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October 10, 2008
Insulting library users, librarians, authors, publishers, quangoes and fish and chip shops
From a library user this morning
"We are all desperate for each new Minister to know what a library is supposed to be, Perkins, but this one has been quicker than most to show that she doesn't.
"Everyone has the right to first-class libraries, wherever they live. No-one should have to put up with a lacklustre service, inward-looking and appealing only to its 'regulars'," says Mrs Follett in almost her first statement.
This starts off all right, but then insults her entire customer-base: we long-suffering 'regulars'.
Worse than that, it looks as if she is going to make the same mistake as her recent predecessors, by ignoring what the actual users want, and acquiescing to the likes of Sue MacKenzie who hope to convert our libraries into something else, with the distorted aim of attracting any visitors at any cost (a past Minister having decided that visits were a better measure of chief librarian’s kudos than lending books).
We regular book-borrowers don’t seem to get the same respect that other “minority groups” get these days. It’s ironic that one of the few institutions that has to be “communal”, by definition, is in danger of being abandoned by a governing party which once wanted almost everything to be provided by State authorities.'
Yesterday was a day for insulting people. In this piece recorded in the Daily Mirror, the Minister was incredibly rude about the people who work in libraries.
And in this piece on the dcms website he was incredibly rude about the British Publishing industry when he says
'Learning, literacy and the written word will always be the heartbeat of the service, but there’s much that can be done in addition to make them come alive for generations to come. There are some incredibly interesting things going on in our public libraries, far removed from the stereotype of dusty books and silence, that we should celebrate'
Suddenly, too, Lyn Brown MP announced that she, too was to hold a review into public libraries, by being extraordinarily damning about the MLA and calling for it 'to be disbanded as a prototype that could not prove fit for our current purpose'
I suppose you could add that someone was very rude about fish and chip shops, too- but we didn't mean it.
Posted by Perkins at October 10, 2008 6:37 AM