More on corporate libraries

To quote Meredith Farkas over on Information Wants to Be Free:

“I think deprofessionalization is a real problem, but it’s not about people working as librarians without the degree. It’s about the underlying assumptions and trends that lead to that happening. The fact that the people making decisions don’t see the value of the MLS. The fact that budgets are shrinking and administrators want to be able to be able to keep the same number of staff for less money. The fact that what we do as librarians is changing and it’s more difficult to show how what we do is different from jobs people do without professional degrees .” (emphasis mine)

libraries go corporate

Jill recently wrote about libraries being privatized over at New Librarians.

While it hasn’t been literally privatized, the public library system I volunteer at is undergoing a slow, though no less hostile, takeover. Librarians across the city’s system who retire/leave are being replaced by office managers (non-degreed unless the branch has no librarian on staff, in which case one is hired so state/federal funding isn’t lost). These people usually have no library experience and have been hired as “yes” people so the library director can do whatever she likes without resistance.

The effects of this have been particularly grim at the branch I volunteer at. There is now one librarian on staff (with whom I work) and the new branch manager is young (half the age of the rest of the staff), “bubbly,” and has no library experience whatsoever. She has made no effort to learn how to be a librarian (again, something Jill has talked about), so no adult/YA books have been ordered since January. She’s evicted my librarian from their dual office so she can spend the day locked inside, e-mailing downtown about all the “insubordinate” things her staff does. She cannot spell (or use spell-check) and makes no effort to interact with patrons.

And she’s just one branch manager at one branch. Slowly the city’s library management are all becoming yes-men to the library director. The crazy thing is that the library director is actually a degree-holding librarian.

(Naively?) I thought that libraries would be one of the few places where power politics would not come in to play. What high stakes are there? What great rewards to thereby obtain, aside from the greater civic good? This does not mean that librarians cannot be ambitious–I consider myself so–but even in our ambition, we are still stewards of a community resource. It is difficult to get over the shock of finding someone so clearly belonging to some corporate ladder managing something as innocuous and selflessly giving as a citywide library system.

UK Culture Secretary wants to turn London libraries into Barnes & Noble chains

Listen to this. Library usage is down, says UK Culture Secretary Margaret Hodge! Boost your stats!

She wants London libraries to institute:

• home delivery
• direct marketing
• in-house cafes
• “a Loyalty Card that gives users a one-day travelcard or a pair of cinema tickets for every ten visits”

She does have a couple sane ideas, namely merging all London city libraries, currently unaffiliated, into one citywide system. However, “It is unclear how much new funding would be required to institute the changes Hodge proposed, but she’s looking for results.”

Apparently she thinks libraries are just really bad at selling themselves… if libraries just marketed and programmed more and better, they’d have tons of users! I guess she is not aware that library branches all over the UK are being closed due to lack of funding and are, I’m sure, doing the most programming they can with the limited funds they have.

Finding funding isn’t her problem, though… she just wants those results.