4I last did an analysis of my tweeting back in May 2012, and before that in July 2011. Those posts took a thorough look at the content of my first 100 and first 1,000 tweets from the @SaintEvelin account. My tweet tally now exceeds the 6,700 mark, which is too many to go through by hand. Fortunately, there are ways to crunch the content, and so I will, looking specifically at my twitter activity through the course of 2013.
First of all, let's take a look at the volume of my tweeting this last year: 3787 tweets in all. On average I make ten tweets a day (up four from last year). Rounding as necessary, four of those tweets are @-led conversations, two are retweets, and one contains the word-stem libr*. The numbers round more reliably if we expand to a full week's twitter activity, so here we go:
2012
2013
Tweets/week
43
73
@s
21 (49%)
29 (39%)
RTs
8 (18%)
17 (24%)
libr*
3 (8%)
4 (6%)
So I'm tweeting more, conversing more, retweeting twice as much as last year, and tweeting without the words libr* about twice as much as last year. My use of the L-word is up by one tweet a week, but as a proportion of my output it is lower than in 2012.
Of course, it's not all about the L-word. If we include info* in the search, things go up by another tweet a week. Adding CILIP has the same effect, putting us at six library-y tweetings in seven days. This by no means tells the whole story, so let's add another one for luck. This puts us a little more honestly at the rounded-up figure of a library tweet a day. Let's call it a tenth of my twitter output. That sounds a fair proportion really. At the 1,000 tweets mark it was about a third, so there may be more to this story. Applying the same criteria to 2012 as to 2013 I'm up by a percent or so.
To get a more accurate view of what I tweet about, we can employ a word cloud. Here's one I made earlier:
The RT is for scale. We already know that that's about a quarter of my twittering. I also say "just" quite a lot, don't I just? Looking around the edges I note that I tweeted about Strictly Come Dancing more than I did about the Great British Bake-Off, which is entirely right and proper. But I think the real story can be found at the top of the nebula, with the inspirational legend: NOW EUROVISION LIBRARY! Nice to note that library is the biggest noun in there. I may mention libraries less than once a day, but I seem to mention them more than I mention other things. I think that's an appropriate balance, really.
I notice that York is bigger than (pretty) Hull. But cake is bigger than both. The words that appear all seem rather positive, so that's nice (top left, between great and lovely).
To wrap up, here's a chart depicting pretty much all my tweeting ever, including on my other twitter account. It doesn't include my tweets from @HullUni_Library. What it does do is show how @SaintEvelin, an account initially intended as a "professional" networky sort of thing, has become my main account for most of what I have to say, be it about libraries or about Strictly. My original @KingConstance account still trickles along, mainly as a vessel for my angrier tweets, and, when I remember, to continue the pretence of a medieval kingdom in South Yorkshire. But the original reasoning behind the schism: a sort of separation of church and state (social versus professional, if you will) has been disavowed. Tweetdeck, and the raising of the limit on the number of members in a twitter list, allow me to monitor various spheres of interest at once. What is more, the social aspect of tweeting is, I believe, a vital component of the networking aspect: all work and no play makes @Jack a dull tweeter. There's no need to carry on a split personality. Not with librarians at any rate. Cake is an essential part of the job.
My total number of tweets this year from both accounts was 4,369 (582 from @KingConstance). In 2012 it was 2,808 (573 from @KingConstance), so that's roughly a 150% increase in activity. In 2011 (the year I started tweeting as @SaintEvelin) it was 2,853 (2,178 of those from @KingConstance).
The peak in summer 2012 corresponds with library conferences and unconferences, and with me looking for a full-time job. The near-death of @KingConstance in the last quarter of that year corresponds with me finding a full-time job. There's activity on both accounts in January of this year when I was out of work, then things go quieter when I'm in work again. Funny that. May sees Eurovision, and my biggest spike of activity (127 tweets in one day). This is my third busiest day of tweeting to date (Eurovision 2011 clocked 139, and I made 189 tweets in October 2010 when I "live-tweeted" the historical activities of the Sheffield police force). Since July, my tweet-rate has been fairly constant at around the 12-tweets-a-day mark. BBC television may have some part to play in this.
So that's the twitter analysis for another year. I may have slightly exceeded the 140 character limit. My average tweet length is 92.
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.
