The Good Library Blog

I was planning on starting this comment by slagging off South Lanarkshire Council's mobile library service, but then I read Andrew Motion's article so now I'm going to kill two birds with one stone. Last year or so, South Lanarkshire reduced the frequency of mobile library visits to my mother's rural village from weekly to fortnightly. Not surprisingly, use of the service is drying up. No doubt it will soon stop altogether and the usual excuses about lack of use will be made. At the time, I complained on her behalf and was snottily told that the whole library catalogue was now online and any book my mother selected could be delivered to her home. Apart from the fact that South Lanarkshire has a large geographical area, possibly making it less economic to have lots of little vans buzzing about rather than a couple of big ones, my mother is not online!

Now, I accept that within 10 years most of the population will be online, but right now it isn't and no amount of argument will change the fact that Mum isn't online and isn't going online. Nor, probably, are a lot of other isolated pensioners who aren't IT-literate, so thanks a lot for reducing a service and dressing it up as an improvement, you mean-minded muppets.

Then I read our esteemed Poet Laureate's article (the guy I begged to write something pithy and to the point) and while it wasn't wholly bad it certainly had no pith. I wasn't impressed by the careless question whether books should take second place to machines (the answer, you pillock, is that they're equally important, each in their own way, with books and reading remaining the central business of libraries), but I was deeply unimpressed by the comment towards the end about "putting a lot of things online, speeding up how people order books from home, having them delivered to their homes and collected from their homes" which just plays into the hands of small-minded little councils like South Lanarkshire who will clap Motion's article to their scrawny chests and dance around the streets, snottily telling all and sundry that this justifies their van/online idea. Meanwhile Mum will have to start going to charity shops to find a bit of light reading.

Apply a little intellectual rigour, please, Mr Motion, because your article made me feel like having a bowel motion!

PS. A last thought. As a chartered librarian I couldn't avoid hearing about the LA/CILIP over the years, but until I cracked up and started contributing to this blog, I don't think I'd ever noticed the MLA. I honestly do not know what they do, so would it really make any difference if they stopped doing it?

I read Andrew Motion's article and found it hard to believe that he had written (most of) it himself. It doesn't read like the work of a poet - more like the writing of those officials with whose use of the language we have become so familiar.

Am I right?