Tales of a Librarian

I attended the AGM of the Library and Information History Group (LIHG) yesterday afternoon through in Edinburgh, which was very insightful indeed.

It was held in the Signet Library, just off of the Royal Mile, in West Parliament Square, an area of the city so steeped with history that it seemed to be the ideal location for a group that are interested in the history of libraries and of the library profession.

My interest in attending this event was primarly to attend the talk and tour of the library, which is a very important law library within Scottish Legal History. The talk that we were given detailed the development of four of the legal libraries within the area, from the 1600s, which i have to admit left me feeling a little bit dizzy with numbers, and also very appreciative of modern fire prevention and fighting techniques, as the frequency of fires which these libraries seem to experience in the early days of their history was quite astonishing!

The library itself was a Georgian masterpiece of a building, with sweeping staircases, enormous pillars and walkways, and stained glass windows. How very different to the modern constructions of libraries today! The library itself was an exercise in preservation, nevermind the books that it held. Much of the original furniture remained, and rugs which would cost upward of £0.25 million to replace today. How extraordinary!

The library contained both legal and non-legal texts, most of which were kept in shelving behind glass or metal screening. I do not think that i saw a single person using it in the time i was there! Their situation regarding cataloguing is that only three quarters of the books in the lower library (law related) are electronically catalogued and available in an online opac, the rest are included in a card catalogue (held within the most magnificent mahogany cabinet!). The upstairs library has not been catalogued for the online opac due to funding restraints. Indeed, until only a few years ago they kept a hard copy loans record!

The building is really very impressive, but i have to admit that i was a bit confused by all the technical legal type information, i.e. the different users of the library and courts and such. There was not a great turnout for the event, most people there were already members of the group and of the committee, but they were very welcoming of me, the little outsider who knew very little, if anything, of library history.

Most of the people there really seemed to be very interested in library history as a research subject, and seemed in that sense to be as much historians as they were librarians. They seemed to realise that there was a real problem for their group in getting people interested in the history of libraries and that most librarians and library staff had very little knowledge about the history of the libraries in which they worked and of library history in general.

I think that the experience gave me a real insight into a view of librarianship which i had not really considered prior to attending. Understanding how the profession has developed and how it has been regarded by the public over the many years is of interest to myself, but i do not think that i would join the group as yet - if anything, i do not feel as if i know enough about the history of libraries to merit joining.

I will certainly in the future think more about the profession from this angle, and perhaps next time I visit a library building will think not just about what it currently offers and what it will offer in the future, but also about what it has offered in the past and how it has shaped and influenced the lives of the people who have used it and has grown and changed with the community in which it is placed.

UPDATE: I forgot to also mention one of the most unusual things that i discovered on the day - that the speaker who gave us the talk and tour of the building had been only the second qualified librarian to work in the library since it first opened (hundreds of years ago!)… what does that say for the recognition of the profession!?? Also, she was the first woman to work as a librarian within the library too….. (16th June 2006)

Technorati Tags: history, libraries, agm, meeting, tours, legal libraries

Hey folks, I came across this article today from the Guardian website (via CILIP Daily news) which discusses the problem of increasing library closures across the United Kingdom. It is fairly critical of the response of culture minister, David Lammy, a self-confessed ‘lover of reading’ and proponent of the recent ‘Love Libraries‘ campaign, which they feel has turned from being highly concerned about the closures, to a more ‘laissez-faire’ position, epitomised by his statement that “communities come and go”.

Many of the points made by this article are all too familiar to many communities, particularly the comment about providing a poor stock of books etc. so that hardly any one uses the library, and then being able to make the case for closure. It seems that all too often, libraries are seen as an easy place from which to save money - however, the amount of the council’s budget spent on libraries is probably tiny in comparison to many other things. I personally, would be very upset if my small local library were to close, as it is in its proximity to the community that much of its strength derives, and its relevance increases. However, being one of the smallest libraries within the area, it would perhaps be the first to go, if the decision to make such cuts was made.

The article also contains one of the most scathing criticisms of the public library service that I think that I have ever heard in my whole life! Supposedly, in the Eighties the Adam Smith Institute denounced the system as one ‘which largely supplies free pulp fiction to those who could well afford to buy it’. Ouch!

It is such a shame that the public library service is seen to be something which is largely disposable, and a place from which the first cuts are to be made. Libraries, IMHO, provide something which is precious to communities, and of relevance to all age groups. It is truly sad when this is overlooked, or worse still, not even recognised in the first place.

p.s. there is a link within the article to a comments feature, which is also very entertaining and well worth a nosy… here is the link if you want to jump straight to it…

Technorati Tags: public library, closures, budgets

Hey there. This week i attended my first Career Development Group Chartership Event, which was being held at the Mitchell Library. It really was very enlightening. I think the two key words that i came away with burnt into my consciousness were EVALUATE and REFLECT!!

There were a few different speakers at the event, a couple of which were recently chartered members of CILIP, who very kindly offered to stand up and give us an overview of how to get ourselves through the chartership process, and gave us ideas on what kinds of things could be included as part of our portfolios. There was also a woman there who was a board member of CILIP, which means that she is responsible for assessing people’s portfolios and deciding whether they are suitable to be passed. It was also really interesting to hear her talk about what things people usually do wrong, and what kinds of things she is looking for in a portfolio. I’m not going to go into too much detail here as I have agreed to do a write up of the event for the Career Development Group newsletter, Focus, so all will be included in there.

I also met up with a friend and couple of other people i knew from the library course i did last year which was really great. It was fun to exchange stories of what we are all getting up to since we have been released into the big wide world. It was also good to have the focus on chartership and the talks that we had been given too, and we could discuss different things that we had been planning together. It would seem that out of the six people from the course that were there, three are working in school libraries, so it was a little insight into that world as well! What different issues they have to face compared to what goes on in my work. It was also strange to think they all ended up in school libraries as i had never really thought much about it before. I think that the major difference with their work is that they pretty much work by themselves, and from what I could gather, this has both its advantages and its disadvantages. I personally could not decide whether this was something that I would like, or whether I would go insane with the isolation. Hmmm. It certainly would be interesting to spend a day or so in a library such as that to see how it all works. I can only vaguely remember my high school library and to be honest i don’t think that i used it all that much. What i do remember though is that they had a card catalogue and little cardboard things with your name on that they put the slips of each book inside to keep track of what you had out. How things must have changed!

Anyway, I came away from the meeting feeling very motivated towards my chartership, and with a head bursting with ideas for different kinds of ‘evidence’. I must try to write it all down before it leaves me forever. I am looking forward to doing the review of the event, as i have not really done much writing since i left university. I doubt, however, that the academic style will be appropriate for a newsletter, so i had better spend some time looking over past articles in order to get the tone right.

I am also planning to do the ECDL again - I have pretty much forgotten about it since i left uni last summer and started working, but i have found a college that does the tests only and I have ordered some course material from my local library so I will arrange another couple of tests as soon as possible. Again, I could review how this has helped me develop ICT skills and how this has helped me in my work as, yup, you guessed it, more ‘evidence’!!!

Technorati Tags: CILIP, chartership, newsletter, writing, event