look beyond its nose
end. Yet the current government, on one of its Big Society damn-fool idealistic
crusades, did devise something dubbed a Happiness Index. It was a crude
yardstick based on Morris Dancing and bunting, but they made this thing and it
is a thing that could be appropriated to serve our own interests. God save
strawberry jam, and all the different varieties. The village green preservation
society is made up of blue-rinsed Conservative Club regulars, and we are the
village hall. The Tory grass-roots are children of the post-war consensus, and
they are our nostalgic allies. A fine mission, involving copious quantities of
gin, might be to infiltrate this community and ensure that sops to the
heartland are sops that benefit us too. The demands of the public and the
demands of the state can sometimes be harmonised.
The
stats game infects our own services though, sometimes in counter-intuitive
ways: the mentality exists such that that which cannot be measured is first
against the wall, ignoring the fact that that measurement is no measure of
value. So it is that newspapers are cast out of libraries because there is no
efficient means to gauge their use (beyond the testimony of staff and users - a
measure which for some reason is seldom observed). Removing the newspapers
removes the people who came to read the newspapers (however great or not that
untallied number may be) who then become people that don't read newspapers (is
that a positive or a negative from the government's perspective?) and don't use
the library. Reading newspapers is an expensive business these days, but so is
providing them to those people who don't want to pay up. And so there goes part
of our core user-base, and we know not what devastation that causes because
we're rubbish at measuring long-term social return and 'soft outcomes'. We
could sellotape a camera to a tramp but we might never get it back. The most
telling way to assess the value of our service is to compare places with
libraries and places without, but that's an awful lot of variables to juggle
for good science to prevail. That's the problem with evidence: beyond the lab
it becomes a subjective issue.
Meanwhile,
libraries are being handed to the well-meaning and ill-prepared. There's no
real funding beyond one-off grants which create vibrant and well-used libraries
until the novelty wears off and the money runs out. Libraries need money and
money, we're told, is in short supply. My own feeling is that whilever there
are couples going on Grand Designs, there is no acceptable excuse for a
reduction in public services or working conditions: the money exists within the
economy but it is being spent on bespoke kitchens and never-to-be-used
mezzanine dens. This is not the economics of envy (as much as I'd love a
mezzanine den) but of the basic mathematical fact that percentage pay increases
(not to mention other more ideological factors) have prised a monumental gulf
between the richest and the poorest which is not being curbed by legislation or
plugged by taxation lest the invisible hand take umbrage. Instead, why not work
for free?
One
might contrast the growing professionalization of councillors over the last few
decades with the drive towards an amateurization of council services. It's a
crude contrast but worth making, if only because the same arguments for the
professionalization of the council membership apply more broadly, and no
argument works half as well as direct analogy to ones own predicament. Except
again we face the sour grapes fob if we are too indelicate. But while I sit
here typing my Marxist rhetoric, volunteers are out there manning the desks and
learning the argument the hard way: without pay, only the richest can sustain
voluntarism; with pay (token pay, inevitably), a community body is reliant upon
fundraising efforts, and these efforts are distractions that are to the
potential detriment of the wider service. So it is that we pay councillors: so
people from all backgrounds can represent our interests without pecuniary
distractions that may run counter to those interests. Oh the irony.
Copywrong
"Q:
Why do anarchists only drink herbal tea?
A: Because it can be locally sourced
and responsibly cultivated."
In
every Library Camp comes that point where one session you want to attend gets
pitted against another you'd've quite liked to see, and so it was here. But
this session on copyright seemed to encapsulate my expectations of what Radical
Library Camp should be and I feel my expectations were adequately met.
In
academia we're in the business of telling students that plagiarism is naughty.
But how many of us then go on to quietly breech a bit of copyright in some way
shape or form? Maybe we do it by accident or maybe we're just downright
naughty. Perhaps we're really good, and never break copyright ever, but even
then we are sure to have been frustrated by the lengths to which we've had to
go to be so angelic.
There
are ways to get out of some copyright obligations: agreements reached in
smoke-filled rooms that allow organizations like universities a little more
freedom than the rest of us might be dealt. But these breaks only go so far.
What
is copyright for? Copyright is about asserting ownership on something you've
made, and that can be very advantageous if you intend to make your living from
things you've made. But if you're in the business of making knowledge then your
copyright may perhaps hinder the greater good. This is a problem keenly felt in
the world of patents, where areas of invention are closed off from innovation
in the interests of a potential cash cow. This is not a new problem by any
means: Thomas Savery's steam engine patent served him well: Thomas Newcommen
had to enter into partnership with Savery to develop the innovations that were instrumental in the industrial revolution, and Watt had to stick all manner of
bits of brass hither and thither to negotiate patent obstacles. Still, it's hard not to be freaked out when Google patents hand gestures, and
the morality of medicine patents serves as a useful shorthand for the
free-market economy more generally. The whole thing is a bodge, of course,
designed to balance competing interests, but some interests are capable of
speaking louder than others, and while the likes of the IFLA may seek to lobby
in one direction, certain corporate interests have heft to pull the other way.
Given
a commodity-based economy, copyright serves a useful purpose in the protection
of a creator's interests. But when that copyright is passed to a publisher,
things become woollier, not least because publishers do not have the same
cuddly reputation as artists. Publishers have a reputation for being a touch
greedy at times. Artists do, too, for that matter: just witness the inflation
of copyright life: printed works have gone from lifetime of the author + 7 to
lifetime of the author +70, with such inflations being retrospectively enacted
on previously escaped works. Clearly this does not serve the author's interests
(the author being dead) which makes the whole arrangement seem rather dubious.
Copyright
does not necessarily benefit the creator of a work even when alive. While some
popular musicians are keen to extend the 50 year watershed on recordings in an
effort to maintain an income from '60s releases, many more obscure acts have
benefitted hugely in the exposure gained from expired copyright works making
their way onto cheap CD compilations. It pulls both ways, but again it more
generally pulls towards the more vocal "haves".
Where
do we come in? Well libraries have a particular interest in copyright as our
very existence is predicated on a wilful (sanctioned) flouting of copyright law
(much to the irritation of some authors and to the delight of others when they
get their PLR cheque in the post). But we also have a duty of concern with
respect to the public good, not least because we are in the business of
disseminating knowledge, and copyright is all too often a hindrance to that
mission. This duty of concern extends to our professional body, CILIP, a
registered charity with the obligation to the public good that that entails.
CILIP needs to be in the thick of the copyright debate, lobbying for the public
interest. And if CILIP's charitable or chartered status is considered an
impediment to charitable behaviour, perhaps it needs to think twice about
whether charitable or chartered status serves its purpose. Or perhaps there is
a need for another body that can act in these ways.
It's
fair to say that this session lost its focus a little at this point, as we
voiced various frustrations with a certain Chartered Institute. The feeling in the room
was that CILIP was almost as broken as copyright itself. But perhaps the answer
lies not in moaning about CILIP but in getting involved and taking the bridge for
ourselves: not just radicals but entryists!
Supporting
Activism
I went
to this session expecting it to be something else, and I didn't engage very
well with it, but here's a summary of what I took down in my little red book:
State.
Employment
law etc.
Community
statistics project.
National
Archives / Public Records - anyone can access, but requires the tenacity of a
librarian to find stuff. [We are professional finders of stuff. We're good at
it, and we enjoy it (some people don't). It's a living!]
Voluntary
⇒
flaky [I don't have time for that this week. I don't have time for that this
month. I don't have time for that this year.]
Active
participation→ "I know that" ∴
"someone else knows that"
Give the methodology - doesn't necessarily do us out of a job -
still need to know what to do and still need to do it. [It's a living thing!]
Radical... a mental landscape...
Radical
referencing...
Trotsky,
L. (1928)...
I'M INVESTED
...ok, so sometimes my notes make more sense than at others,
but there's some fab doodles too, including one of a little bus, which I'm
pretty sure was relevant, and one of a drilling squirrel, which I'm pretty sure
was not. I guess the radical cake was kicking in at this point.
The afternoon ended with a plenary session, during which the
revolution was set back until after the next meeting, in accordance with
radical lore. We did agree to make a fanzine though, and I do look forward to
seeing its fruition. I hope that the radical library camp goes on to create
some beautiful things, and to not simply talk about them.
Thanks to everyone who was involved in another excellent day's
camping. We concluded in a rather fantastic private members' club complete with
radical library, which is very much a fitting end to a radical library camp, I
think.
Location:Yorkshire. Current gig: Academic Liaison Assistant (an assistant librarian). Current mobile device: an LG mobile telephone (second generation) with a qwerty keyboard. Current computer: a Lenovo laptop (Intel, 6GB RAM, Windows 8), plus peripheral keyboard, mouse and monitor. One word that best describes how you work:Fitfully.
What apps/software/tools can't you live without?
The Opera web-browser. Also on my quicklaunch toolbar at home are Oolite, Spotify, Corel Photo-Paint, XChat, Eudora, SeaMonkey, Notepad++ and Foobar, some of which show my age and my willingness to embrace change, though not all are essential to my existence. Before I made the error of buying a 64-bit computer, I also had a 16-bit copy of the OED to hand too. Windows is another bit of software I've come to rely upon a great deal (running Classic Shell these days, necessarily), and I spend a considerable amount of time in Microsoft Office.
What's your workspace like?
I am rather messy. Papers everywhere. I'm currently at home, sprawled out on the settee, keyboard on my lap, mobile phone by my side, bottle of coke and tin of biscuits in near reach. On the coffee table are:
1x roll of gaffatape
1x Royal Opera House ticket (used)
3x bottles of nail varnish
1x steel ruler
½x adhesive fabric for putting inside evil shoes
1x pair of scissors
1x pen
2x AA batteries (spent)
1x ring
1x hair grip
1x ear-phones
1x sunglasses
1x badge from Library Camp
1x nail file
2x coasters (pads in my vocab)
1x mug of water
1x wireless dongle
1x microSD to SD adaptor
1x monitor
1x laptop computer
What's your best time-saving trick?
Shortcuts. Make shortcuts to documents and use "Recent..." folders. Self-plagiarise instead of repeating work. And remember that few things have to be "perfect", they just need to be "pretty decent". It also helps if what you're doing's fun, of course.
What's your favorite to-do list manager?
I use the one in Outlook. It does the job adequately.
Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can't you live without?
Plumbed water and electricity are pretty essential to my lifestyle. Oven, fridge-freezer, washing machine, shower... The telephone is less essential (very presumptive of you, that), and I use it more as a clock / portable Twitter device than as a telephone. Aside from my computer, I'd say the lamp that's illuminating me is currently the most essential bit of tech in this room.
What everyday thing are you better at than anyone else?
Being half-decent at things. I think I'm a bit of an all-rounder, probably specializing in computery stuff. My general knowledge used to be pretty good too, but less so now.
What are you currently reading?
Salway - Roman Britain; Cooper - Appassionata; Nabakov - King, Queen, Knave; Grand - Babs the Impossible. I'm not generally a big reader, especially of fiction. Mostly I read history books.
What do you listen to while you work?
If I'm really hard at work, music can be a distraction. Otherwise, music is good. Verdi tends to be my default option at work, or maybe some Mahler or Shostakovich. I am currently sitting in silence but only cos I forgot to put Spotify on earlier. Instead I shall now fire up Foobar and open the playlist that is just the entire musical contents of my hard-drive at random. First up is a MIDI version of Creep by Radiohead [fastforwards] the right channel of a noise piece I made, entitled "Lynch" because it sounded like the sort of sound you might hear in the background of a David Lynch film
[fastforwards]
The Chromatics - Cosmic Radio Show [fastforwards quickly] Gainsbourg & Bardot - Comic Strip... As you can see, playing my hard-drive is a little too fraught with trouble for working porpoises.
Are you more of an introvert or an extrovert?
Introvert, mainly. Except when the mood takes me. I'm an only-child. At school I could be quite zany, with all the horror that implies, but I lost some of that after I left university and failed to sell records for a living. Once I get to know people I start to come out of my shell. Alcohol helps this process slightly. I'm trying to come up with a better method.
# A MIDI version of one of my own compositions [fastforwards] Michael Hurley - Hoodoo Bash #
What's your sleep routine like?
I like my sleep. At one point, in the days before a proper job, I got a bit too much sleep and started getting sleep paralysis of an afternoon's lie-in. That's how much I like sleep. I try to avoid getting out of bed until the Sun has had chance to warm up the world. My natural sort of pattern tends to be to sleep from about 3am to about 1pm, but working life has intervened. I currently get up at about 7am and go to bed at about 10:30pm, except at weekends when I try to approach the preferred behaviour. Sleep is important to me. I enjoy it a lot. Dreams can be brilliant entertainment.
# Pink Floyd - If #
Fill in the blank: I'd love to see ______ answer these same questions.
You. But only if you want to.
# Heddy Lester - De Mallemolen (Eurovision '77 version) #
What's the best advice you've ever received?
Oh, the usual "life is for living" stuff, I guess: get stuck in and enjoy it. Can't point at anyone specifically. I expect the best advice I was ever given was something I failed to act upon. The advice to go to library school would have to be pretty high in the list (thanks to Karl (my ex-boss) and Anna (former work-colleague / former History teacher) for that).
# Danny Elfman - Theme From Black Beauty #
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
I've not really talked about "How I Work", which was the point of the exercise. I should like to add that.
# Off-air recording of Five Live Drive (2008): Jane Garvey interviewing a little boy about a hamster (radio palladium) #
Leonardo Da Vinci had a bit of a reputation for starting great works, getting bored and moving onto something else before completion to his or his sponsor's satisfaction. I aspire to such greatness: my hard-drive is a graveyard of abandoned projects.
# Unlistenably crusty recording of Pulp - The Boss [fastforward] Marais and Miranda - What is an Animal? (What is a Plant?) #
When being paid, however, I operate to different rules. I tend to add things to a To Do List (a recent development to save me juggling calendars), prioritising the more urgent demands and interspersing with contrasting activities if available so as to thicken the plot. It's worked so far.
# Carlos Paião - Playback (from Eurovision '81) #
Some of it... a lot of it is intuitive. I don't sit and analyse my workload. There is no complicated mathematics (if task x takes two weeks and task y takes three days etc). The sense of a deadline and the safetynet of flexitime can help, but I've moved on from the last-minute Saint Monday mentality of my undergraduate days.
# Nico - Ari's Song #
Still, I don't usually get properly stuck in to a project until I can begin to feel a modicum of urgency (like starting an essay with a couple of weeks rather than a couple of months)... I prod at it and poke at it with a little too much leisure, making too much of a fuss; developing too many vested interests in bits I might later have to dismantle. As such I prefer to get heavily stuck into a project, work through it quickly, and get it done.
# Spirogyra - The Furthest Point #
Unless it's something that really really fascinates me, in which case I will lovingly explore layer after layer of it (as was the case with a recent LibGuides project). It's this type of project that comes too close to playtime and runs a risk of being abandoned before satisfactory completion when something else shiny catches my eye. Spirogyra are singing...
"We, who started off so wide eyed / Never doubted success / But we were foolish to undertake such a mammoth task"
...which is a little defeatist if you ask me, but presents a cautionary tale. So far I've been chewing my morsels sufficiently, and at school my party-piece involved seven Highland Toffee bars and a single mouth. Back then I had the good sense not to step up to eight. People, know your limits!
Last year CILIP's Annual General Meeting (AGM) attracted a maximum of 182 votes from a total membership of 14,832: roughly 1% of membership. I can't say I'm surprised by this figure. After all, who pays attention to AGMs anyway? It's just a lot of i-dotting and t-crossing and signing off of accounts; it's something that needs to be done but which does not need us all there to do it. I don't think I've ever participated in a national AGM before now (not least for geographic reasons).
This year's AGM attracted 160 voters to the hall (up ten on last year and double that of 2010) plus 892 proxy ballots. With a reduced membership of 13,690, that works out at about 7.5% of the total: a 7.5 increase in percentage terms and a six-fold increase in real terms. Why such a surge of participation? Well, for one thing there was nothing to vote upon in the 2012 AGM beyond the standard agenda items. Indeed, a quick and inelegant trawl through archive.org suggests that this is the first time in over a decade that anybody's submitted an additional motion in advance of the meeting. In the case of 2013 we had two bits of extra business: the question of what we should be called and the question of what we should call Ed Vaizey. One or both of these item inspired the interest of hundreds of extra members, myself included.
A year ago, I suspect most of us would have been up for a name change. CILIP is not a pretty moniker. But the way CILIP went about its attempted conversion to ILPUK rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way (about 700 people by the looks of things). The prospect of a naval-gazing vote on a deckchair-shuffling name inspired the No Confidence in Ed Vaizey campaign and as a consequence we had something resembling decisive political action on the agenda. Symbolic, admittedly, but it's a start. This item's presence (and subsequent success: the motion was carried 669 to 200) marks what could hopefully be the start of something good for CILIP: the organization's dismissive and high-ham-fisted approach to the name change has led a small portion of its membership to question the purpose of the AGM and to seek a more relevant and active agenda. With the body losing 1,000 members a year, and librarianship in a state of government-imposed crisis, let us hope that this new attitude gains momentum and that next year's AGM is both more relevant and better attended.
I like LibGuides. I'm generally rather sniffy about building-blocks web content because it's usually quite limiting and ridden with javascript (*shivers at the memory of certain VLEs*). But LibGuides is different: there's none of the painful clunk and nested frames one often gets with these things, and, most importantly, a LibGuide can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. In a good way. In a proper web-standard sort of way. LibGuides uses boxes of content which you can arrange around your page. The box content can be edited using a WYSIWYG editor or by using a Plain-Text source editor, so you can be as simplistic or as tricksy as you like when adding stuff to the page. In theory your page could just be one big box which you edit as you might edit any other web page.
You can use their basic bits of Duplo, or you can mortar in some real solid bricks. And this flexibility is good, because it suits Walter who's up for retirement and has no interest in engaging with HTML, and it suits Zoe the web whiz-kid who wants to employ all the tricks she learnt in her computer science days.
My first encounter with this fully codable and customizable world was when I was playing around with my LibGuides profile and accidentally misused the <plaintext> tag. <plaintext> does not change styled text into unstyled text as I had guessed it might. <plaintext> renders any subsequent HTML code as plain text, and should be accompanied by a closing </plaintext> tag. I did not accompany it with an accompanying </plaintext> tag, and consequently the LibGuides profile web-form melted before my eyes into a slurry of pointy brackets. I had to hack the code in my browser (see last month's post on the virtues of Opera) to save my LibGuides from the internet version of a China crisis. It was a frightening moment, but one which excited me to the freedoms inherent in LibGuides.
So lesson one: don't use a <plaintext> tag in LibGuides. On a related note, always be sure to close any <div> tags you might use, lest they hang beyond your box and prevent you from editing it ever again. In other words: it is very easy to break bits of LibGuides and there is no "undo" button. If you're going to play around, do it with either a) a little knowledge (a dangerous thing) or b) a browser that lets you tweak the script locally should the worst come to the worst.
The last paragraph was needlessly alarmist, you will be relieved to hear. While it is very easy to break bits of LibGuides, you are unlikely to ever do anything that will break bits of LibGuides. LibGuides is pretty sturdy even if it can be unforgiving.
Last December I was charged with the task of setting up a booking system on LibGuides (using its sister application: LibCal) and spent a couple of weeks tweaking the style-sheets to get them to match the library branding. I had used style-sheets before, on my own web-pages, but never for anything more than setting fonts. It was an exciting learning experience, and I began to get an idea as to the more unconventional areas of LibGuides customisation.
During my time at the University of Hull this year I was asked to research the ways that other institutions use their LibGuides. We then pulled together something of a wish-list of ideas: what we thought should be on the guides, and how we might make them look and work in a way that would be foolproof to navigate. I was given the job of putting some of these ideas into practice.
What most LibGuides tend to look like.
The image above shows your typical average LibGuide (the content and tab order represent the mode of the top umpteen Google hits for libguides.ac.uk and subjectguides.ac.uk domains). There is some logic to this content which is why it occurs with such regularity, but the appearance owes most to the box from which it came: we're looking at a factory default, and not everything in that default is strictly useful.
In this post I'm going to talk about some of the tricks I learnt in the process of giving Hull's LibGuides a facelift. The reasons for the changes we made, both cosmetically and in terms of content, are probably better left to those still involved with the project: this is not a corporate account of a rebranding. I'm here to talk about the mechanics of LibGuides more generally, and what can be achieved. But as an illustration you might like to compare the above generic page with one of the new Hull guides (Computer Science, for example).
The secret to customising LibGuides lies in mastering the CSS. Before I started playing about the other month I didn't know very much about the finer points of style sheets, but nosing at the page source of various LibGuides across the country alerted me to some useful bits of code, and the first one of any real import was:
{display:none;}
Don't want some part of LibGuides to show up on the page? {display:none;} is your friend. Say you were worried that the LibGuides search box distracted from your catalogue search box, you could switch off the former by putting <style>.lgsearch{display:none;}</style> somewhere in your page (the custom CSS section if you have that option, though any old bit of box via Plain-Text Edit will do). All you need to know to switch off a part is its element name (e.g. .lgsearch in the case of the search box) and that's the hardest part. The slow way of doing it is to parse the page source with a fine-toothed comb and a knowledge of HTML and CSS. The quick way is to use a DOM inspector, and that's the approach I took to taking, using the Opera browser's built-in DOM inspector: Dragonfly. All I then had to do was right-click on the bit of the page I was interested in and inspect it. I could even tweak the code 'live' to see what would happen. I have no better words to describe such playing about than: "well cool!" Pretty much every bit of a LibGuide has its own class and can therefore be turned on or off. Say you wanted to generate a list of guides by using the built-in box options, but you didn't want the names of the list owners to be displayed (as they are by default in such lists). It so happens that the list authors have the class ".pdisplay_author", so you can consign them to the back of the net with a quick line of code.
{visibility:hidden;} is {display:none;}'s more sophisticated sister: she renders elements invisible rather than non-existent. Applying {visibility:hidden;} to this paragraph would leave an enigmatic gap on the page, while {display:none;} would shunt the next paragraph up into its place.
But it's not just about turning things on or off or obscuring them from view. You can set the font styles of every single different flavour of text, so if you wanted bigger type for your lists of links, <style>.itemlist li {font-size: 200%;}</style> would double the default font-size. A similar approach can be applied to the tabs at the top of the page, should you favour a chunkier look.
As with all things, the more you fiddle, the more you learn. http://www.w3schools.com/css/ has become a regular reference as I've sought to put ideas into code. Hours have been spent shunting box content around with margin tags. The best way to find out how something works remains to find an example of that something and to take it apart (this was the approach I took when replicating the quick links menu from the main University website). This is not as easy as it used to be a decade ago, because things are increasingly held in separate style sheets (which is why a DOM inspector is a handy bit of kit to have to hand). Not everyone's going to want to do that. Most of you are probably already reeling at the various different flavours of brackets and punctuation I've thrown at the page. But even if you know only the faintest smattering of HTML or CSS, you can stick it into LibGuides quite freely, and that is something rather refreshing and also rather liberating.
There are still some frustrating limitations with LibGuides, chief among them being that you can't create replicable directory structures as you might with web-pages: a link to a tab on one guide will need to be replaced if you make a copy of that guide, requiring a fair bit of tedious mucking about if you're rolling out a new template that makes use of such links. But mostly LibGuides are a Good Thing: straight, friendly webpages put together in a way that suits beginners and experts alike. And that's why I like them.
Some useful element identifiers:
topnav
The bar at the top that contains:
breadcrumbsl
The breadcrumbs trail
bc_library_home
The library homepage part of the breadcrumbs
bc_lbguides_home
The libguides homepage part of the breadcrumbs
bc_guide_name
The current page in the breadcrumbs
guide_header_title
The page title
guidedesc
The page blurb
guideattr
The bar containing:
lastupdate
Last update
guideurl
URL
printguideurl
Print guide option
rssupdatelink
RSS feed
addthis_button
Share button
tabsI
Tabs (other versions available depending on set-up)
In my last post I vented about the state of the library profession in academia. Now, I try to look at it from the point of view of another interested party...
What do the students want from us?
They want the books and articles they want/need to use.
They want somewhere to work (both individually and in groups, with or without machinery).
They want/need help with the resources and the work.
They don't strictly give a monkeys as to our pro or am status, or where we come on the pay spine. They just want to get their essay done.
Things like self-issue machines, which dramatically alter how staff operate, probably have less effect on the students. Some will be alienated by new technology and others will be liberated: giving the students a choice between machinery and humanity is the best possible approach in this situation.
Back-room changes like book sorting machinery and 'shelf-ready' purchasing do not have as obvious an effect on the students (moral or financial motivations notwithstanding). In some cases (where implemented wisely) they will speed up turnaround times, increasing the likelihood of stock appearing in the main stacks when the students go about their hunting. Better still, of course, is to make sure there are enough books in the first place.
Let's do some quick arithmetic. A year's worth of lecturer comes to about £35-40k, which is about four students' worth of fees. In other words, four friends could club together and buy a year's worth of dedicated lecturing. Add another friend and you have the best part of £10k to spend on books for the five of them. That should punch a reasonable hole in most reading lists.
This is crude maths. It fails to consider the expenses inevitable in upscaling that model beyond the capabilities of a small room. It fails to factor in the support structures and general perks of your average university. It fails to take account of the gobsmacking resource costs we are likely to meet as we ascend to those scales. But as a back of a weblog calculation, it is a lot for us to try to live up to.
Most students have not even remotely considered this sum. The student mortgage is just an obstacle they must surmount if they want to be a student. Most students, I suspect, will not actually question where the money is going. Most students will be happy to believe that we cannot (in all possible economies) afford to provide every student with every text on a reading list. In the current situation, at any rate, it is true. But that truth is born of priorities, and the university's priorities may differ from those of the student.
Remuneration is one obvious factor. In a nation of growing financial inequity, it is only a matter of time before students begin to look upon the pay-cheques of the university management with envious eyes. It might do us all a lot of good if that happens, particularly if some of that wealth were to be redirected to the library! Extra-curricular entertainments aside, the purchasing of educational resources must be high on a student organisation's shopping list were they redesigning the university budget from scratch.
In the meantime we maximise those resources we can afford. It seems particularly in vogue at the moment to try tinkering with loan periods. I hope someone is doing a proper study of it all. Though by the time such a study is published, e-texts may have done for this whole area of debate! [This paragraph is a whole other blog post waiting to happen.]
Then there's the library as study space. The students can study anywhere. Especially if we rent out portable devices. They might equally try the campus bar, common room, or any other nook / cranny the local architecture has to offer. They needn't even be on university property. But a good library designs good study spaces, and good free space is increasingly at a premium. It needn't be the library's space, but it is, and that's good for all of us. The libraries of the future, from a study environment perspective, will be mad places: hanging bean-bag gardens overlooking spectacular scenery b/w cryptic candlelit carrels (budgets permitting).
So we try to provide somewhere for the students to do their work, and we try to provide them with some resources to work with: not enough resources (probably not even enough spaces) but we try to do our best with what we've got.
And then we have to explain to them how it all works. This is a necessary evil, but the whole university is operating on the premise of education so we might as well chip in, eh?
I don't think it's naïvety, then, to suggest that student aspirations for our service are broadly compatible with our own self-interest, without recourse to any macro-economic slights of hand (it probably helps that we aren't the best paid profession ever). It's far more naïve to anticipate any sort of student-led revolutionary re-budgeting. But to be able to argue from a position of genuine academic necessity (I opine that texts are the second most important element of higher education after the teaching staff themselves (some might even raise their level of importance a position further)) must be some sort of advantage for us. That said, rationality seldom has much of a place in economics...
We're here to support the educational process by providing:
support materials (mainly, but not exclusively, texts)
a study environment
assistance in the sound use of both
Academic librarians: what are we for?
We're here to support the educational process by providing:
support materials (the right ones, sourced in dialogue with the academics, and made sufficiently locatable and available)
a study environment (properly equipped to anticipate student needs)
assistance in the sound use of both
The role of the academic librarian, then, is to facilitate the sound function of the academic library. This is a "professional" role, by which I mean that this a role for which the incumbent has undergone some form of training and assessment accredited by a trade body. The idea behind such professionalism is to ensure certain standards: standards of capability on the behalf of the professional, which in turn suggest certain standards of remuneration.
(nowadays you need several grand to turn pro)
The precise framework of this professionalism need not be rigid, provided that sufficient rigour is applied in the determination of what constitutes an appropriate level of expertise. The important thing is that that expertise is recognised as being of sufficient value.
There is a British Institute of Facilities Management, and an Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators, not to mention the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Librarians are not the only professionals on campus. That is not to say that all cadres are valued equally. Indeed it may well be that your value is determined not by your cartel but by where your job has been pegged by the goddess HERA.
HERA and similar job evaluation schemes are an attempt to grade academic staff according to the demands inherent in their role. Anyone who has looked at the paperwork will notice that these things tend to be skewed to particular flavours of administration and that they are often just a wee bit woolly in places. Still, the consequence is that various library roles are pegged into a local framework: shelvers sit under library assistants who sit under librarians of various shades. The question for all three strata is: to what extent was my position in the grand scheme fudged, and what degree of (in)tolerance exists to threaten it?
I have seen shelvers having to be taken outside the system and treated as a special case to stop them being on the same grade as assistants, such are the limitations of role assessments (other alarming tales are heard beyond the library doors). The whole thing lands us into messy territory: any change to our role should really be met with a new assessment, although what can go up may also go down. I just did a quick back-of-a-datesheet HERA assessment of typical librarian roles and got anything from 100-300 points depending not only on how much responsibility is given to the role but also on where the limits of that responsibility are drawn. 100 points is very lowly indeed, and perhaps best serves as a cautionary exaggeration. The point is that convention and received attitudes can be as important as our actual duties when it comes to playing the role profiling game. Shift out one level of the strata that hold us in place, and the ground crumbles beneath us.
Peg a shelver on grade three, stick a library assistant on grade four, and you can start pegging senior library assistants and junior librarians at the grade five mark. But were you to remove the shelvers from the picture, replacing them with zero-hour students or trainees, the subsidence can begin to bed in. The undermining starts below us: the clue is in the name.
Self-service machines are easier to use than they once were, reducing desk traffic and with it the library assistant's communication score. Book sorters potentially de-skill the role of the shelver. Out-sourcing of processing and other back-room duties may also have a de-skilling effect, or may simply lead to redundancies. The work still exists beyond our walls, made monotonous, production-line and ill-paid, rather than as part of a varied and pleasant library job. The move to a 24-hour service may see us training up our contracted security staff (also outsourced for economy) who will happily do a lot of the work our shelvers and assistants do for none of the money, just for something to do in the small hours.
(your services are no longer required)
Outsourcing is a great way of bypassing all those expensive agreements the university has made with the unions over the years, and a brilliant way of pulling people out of the pay spine. It cheerfully disregards things like reward, happiness and work-ethic for the sake of a few quid. Councils have demonstrated that outsourcing is generally a horrible mess but this won't stop certain quarters of academia giving it a go. Mostly these will be the already well-established bad eggs, but just look at how campus security has been treated by even the nicer universities to get an idea as to what is possible. Cleaners and catering are the next obvious targets, and then they might look to the library, where outsourced staff are already keeping the place going during most of the day.
On top of all this is the concept I will now call digital slippage: as more and more of our holdings go online, they become invisible. In the past we could point to the crammed stacks and say "build us a library extension", the creaking tangibility serving as a compelling argument in our favour. Now we walk the rope in a tug-of-war between electronic and physical: our stacks can be painted as anachronisms; our digital collections, whispily drifting across campus, might equally belong to I.T. In a world where collections can be infinitely large, our powers of weeding become irrelevant and the departments might as well take over the whole stock-managing malarkey for themselves. It might even make Open Access more straightforward for everyone!
The physical collection management will remain, though it is likely to become increasingly archival in nature as current content becomes more consistently virtual (catastrophes not withstanding). The study environment could, let's face it, belong to anyone, not least I.T. We might be able to manage it better than anyone else (members of the British Institute of Facilities Management included) but space management requires less heads than stock management (nobody needs to catalogue the comfy chairs).
Which tilts the bagatelle of librarianship to information skills. Information skills are genuinely important in academia, which is why they end up being taught by librarians in brief and ill-attended induction sessions. There is more to it than teaching students how to use EBSCO: even if interfaces did become "easy" they would still inevitably bring up crap (Google is the epitome of "easy") and evaluation is just as important as Boolean logic.
(if you think The Sun's bad, you should see Page 3 of Google)
Variety is the spice of life, and academic librarianship is currently a very well spiced profession (not all of it, but some). I would like it to stay that way (it was one of the things that drew me to it in the first place): I want to be able to juggle teaching, stock-management, space-management, archiving, I.T, and all the other stuff we do: it makes for an interesting and pleasant job, and interesting and pleasant jobs make for happy and productive workers. I am worried that this interesting and pleasant job is on the verge of fragmentation: the teaching going one way, the stock management another, etc. Which bits retain the "librarian" moniker and is there any way of holding them together? Because if we don't, we run the risk of dropping down the spine: not only will our work be less varied (and hence more tedious) but it will also, as a consequence, be deskilled and therefore worth less money. As such we need to ensure that all aspects of our work are clearly and incontrovertibly associated with librarianship: all of them. Or else we must cut our losses and hitch our roles to another profession: teaching, archiving, facilities management. Either we hold together, reinforcing the core idea of the library as a centre of study support and the librarian as the agent of that support, or we let it disintegrate and throw our lot in with some other part of HE. I think the former option is still available.
The library building is still there, with both the books and the study spaces. The need for information literacy is both real and compelling. The array of products and licences, the horrors of copyright, the fog of open access, the mysteries of repositories and research data... they constitute a mess of support materials to which we can readily claim some mastery. It's easy to lose sight, from the inside, of the externally apparent mysteries of stock procurement and management (particularly digital stock). Librarians can cast and read those runes in a way that other academic staff cannot. We know what we're doing in that regard. And if we're worried that our magical capabilities might be outsourced, then we should also get our mitts on juicy research data and various repositable gubbins that might be better kept inhouse than out. We need to pull together all teh stuff and make sure everyone knows it's ours. In that regard, it is vitally important to ensure that our work is seen and valued. This is seldom easy for us: running a COUNTER report can only tell so much, and there are no truly effective ways to measure the impact of a LibGuide. So we have to talk about it. We have to show off at every convenient opportunity. We have to stick together and we have to advocate.
Which is where CILIP/ILPUK comes in. Or should come in. Unionisation also has a role (especially in terms of the undermining aspects) but the professional body is key to reinforcing the values of librarianship and of the work we do; of giving the lead and offering a sense of direction. Academia is in a very odd place at the moment, with no real sense of direction, and we could conceivably be in the middle of it, forging something wonderful. But it needs a bit of coordination and the odd gala luncheon to provide the necessary momentum to carry us forward. It needs us all mucking in and looking out for each other, and it needs a little flamboyance from our body. We should be getting out there, flapping our beautiful wings and boasting about how fantastic and essential we are, but instead we are wailing and gnashing our teeth. With a little braggadocio you can convince an emperor to parade naked, so convincing him that librarians are important (which they actually are) ought to be a doddle. If self-belief requires a name change, then (as daft as it is, and it is very very daft) let's do it so we can get stuck in to what matters.
