Tom Roper's Weblog

Libraries to start lending money

From Newsbiscuit

In its latest bid to kick-start the nation’s ailing economy, the government has announced that public libraries will extend their current range of services to include the lending of money. From today, customers borrowing books will also be able to take out financial loans for a period of three weeks, though it may be possible to renew the terms of these agreements provided no other customer is waiting to borrow the cash.

[From Libraries to start lending money]

A working life: the librarian | Money | The Guardian

I usually eschew the Money Guardian on a Saturday. The people who write to Tony Levene on the letters page seem bereft of all common sense, and prey to any and every scam there is. But last Saturday, with thanks to Bruce Madge for the link, I see they offered a case study of modern librarianship as a career:
A working life: the librarian | Money | The Guardian.

JISC Digital Media

In the opulent surroundings of BAFTA, with Dara O'Brian lounging in the common room, and posters for old Ealing comedies on the walls, JISC Digital Media, the successor to the ten-years old TASI service was launched.

Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary of JISC, in his introduction stressed that further education is an important audience for the service, which advises on the use of still and moving images and audio in teaching, learning and research.

Karla Youngs, Sue Atkinson and Zak Mensah spoke, discussing the history of the TASI service, showing us the new website, and asking us to be ambassadors for the service. We certainly shall.   

Hampshire library conference

Hampshire County Council, who are no saints when it comes to closing libraries, held a conference yesterday, 24th February, on the future of public libraries.

It was a curious event. The attendees were there by invitation only, and, looking down the list, they were mostly from Tory-controlled authorities. According to the speakers' biographies, only one of the people who run public library services and held forth was in fact a librarian. The others seemed to have drifted into managing libraries from other local government departments. And of course there was no one there to speak for those who use libraries.

In a concession to openness, there was a good Twitter feed from @libconf and sporadic use of the tag #libconf,; most of the presentations went up, only to disappear again this morning and videos will go up early next week. But the speakers refused to take questions from the Twitterverse. At one point Tim Coates, the former Waterstones boss and self-appointed expert on libraries, claimed that half Britain's public libraries close for lunch. Evidence, Tim?

I doubt if this conference will be remembered as one that changed very much. I think Hampshire probably held it for PR reasons as much as anything else.

Public libraries: 'one of the great creations of Victorian culture"

See Joan Bakewell in the Times on the Wirral and Swindon closures and more:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/joan_bakewell/article5767579.ece

On the classification and shelving of superstitious materials in public libraries

Some newspapers' interpretations of the Museums Libraries and Arts Commission's (MLA) report on Handling Controversial Material in Libraries, published yesterday after a consultation period, claim that the MLA is instructing public libraries to shelve copies of the Koran on the top shelf. The report says nothing of the sort; it include in an appendix, without comment, an incident in Leicester where a few Muslims complained about the book being shelved in its proper place, some taking it on themselves to move copies, with the result, perhaps at odds with their aim, that readers would not find it. The example seems to me to have been included as an illustration of the ways in which special interest groups may try to exert undue influence over library policy and practice. I have heard in my career anecdotes of Muslims who have objected to female library staff handling copies of the Koran.

The shelving of religious books, as with any other type of material in public libraries is usually determined by the classification system used which, though not its primary purpose, provides a logical shelf arrangement. The privileged place of religion in the Dewey Decimal Classification reflects the classification's historical and geographical origins in nineteenth century America: a whole class, the 200s is devoted to religion, subdivided, which seems to me, in this most secular and rational of countries, to be overstating the place of religion in modern life. I much prefer the approach of the Soviet classification, developed at the Lenin Library, which relegated religion to a much more logical place, with superstition and folklore. But, if we're stuck with Dewey, as I suppose public libraries are for the foreseeable, then there is no justification for taking material out of sequence to pacify vociferous god-botherers, and I very much doubt if any of my colleagues would give any such request the time of day.

Read the report here (PDF): http://www.mla.gov.uk/news/press/releases/2009/~/media/Files/pdf/2009/ControversialMaterialReport

Christine Reid: What If?

I enjoyed a presentation at Kingston University's Information Services staff development event, to which they generously invited representatives from partner institutions such as my own South Thames College.

Christine Reid, from Strathclyde's Business School, gave a tour d'horizon of technical and social developments, asking at the end how our services would meet these challenges. It was a presentation that defies blogging, at least as a linear account. She didn't say much about the impact the current financial crisis and consequent slump might have on technology, on society and on the way we deliver services. It seems clear to me that we will not be unaffected, and I think it may mean we have to rethink the simplistic belief, the Whig view of networking as it were, that there will be continual and unimpeded progress towards a wired utopia.

But a lot of the issues she discussed were echoed in a paper by Lorcan Dempsey which has been sitting in my briefcase for weeks and which I finally read on the train on the way to the meeting:

Dempsey, Lorcan. "Always on: Libraries in a world of permanent connectivity" First Monday [Online], Volume 14 Number 1 (30 December 2008)

The meeting was enriched for me by some serendipitous discoveries with fellow delegates.

Guardian on OCLC records

It is rare for the Guardian to report on library catalogue intellectual property issues, but OCLC appears, though without glory, in a piece in the technology supplement this morning on the records ownership controversy:

Why you can't find a library book in your search engin

Teddy bears at Skegness: Keith Manley on the Twopenny Libraries

Keith Manley of the Institute of Historical Research spoke to the first CILIP in London meeting of the new year at the Sekforde Arms on twopenny libraries. flourishing from the 1920s to 1950s, these private, circulating libraries in small premises, these charged twopence (c 0.84p in decimal money) for the loan of popular fiction and spread widely, since they filled a need that publicly funded libraries were reluctant to meet. They were not popular with the book trade, with the more established circulating libraries, such as Boot's, Mudie's and W. H Smith's, nor with the library profession, who, as J.D Stewart of Bermondsey Libraries put it, felt they merely gave people a 'daily dose of imaginative dope,'. or sniffily pronounced that they catered for those who read for amusement only. The fearsome Queenie Leavis attacked them as 'twopenny dram shops' and Orwell satirised them in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for example the woman client who asks for salacious romances by requesting something 'modern but not deep'

Keith based much of his talk on work he has done with Home Office papers, for in the mid-thirties on the reforms to the Shops Act of 1911, under which the hours of work of shop assistants were regulated. The twopenny libraries had claimed exemption from these provisions, on the grounds that they were not in the retail business, and shopkeepers resented what they saw as unfair competition by the long opening hours offered by the twopenny libraries. A key test case had been whether a man who ran a pitch on Skegness beach, at which he offered an entertainment known as slippery bears, was a shop keeper or an amusement caterer.

It was a fascinating paper, and inspired a number of questions form the audience. Many of us, like me, were old enough to have entered the profession when the 'fiction debate' was still live, the hard-fought issue of whether public libraries should stock popular fiction, or restrain themselves to works of literary merit. As did other in the audience, when I first used a public library, tickets were allocated for fiction or non-fiction, to try to make sure borrowers balanced their frivolous fiction reading with some serious non-fiction.

I offer the term 'amusement caterer' to Edinburgh Council, where they propose, in the face of staff and public opposition and considerable ridicule in the press and on library blogs, to rename library staff as 'audience development officers'.

Support builds for Unison campaign

Poet Laurate and, significantly, the new Chair of the MLA, Andrew Motion, has attacked library closures, according to the Guardian: Poet laureate speaks out against library closures

Meanwhile, at Westminster, an early day motion supporting Unison's campaign on public libraries is gathering support from MPs, with thirty signatories as I write. Early day motions are not, in themselves, very significant: they are not debated in parliament, and the motion is mildly worded. Even so.