The Good Library Blog

No. You misunderstand, perhaps wilfully, my point. What I am querying is that such basic issues such as communication shouldnt need discussion. Proper communication should be a given in any situation. Why do people need to sit around discussing how they should be communicating with each other? Surely nothing that simple requires discussion?

Shouldnt they be sitting round discussing the bigger problems facing their library service, rather than arguing about whose turn it is to sweep the steps?

No I don't misunderstand. I spend my time visiting public libraries and when I do, I am trying to see them from the point of the view of the public. I see dirty premises, grimy windows, badly displayed offerings, light bulbs covered in dust or not working, services which are offered but not advertised, poor quality of stock, computers not working properly often with important items difficult to find and often missing. I observe that if these matters and similar ones were put right then the public library service would be 80% better than it is.

So I believe that instead of conjecturing that the problems that the library service faces are 'bigger ones' those who manage it should return to the basic and simple qualities of what a good library offers, and do them properly.

I have always believed and said that the reason that people decline to use public libraries is not because, somehow, society has changed, but because, relative to other service offered to the public, libraries have fallen behind.

So I think I didn't misunderstand, but I did disagree with you and that is why I posed the question about what people think they are trying to do. I believe that the library profession and library managers and politicians are addressing the wrong problem in all their considerations and reports. More often than not the steps need sweeping and no one thinks it is their job to do it... and that is the real problem, hum drum though it may seem.

The library service with whom I was working the other day have a very good management team and they are very ambitious for their service and what it can deliver. But at the same time they know that they have to be able to provide high standard, high level service every day to every library user, and when they assess themselves against their own market research data, they recognise how important these matters of detail are.

Poor Perkins has been suffering recently from ironyitus (on Reading and Government). (Perhaps she picked it up from her spell in hospital, where criticism of professionals has to be inverted to ease the ordeal.)
So her question about CILIP may have been tongue-in-cheek, but it gives me the chance to point out a glaring difference between this professional body and any other I know.
All the others provide help to their members with journals and databases to perform their work – be it designing buildings, advancing chemistry, or curing patients.
But, perhaps because it involves the B-word, our librarian-friends (on whom our lives also depend) do not seem to have an arm of CILIP whose purpose it is to assist them in their core function of stocking their shelves comprehensively with the best on any subject or that in imminent demand.

OFPS - I can't be doing with all this "whose job is it to do so and so" business. I work for the NHS in a major hospital and I'm sick of people who dodge out of being part of a team because they notice something wrong with the system and then sit there moaning about it, but don't bother to take the initiative and do it themselves because its "not on their job description". If you see something that needs doing and nobody else has bothered to do it, rather than sit there and complain that nobody's doing it, do it yourself. Use your Job Description as a starting point, not an ending point. Get the broom out of the cupboard and sweep the steps yourself, rather than complain that the steps are grubby and nobody's swept them.

I ALSO work in the NHS, and I'm afraid I've seen far too many people who do indeed sit around moaning, bitching and back-stabbing, leading to conditions of near-anarchy. A friend of mine has just resigned because of such conditions and I do not think the NHS will ever improve until managers stop talking about "vision" and start attending to the nitty-gritty. Neither will librarianship. It is vitally important to attend to the basics or the system will rot.