Evidence, or ‘What have you been doing?’

As with my Glasgow colleague, I am beginning to bring together evidence for my Chartership portfolio.

I have a draft of my Evaluative Statement already, as I felt that this would help give shape to the evidence selection. The statement is also a pain to write, with its tight word limit and demands for evaluation and reflection; so I felt spending a long time on it was inevitable and an early start the best option.

As I said some time ago, given the word limits I am tempted to try haikus Here is my first attempt, on service evaluation:-

user not broken

but does that mean that we are?

 hear the OPAC suck

I like a laugh

Many of you will already know Unshelved. Always funny, often hilarious and sometimes just weird. And they do nice t-shirts too!

Also always good value, the Warrior Librarian. The book is pretty funny too.

And why not try Rex Libris. Damn hard for me to get hold of, even with two fine comic shops near to home; worth the effort mind. I cannot comment on the quality of the apparel, but the comic is good.

Disintermediation

No councillors, save as members of an oversight board. No ‘consultants’ (where do they go when efficiency savings come round?) No ‘experts’, unless they’re prepared to put their bodies where their words are.

We could try just the librarians and the visitors, working together. Public libraries could work much better if they were just given the tools and money to do their basic jobs, and left alone to do it.

Radical trust? Where is the trust in librarians? No, we just have to put up with the same tired stereotypes and cliches and accept that the consultants and campaigners of course know so much more than us.

Recruitment, standards and CILIP

In the comments to Tim Coates’ post on CILIP/MLA, Verity Penglais argues that no-one would notice if CILIP went, except insofar as money from dues would go back into frontline services.

Leaving aside the charming assumption that councils would use money they currently spend on CILIP fees to boost frontline services, there is the issue of recrutiment.

Penglais notes that many libraries are employing people who don’t have CILIP accredited qualifications, and that people don’t notice. Maybe they don’t, but in itself that’s not a good argument for primarily employing people with no library experience or study background. I’ve nothing against employing shop workers ( I was one myself, and the experience was helpful) it’s the assumptions underlying this practice and the calls for deprofessionalisation that concern me.

I have said in the past that I don’t want a ‘closed shop’, but I am concerned when it’s assumed that ‘life experience’ or analogous experience can be used as an argument against any sort of qualification structure. It’s of a piece with ‘how hard can it be to be a librarian?’ I mean, if you’ve got retail experience you can do it, cos it’s sort of like a shop eh? Or, if you’ve worked with children you’re bound to be great! Don’t fancy CPD in librarianship? Why worry, it’s not rocket science is it? Soon there’ll be no librarianship anyway; just lots of lovely books and computers and smily staff who’ll soon be off to HMV or a bookshop or some other Temple of the Cheap and Bland…

You can see the effects of this thinking in school libraries. It’s assumed that pretty much anyone can do it, so no quals are demanded by many schools.

Now, this does not mean there are no good unqualified school librarians; but what it often means is that the people in post are there for the other benefits rather than a desire to develop really good libraries. And what respect can librarians command in a school when they do not hold a qualification in their field as the teachers do?

And simply channeling money to ‘the frontline’ will ultimately have the paradoxical effect of making services worse. You’ll have a few more people on the desk, but what of the people who do the service planning, the networking and the firefighting? Or will your new, cheaper desk staff do that too?

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask that a structure be in place for training and CPD. CILIP could do a good job of this, if it were slimmed down radically. Getting rid of it is just of a piece with an ‘all must have prizes’ model of a lovely flat organisation where we all mean the same and (oh so coincidentally) can be paid a lot less. No need for qualifications or librarians indeed. Or librarianship.

Other people have accepted this sort of thing, we are told, so why can’t we dinosaur librarians do so? Because it wasn’t always right then, for one…

There has to be some realistic replacement for CILIP, not just giving it a kicking then claiming the money saved will make services better.

Dipping my toes into bookreading 2.0

I don’t have a connection at home, which in a lot of ways is a nice thing So I do my testing and browsing here at work.

I thought I’d have a look at LibraryThing, Shelfari and Revish, specifically at what they tell me about The Book Thief. (Shelfari link; LibraryThing link)

My notes tell me I thought the following:-

LibraryThing is good for general reviews. I’m never sure on the recommendation side of things, based as they are on what people have read- as opposed to similarities in titles/subjects. In this regard,the cataloguing information is useful, pointing to subject links etc. As for tags, they can be useful once you’ve filtered out the superpersonal stuff.

Shelfari is okay, but I didn’t like the look and feel side. Not so intuitive, and the layout is not to my taste.

If I did have the net at home I might be tempted to LibraryThing some of my books; as it is it’s somewhat impractical to do it from work.

Revish only has one review, but it was quite a good one.

I can see how having a wide range of reviews, however varied in quality they may be, is very useful and will use LT and Revish in this way. The ability to link to LT records will also be of use as one way to get user tags into catalogues.

MLA Blueprint

I’ve submitted my response to the MLA Blueprint. Not a nice form; it assumes you like the Blueprint From there it just asks which of the bits you like best essentially.

 You can use the free text areas to have a more genuine say, but it’s still not a good form. Still, I’ve done my bit. Maybe it means something, maybe (nod to Tim Coates) it doesn’t. We shall see.

Umbrella 2007

Who’s heading to Hatfield for Umbrella?

I’m looking forward to it, though I’m not a natural socialiser or networker. The first-timer lunch should help…

Physical description 2.0

Now, this is not about David Cronenberg (“do not despise the things of the body; that is Manichaean error”; I wish I could find who said that.)

Rather it’s about an intriguing bit of OPAC work  flagged up by Michael over at 025.04

Will RDA allow for the colour of a book cover as part of physical description? Does AACR2 do so now? Would it go in the notes? ‘Red background, picture of Southern belle and Cavalry officer, raised gold letters’

Will FRBR allow for such descriptions? [colourCover=red]

It’d be great if you could build that in as part of standard cataloguing, as quite a lot of people do remember books by cover etc. And is not one of the great Tasks of the Catalogue to enable people to find stuff?

What are we for, revisited

Are libraries about information? No; at least that shouldn’t be their focus

Are libraries ‘just’ for books? No

Should they be ‘mainly’ about books? For now, yes

Should they be about ‘anything we can think of’? No

There has to be a limit to what libraries are charged with doing, be that by government, commentators or librarians. Libraries should be about:-

• books- including the usefulness and joy of reading
• other sources of works of research and the imagination- from CD-ROMs to wikis; and, we might add now, about the fun of creating and sharing
• help with finding and using these books and other sources
• local information, including council information, cultural information and pointers to further services

Libraries shouldn’t be, amongst other things

• free day-care centres
• replacements for well-run and funded GP booking services
• teen centres
• people-who-always-come-here-centres
• people-who-validate-the-staff centres

Libraries have their part to play in various schemes etc, but they do that best by being good libraries. Anything that happens in them should contribute to that; not to numbers, not to getting ‘em in so we can sell ‘em something else.

If libraries are everything, eventually they will be nothing.

Was it so bad in the past?

Flicking through The Times I come across an article on bookshops, browsing and the internet. Authors saying that they miss browsing and the serendipity of the bookshop; but one didn’t miss the old bookshops with ‘an old dragon’ at the desk or only the works of Mao on the shelf.

Now, I remember independent bookshops too, and not in that light. I remember commitment, a wide stock range, a genuine service. Am I wrong? Was it really all so bad? And the same argument goes for libraries- they are portrayed as uniformly bad. But I remember my local library as a great place, and the public library in my college town (Aberystwyth) in the same way. Am I wrong? Not being famous I can hardly be right now, can I

I feel that too often the past is painted as bad as possible so that people can present themselves as the ’saviours’ of libraries/bookshops/whatever. But cack-tinted specs are no better than rose-tinted ones.