A sad decline in standards

Before I joined the library as a member of staff, I had a beard and ponytail, from my time in the circus, playing a pirate in Treasure Island! Here you can see us doing a group apple juggling routine, with me on the left...
When I got the job in the library I still treated it as a 'performance' job, so shaved and cut my hair short, to try to look like a librarian.

After the first couple of years I managed to get a job backstage, in the computer maintenance team. At this point I was still pretty clean and tidy, waistcoats and all.

I even wore a tie most days, even though I didn't meet the public that much...
And although it was a serious job, we also got to play with things like webcams...

I kept up appearances because I helped run training courses for staff and so on...



And would spend any wet lunch hours in The Stacks. As you can see, my hair started to grow out in what I considered a kind of 'Archivist' look.
When we moved into the temporary library in John Street, our original 'public internet access' experiment solidified into a cybercafe, and somehow the techie look seemed to allow a ponytail, so long as it was tidy, etc.
In fact, according the Wim Wenders, in Wings of Desire, 'library angels' all have ponytails...
And the technology carried on changing, with our RFID tag and reader...
Somehow the combination of library work and computers got me into writing a novel in a month, just for the craich.
And then, getting a Print On Demand copy or two from Lulu - just for the hell of it!
By the time we had moved into our state-of-the-art library, and became the universal computer support guy, I had a beard, the hair, and a bad attitude to uniforms, compulsory second language and other limitations... As the politicians try to eliminate libraries completely...

Moving On

This blog started after I went on one of those inspirational courses (with the support of my management) - back in 2008 - where people tell you what we could be doing - within our service - to keep up with the 21st Century. Dave Pattern totally enthused me.

I was so excited and motivated (the course was in work time, after all, and part of my Professional Development) that I ran back to work to set up e-learning, wikis, blogs, Facebook Pages, etc.

We are now officially on Facebook. An official blog is going public, I gather. The Music Dept are still hoping to get their MySpace site accepted. The e-learning FAQs are is in place, for staff.

It's all taking off, slowly.

My work here is done. This blog may no longer get updated that much, as my focus shifts to 'supplementing my pension elsewhere in cyberspace'.

If anyone does actually read this, I hope to shift your focus to the official channels (through official links)...as soon as I dare publish.

I will, of course, remain a user of libraries, whether I work in them or not.

A uniformly bad idea

Ah me. Please remember this is an unofficial blog with a disclaimer about it only representing personal opinions.

Today I heard the union was meeting to decide how to deal with an employer adamant that staff in the library will wear a uniform. This has only been going on for a couple of years now, with the battle covering the ground of yes/no, who pays for it (staff/employer), and "if yes, then what colour" and other issues.

My own take is that I can't wear synthetic materials - if 'they' buy it for me.

I have no objection to identifying myself as 'someone who works here' - I already wear a lanyard with Staff on it.

The resistance has proved surprising, although bear in mind that 80% of library staff are women, who perhaps resist the idea of shapeless sweat shirts, in colours/styles they don't like, slightly more than men do.

And all the official librarians, with their degrees and all, dress professionally anyway.

We unqualified (although experienced)

library assistants have a loose dress code, but mostly we prefer to appear approachable (to go along with the new ethos (also imposed by management styles) of informality, a library where no-one will shush you.

Spot the contradiction?

Personally, I'd happily wear a uniform with a (pretty cool, after Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons") ambigram on it, but they only make them for women, which might perhaps tell you something about the library service - as a job for a man...maybe?

If you'd like to support your local library service, or even end up working as a volunteer, running your local library for no pay, you might like to check out the stuff available at CafePress - which includes everything from T-Shirts and mugs to badges and bags.

What's your image of a 21st Century Librarian?

OK, OK, library assistant... (sigh)

Noisy Librarians!

The library staff no longer shush people: they can chat, laugh, talk on the phone, even eat noisily if they want!

And yes, that sentence remains deliberately ambiguous!

This morning I was training a couple of members of staff to use our new shelf scanners (and admittedly I do have a rather booming voice) when I got shushed by a member of the public who was trying to revise!

No, we don't provide any quiet areas for study any more.

Still, I don't think I am the first member of library staff to be accused of being noisy.

Noisy Library Staff

Noisy Library, Peaceful Mind from Eva's Book Addiction.

Southwark Noisy Library Day on Flickr


Letter to The Times from Sue Mckenzie, President of the Association of London Chief Librarians

A noisy library is a joyful thing

If you write as good as you talk, nobody reads you

Simon Hoggart managed to get a laugh out of Camden Council (in London) with this wonderful example of bureaucratic language. If everyone wrote like this, no-one would read books (including me).

Reader John Richardson sends in a magnificent example of jargon, from a report by Camden council, north London, called "Growing Your Library" [sic]. This turns out to mean sacking lots of staff and replacing them with barcode scanners. It includes phrases such as "information plinths" and reads in part: "The People work stream sits alongside service visioning, ICT procurement, spatial strategy, pilot RFID (radio frequency identification), enabled library and communications work streams."

The Good Library Guide has already picked up on this, but I’ll mention it anyway.

Just to be fair, however, when I looked at the PDF the Council offers on ‘Grow Your Library’ (I don’t even like the title: ‘grow your own…’ maybe, or ‘grow your libraries’ perhaps), there’s something about the rhythm or the grammar that just doesn’t work as a slogan for me. [muses] ...Grow your rose, grow your pig, no it doesn’t work for me.

Ahem.

Anyway, I can find no phrasing quite as awful as the bit Mr Hoggart quotes, in the PDF.

We all live with 'noisy library theory' these days...

Oh, and the title for the post is the way I remember Lou Reed dealing with an inarticulate heckler...on Take No Prisoners (read Gadfly for background)

Too creative with the truth

The local papers rang the library, enquiring about an incident which had been reported to them.

Whoever alerted them failed to realise how creative our Leisure Department are.

They seem to have missed the announcement of a visit from crime author Peter James, for a book signing - disguised as a Wanted Poster.

We also have some wonderful messages scrolling across our plasma screens, from the BBC feed.

Quite often they seem so gnomic and unlike a headline that you wonder how you would trace the story, but some seem so eye-catching that staff have accused me of smuggling them in!

Today the one that stopped me was:

Mammoth dung clue to evolution
(it didn't help that my brain read that as something like - massive 'dung-clue' to evolution).

Probably this story... :-)

Content Creators

The image of hissing and shushing librarians guarding their precious books like dragons leaves out the fact that many library and information workers actually love books.

And rather than fitting into the mould of "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach" - quite a few library workers actually write books, too.

Mark Isaacs (who works in Cardiff Libraries) has recently had published Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Cardiff and will, apparently, be signing copies at Borders soon. He previously collaborated with the prolific Francis Frith on a book called Around Penarth.

When the Cardiff Bay development was causing a scandal, the local library worker Sian Best wrote A Whim Set in Concrete: The Campaign to Stop the Cardiff Bay Barrage.