British Library and undergraduates

In the Guardian, Lynne Brindley defends the British Library against charges that undergraduates are swamping the reading areas. The exchange sounds a little like a library suggestions book, with its interplay of reader and librarian. Tristram Hunt's central criticism is wrong: it should be the duty of the national library to be open to any citizen who cannot find what they need elsewhere, and undergraduates may well do research projects which require them to use materials only held at the BL. I know of no evidence that undergraduate library users are any worse-behaved than other type of user. Hunt claims "The studied calm of the reading room has given way to a hum of mobile phone ringtones, chit-chat and pubescent histrionics". My own visits to the BL have been disturbed by mobile phone noises from some very venerable users, who don't know how to set them to silent. And as for pubescent histrionics, that old literary journalist's standby, the article on sexual liaisons in the reading rooms, has been published and re-published for many years before wider access to the collections by undergraduates was granted. See Reading for Pleasure by Olivia Stewart-Liberty in the Spectator of 4 July 2005 for an example of the genre.
Hunt's original article is Scholarly Squeeze, there are some comments here, including a suggestion that may well do wonders for Senate House Library's statistics; and there's more in Mortarboard.
It's a good week for librarians in the Guardian: there are some wonderfully pithy and accurate comments on qualified librarians by a library assistant in Notes and Queries, which doesn't seem to have reached the web version yet. responding to a school librarian who worries about the absence of positive images of the profession (a sign of a profession in trouble, if you ask me) she says that the words "mean, sad, peculiar and petty-minded" certainly apply. She adds some more: "misanthropic, hierarchical, dictatorial, uncommunicative, unsociable, indecisive and pedantic".... "I'd add short and shuffly, but I fear I'm being personal". I too, after nearly thirty years in library staff rooms, recognise many of the traits she sees in (some) former colleagues.