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September 10, 2009
10 more library reports in the next 2 months
Instead of managing the library service properly as we should we support and fund an expensive industry of people who write reports about it. In the next 2 months we can anticipate
1. The DCMS report on its review of the public library service which has been in progress since July 2008
2. The Sue Charteris report into whether The Wirral should shut 11 libraries.
3. The All Party Parliamentary Group report on the national operation of the public library service
4. A consultants' report on standardisation of the supply chain in London boroughs
5. A consultants' report on Library workforce benchmarking
6. A consultants' report on Inter Library Loans
7. A further report from the London Libraries Change Programme.
8. A report from SYRUP on what they think public libraries are for. (!)
9. A report from the MLA on why they are unable to comply with the Freedom of Information Act. (and probably a report by the Information commission on why the MLA should).
10. The Local Government Ombudsman's report into the activities of Swindon Council over the conduct of its libraries.
Don't we look forward to it all? - and at the same time poor local councils are said to be faced with the hardest budget round for years and would like a bit of help and a few answers about how to cope with that and hang on to their public libraries and improve their book stock. None of the above reports is likely to tell them those things.
Posted by Perkins at September 10, 2009 7:49 AM
Comments
More library reports... and, today, I have looked in the catalogues of Brighton and Hove libraries, East Sussex's and West Sussex's for a copy of Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries. No copies at all. Exactly the sort of book that one should be able to find somewhere - but, no! and then the library authorities wonder why readers feel increasingly disengaged.
Posted by: Christopher Hawtree at September 14, 2009 10:51 AM
What public libraries are FOR? Don't they know? And if they don't know now they surely never will so what's the point of this, or in fact anything? All I feel is that we have a great rump of middle-class bureaucrats "running" the country who don't have the guts or wherewithal to actually do stuff or fix things, but instead resort to endless report writing, which is useless. Mr McMahon in Galway is on the right lines. Today's society has deluded itself that nothing means anything unless it's written by rocket scientists, dressed up in arcane terminology and sugarcoated with buzz words. Well, bollocks to that! If we haven't learnt from the credit crunch that rocket scientists and their arcane terminology don't bloody well work, then, like SYRUP and public libraries, we never will!
Posted by: James Christie at September 15, 2009 1:45 PM
Perkins, you have it in a nutshell. Before cutting front line services, the leaders of all political parties should ask themselves why they need to spend our money on paying others, quangos etc, to tell them what they should already know. If those in Whitehall and local government know nothing, and are themselves handsomely remunerated for being dim, they should look to finding other jobs.
Posted by: Shirley Burnham at September 16, 2009 7:10 AM