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.
“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.
"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!
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.
