It's hard to keep up these days, with so much happening in the public library world: Gloucestershire libraries attract some criticism for playing music to browsers, Frances Hendrix has found out that the MLA wanted to deny a platform to their critics and were unwise enough to minute it, though they are hardly alone in that: the voice of local campaigners going unheard at the Hampshire conference, and Rachel Cooke returned to the fray with a follow-up to her previous Observer article.She notes Andrew Burnham's decision to intervene in the Wirral but rightly questions what on earth Burnham means by saying he wants libraries to be ‘like Facebook 3D’. A generous reading of this phrase might be that he means that libraries are places where activities analagous to online social networking can happen face-to-face. But Facebook is a poor analogy here, being proprietary, advertising funded, and its ability to connect the user with useful information very mnch connections limited by who your friends are. If libraries are to be thought of as analogous to online social networks, we are probably closer to something much more open and free.
She denounces 'modernisation...[as...] exactly that little trend which has left libraries in places such as Brighton with insufficient shelving (books being so very old hat)'.But the new library in Brighton, the Jubilee library, of which I am a user, is not an example of excessive modernisation. On the contrary, it is not modern enough. Thus:
- there is no wifi, this in the town where you can even sit on the beach and use freee public wifi thanks to the Pier-to-Pier network
- the RFID issue system is antiquated and excruciatingly slow
- the library's web site is short on information and interactvitity and lives at the counter-intiuitive domain of http://www.citylibraries.info/
- there is no library Twitter feed, Facebook group, use of delicious, Flickr or any other attempt to use social networking to bring the library's services to readers' attention or enrich their ecxpereince
- the catalogue, an obscure system called Spydus, is primitive: it lacks any element of personalisation, such as the ability for readers to tag or review items, it cannot make suggestions ('readers who borrowed this, also borrowed that'), and there is no facility to search other library systems’ catalogues, or request items not already held
There are good features, apart from the impressive building: the stock, much criticised, is perhaps not as poor as some make out. Recently I needed copies of Cicero's De Oratore and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, to follow up Quentin Skinner's lecture on Hobbes in which he described the education in rhetoric Hobbes and other Oxford undergraduates of his time would have received. I was delighted to find that Brighton had both, though they fail the Andromaque test. Reservations are free, which is good: forcing readers to pay to reserve material is a tax on the purposive reader.
Of course it needs better book-stock, and longer opening hours, particulary in the mornings, when it does not open until 10 at the earliest, and in the evenings when it only opens til 8 pm one night and 7 pm another. When I started in public libraries our central library was open till 8 pm Monday to Friday and when we younger staff complained about losing our evenings, the old hands would tell us how, when they started, they had to work till 10 at night.
What no one, Rachel included, will admit is this is the entirely logical consequence of the PFI arrangements under which the new library was built. And, for all the qualities of the building, it is PFI too that is responsible for the library being surrounded by dull and drab chain-restaurants and supermarkets. Why not have one of Brighton’s excellent independent bookshops next door? Because they could never afford the exorbitant rents. The PFI 'partners' are deterined to milk the site for profit for as long as they can.
