Tom Roper's Weblog

By the book

Today's Education Guardian contains an article contrasting two new university library developments, Aberdeen, whose £55m "library for our sixth century". due to open in 2010, and the University of Central Lancashire, who have no new building to boast of, but an e-brary, as they call it, of a rather modest 30,000 e-texts at a cost of £25,000. They quote a UCLan criminology lecturer, Nick Currie, who believes there should be more books. Currie does not help his argument by saying, "if you think Marx shouldn't have wasted his time writing 20 volumes of Capital when he only had two or three ideas that could be summarised in a paragraph, then the internet is fine". Unfortunately for Currie, as every schoolboy, at least of my generation, knows, Marx only wrote three volumes of Capital, or four if you count Theories of Surplus Value, to wit, volume 1, the Process of Production of Capital, volume 2, the Process of Circulation of Capital and volume 3, the Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Neither can his error be excused by supposing that he was meant the complete works, for they, in the Lawrence and Wishart English edition, run to 50 volumes.

Technorati Tags: marx

Principia Dialectica on public libraries

I became excited when I saw that the second issue of Principia Dialectica included a piece on public libraries. The LRB Bookshop kindly and promptly posted me a copy. I'm afraid to say I was disappointed.
The piece, Blockbuster Libraries, is a review of Ruth Rikowski's Globalisation, Information and Libraries: The Implications of the World Trade Organisation's GATS and TRIPS Agreements with some reflections by the author, David Black, on Wood Green public library, part of the London Borough of Haringey, where I worked as a Senior Librarian from 1986-1990.
Black is correct to draw attention to the decline of the public library, and especially of its book stock, though he seems to come close to the Coatesian error of thinking that libraries should only contain one medium, the book, and should ignore other media. He describes the privatisation of Haringey's libraries, handed over to a company called Instant Library from 2001 till 2004 as a Public Private Partnership. Instant Library were, as an illustration of capitalism's tendency to monopoly, taken over by a company called Tribal Technology, whose website says proudly that among other things, they have been "upskilling [sic] McDonald's frontline employees". (Interest declared: I registered with them at the start of this bout of unemployment and I think I'm correct in saying that they have not sent me a single job in seven months).
Black incorrectly considers the introduction of charges for services other than book loans to be a new phenomenon. I am sorry to say that this commodification, as they describe it, of the public library has existed when I worked in them in the 1970s and 1980s. I could never see the justification for the reservation charge, for example. No one library will hold all the materials a user will need, so why charge for obtaining material from elsewhere, unless to penalise the more serious and purposive reader?
Black, or Rikowski, or both seem to draw an entirely unreal distinction between manual and intellectual labour, and claim that there has been a shift from the exploitation of one to the exploitation of the other. This is nonsense. There is no job, no matter how menial, which does not require intellectual effort, neither is there such a thing as entirely intellectual labour. And the long history of patents, developed side-by-side with capitalism itself, suggests that intellectual products were commodified a long time ago.
The rest of the journal is Trotskyite-cum-Situationist in tone, an approach that may have appealed to the modish some years ago but which has rather run its course.

Black, David
Blockbuster libraries
Principia Dialectica No 2, Autumn/Winter 2006 (they have no ISSN as far as I can see, naughty, but maybe Situationists despise such things)

Rikowski, Ruth
Globalisation, Information and Libraries: the implications of the World Trade Organisation’s GATS and TRIPS Agreements
Chandos, 2005 1843340844

Technorati Tags: haringey

Clip Board

I'm honoured to see that this blog is mentioned in this month's Library and Information Update (though not in the sections available online) in Edward Dudley's Clip Board column. Edward's' theme is how librarians talk to one another.
Elsewhere, Chris Armstrong's intervention in the debate on public library supply is attracting attention. I've been out of circulation for a while, so missed Richard Charkin of Macmillan's speech to the National Acquisitions Group, in which he seems to swallow the Tim Coates line in toto, to wit that public libraries are filled to bursting with overpaid managers who spend the book fund on expense account lunches.
I was going to stand in the elections for CILIP Council this autumn, but had to withdraw my candidature, but if I were standing, a major part of my platform would be to help to build an organisation that can make forthright, public, convincing rebuttals of Coates and Charkin. Once there was a Triple Alliance of the old Library Association, the Library Campaign and the trade unions that organise library and information workers. We need that alliance again.

EAHIL in Cluj

As it happened I couldn't have gone anyway, even if an employer had been fool enough to send me,. but EAHIL's conference in Cluj, Romania, sounds as if it was very successful. Oliver Obst presented on blogs and was kind enough to mention this one. There was a collaborative conference blog at: http://eahil2006.blogspot.com/ and Flickr photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/eahil2006/

Technorati Tags: Cluj, EAHIL

Educate, agitate and organise

The latest issue of Ariadne, labelled as the July issue, though the RSS feed only showed up today, shows a non-Talis example of a library system supplier trying to integrate Web 2.0 concepts into their product. In this issue Robin Murray of Fretwell-Downing writes under the banner Library Systems: Synthesise, Specialise, Mobilise, with particular reference to the National Library for Health.

Cotgreave indicator live on national television

I was half-watching Restoration last night but my attention was seized the moment that, in the library of the Prichard Jones Institute in Newborough, Anglesey, the presenters fell with cries of delight upon a Cotgreave indicator. They understood how it worked, though they seemed not to know its name.

Technorati Tags: cotgreave

Better stock, better libraries?

The PricewaterhouseCoopers report on public library procurement, Better Stock Better Libraries, available online at the snappy URL http://www.mla.gov.uk/webdav/harmonise?Page/@id=73&Document/@id=24696&Section[@stateId_eq_left_hand_root]/@id=4332 (surely someone at MLA has the skill and wit to construct more user-friendly URLs rather than rely on the defaults thrown out by their content management system), has generated a certain amount of comment: see this Technorati search.
It recommends:
"1. The local library authority remains the accountable body for the
delivery of a ‘comprehensive and efficient’ library service;
2. The role of the local library authority should be to specify
requirements and outcomes – a commissioning function – rather
than selecting and sourcing stock – a procurement function;
3. Stock selection can be most efficiently managed and delivered
regionally, with selection of niche specialisms such as ethnic
minority language materials done nationally.
4. The purchase of a very large proportion of all stock should be
through a national eMarketplace, on the basis of best value supplier
offers
5. Servicing and processing will be undertaken within regional hubs
and delivered direct to local libraries, where items can be scanned
and placed on the shelf.
6. An increase in the use of stock analysis tools to inform
commissioning at local authority level
7. An eMarketplace that includes real time information on price,
availability and delivery times provided by suppliers
8. A single national bibliographic database
9. Automation of financial workflow to encompass invoicing, payment
and receipting; and
10. Shared LMS interoperability standards to enable integration
of local, regional and national activities [presumably just public libraries..why not all sorts, why not real interoperability with all manner of catalogues and data sources-TR]"

But the recommendations give little clue as to how they will offer practical improvements in service for library users. Of course there is some lip service to users, but they seem to have started their analysis not from what Britain's library users want and need, but from the existing processes and structure of the library supply market.
Consider this sequence of events under current arrangements:
1. A reader identifies an item they want to read/view or listen to.
2. The reader goes to their public library systems online catalogue. If the item is already held, the reader can probably reserve it. If the item is not held, neither of the public library systems I use allow a reader to request an item not already in stock online. So...
3. The reader therefore has to fill in a paper request and pay a fee, if they can find a member of staff who understands that there is a world of information beyond their library authority, and that it is their job to help the reader find such material . The principle of universal availability of publications is more honoured in the breach than the observance. Readers will find it particularly difficult to ask for newly published, or about to be published material. I have been told on occasion when asking for such items, "No you can't ask for that; we can't get things that aren't on the catalogue." "Oh yes I can", I say, sotto voce, "I know, I'm a librarian".
How would this change under the PWC arrangements? The only obvious difference is that interoperable catalogues at a national level could allow readers to see everything currently available. But there needs to be interoperability with a far wider range of datasets than just those....with Amazon, both the main Amazon area and with wishlists and listmania lists, with library catalogues outside the public library sector, with Librarything...and so on.
I suppose the trouble is they've looked at library procurement without realising that it's a means to an end for the people who use libraries. The question they should have asked was not how can we make the existing system more efficient, but how can we better serve the people.

Technorati Tags: MLA, procurement

Designing libraries

I should have known about this ages ago, but it's very good: http://www.designinglibraries.org.uk/

And while we're talking about classification...

...see this from The Onion: Dewey Decimal System Helpless To Categorize New Jim Belushi Book
There's a response on the Dewey blog and I look forward to a totally serious one from Lorcan Dempsey.

Obscure library classification schemes

There's an interesting debate going on in the LibraryThing Thingology blog (the theoretical LT blog) about classification systems and their electronic availability. If I ever had a free hand to choose a classification scheme for a general collection, untrammelled by the legacy of any previous system, I'd be very tempted to use Colon, or Bliss.
But a mention of an obscure one, the Blegen classification, for classical studies libraries, reminds me of some of the more obscure ones I have used in my time. When at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons we used Barnard, for which there is no Wikipedia entry. I may write one. I used to visit the Marx Memorial Library, which has its own system, which I was once told was based on that used at the Lenin Library in Moscow.
Classification and taxonomy are in the news. See the Guardian:
In praise of taxonomy
Guardian 12 August 2006 (though I thought that the ICZN taxonomy had been available online for some time)
And in the London Review of Books a fascinating investigation of medical and psychiatric taxonomies by the philosopher Ian Hacking:
Hacking, Ian
Making up people
London Review of Books 2006 28(18): 23-26
(Online version for subscribers only)
Hacking gave the tenth British Academy lecture in April this year, Kinds of People: Moving Targets, on much the same subject.