« Trying to save the libraries in Burnley | Main | Qui est aux commandes? »
November 24, 2006
Love Libraries Seminar
The speeches and discussions (including Stephen Page's as promised) at the Love Libraries seminar are all available on the Reading Agency Website.
The Bookseller summarised the drift of the day at which appeared that most people talked about the need for more books in libraries, and to spend more to get them but not too much about where the money should come from
However the lady from the MLA (apparently) suggested that they should pinch money from the Olympics fund.
The market research is useful. I'll discuss it in another entry.
One thing that genuinely puzzles me is why everyone has started talking about libraries as a "Reading service"-- I can't see why you would say that (except perhaps for children). It sets up the opportunity to employ people as "givers of reading service" rather like people in a launderette do "service washes" - but libraries are strapped for money for books, so why would you do that? I'm sure nobody on the street would call their library a reading service. Why can't they just be called libraries? It is a word that everybody understands; none of the market research suggests it has poor implications of any kind. Why change it?
Posted by Tim Coates at November 24, 2006 2:11 PM
Comments
I think that calling the public library service a modern reading service is a way of getting people other than qualified librarians to run the service, which is happening in a large number of local authorities. In the library service from which I have just retired, there are now no qualified librarians in most of the branch libraries, one of which is nearly as busy as the central library.
Posted by: Janet Moore at November 26, 2006 11:23 PM