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May 29, 2010
Who do local councils work for?
Do councils work for local people or for the councillors or the agendas of central government?
It seems to me that the reason why the public library service operates without the trust of the people who use it, is that the people who run it suffer from the conflict of not knowing for whom they are working - and therefore where their priorities lie.
And, what is worse, I cannot think who is in a position to resolve this.
Such conflict is terminal.
Posted by Perkins at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)
May 23, 2010
More CILIP
From James Christie
And the silence from CILIP is deafening! Not much more I can say, guys. The gauntlet has been thrown down fair and square. Reply or I will take your silence to mean that the "profession" is well and truly in terminal decline and you don't want to admit it! Funny, because a library worker did admit this to me this week, quite freely.
I've also noted Shirley Burnham's comments about library workers being unable to express their opinions. That is Orwellian fascism.
Incidentally, nice rebuttal of Gary, Perkins. Books have always been one of the ways. No one disputes that, but they are equally as important as the other ways, and I am truly sick of their consistent denigration.
It does seem to be very difficult to get through to CILIP HQ at present. Is the big review actually taking place? Does anyone know?
Posted by Perkins at 10:24 AM | Comments (3)
May 21, 2010
Solicitor for library projects wanted
We are looking for a solicitor to work on a number of library based projects. If anyone knows of someone, perhaps retired, who might be prepared to work pro bono and help with the work of saving and promoting the public library service, I would be very glad to hear.
Also we are looking for an intern to work on similar public library projects, to be based in the office of an advertising agency in central London.
If anyone is interested send a message in a comment, and I will respond.
Posted by Perkins at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2010
Improve libraries and cut their cost
The constant message of this blog, since it started, is that library services need to improve and that that can be done at the same time as cutting their cost.
Cost cutting exercises are no good unless at the same time the library service is improved.
Don't shut a library; don't reduce its hours; don't cut the book fund.
Instead, take away all the costs and overheads which are not directly related to an individual library and you will find that you have enough money to increase opening hours, increase book funds and refurbish the libraries.
If a council cuts cost without making improvements, it will take away all the value of the service and the benefit it brings. That is the short route to destruction.
About £200m per annum could be saved in the public library service-- and it can be improved out of all recognition at the same time.
We need a programme of council library transformation projects, now, urgently. We do not want random cost cutting.
These projects need to involve the whole council or groups of councils. They cannot be done by library services working in isolation or even library services working together.
This message was never welcome to those who have been responsible for libraries up until now. Let us hope that the climate will change.
Posted by Perkins at 9:10 AM | Comments (7)
May 13, 2010
CILIP
From James Christie, who, yesterday went to Newcastle give evidence to the CILIP review
"Well, pleased to say the Tyne is not running red with anyone's blood and no one can now say I wasn't willing to put my money where my mouth has been for the past four years and repeat in person what I wrote in private.
I am also willing to listen if Research by Design/Bob McKee/CILIP would like to contact me, and would point out that, although I am autistic, I enjoy public speaking and might be willing to go to bat on behalf of librarianship - but you've really got to hurry up and start being seen to do something, guys!
You absolutely must start to define yourselves clearly and simply, and you must do it yesterday. To make it easier, I am perfectly willing to get on a podium and do so on your behalf, but I will not hang around forever. So speak to me pronto or forever hold your peace! It's up to you".
Posted by Perkins at 8:11 AM | Comments (6)
May 9, 2010
Labour lead in "London Councils"
Previously the Tories had a large majority-- no longer.
Inner London Library Authorities
Camden-- Lab gain from NOC ("No overall control")
Greenwich-- Lab
Hackney-- Lab
Hammersmith and Fulham-- Con
Islington-- Lab gain from NOC
Kensington and Chelsea-- Con
Lambeth-- Lab
Lewisham-- Lab
Southwark-- Lab gain from NOC
Tower Hamlets-- Lab
Wandsworth-- Con
Westminster-- Con
Outer London Library Authorities
Barking and Dagenham-- Lab
Barnet-- Con
Bexley-- Con
Brent-- Lab gain from NOC
Bromley-- Con
Croydon-- Con
Ealing-- Lab gain from Con
Enfield-- Lab gain from Con
Haringey-- Lab
Harrow-- Lab gain from Con
Havering-- ??
Hillingdon-- Con
Hounslow-- Lab gain from Con
Kingston on Thames-- Lib Dem
Merton-- NOC
Newham-- Lab
Redbridge-- NOC
Richmond on Thames-- Con gain from Lib Dem
Sutton-- Lib Dem
Waltham Forest-- Lab gain from NOC
Lab 17 (8) Con 9 (12) Lib Dem 2 (3) NOC 2( 7) Not yet declared 1
Posted by Perkins at 2:15 PM | Comments (1)
Southwark libraries
This is from a reader in Southwark
"Don’t get me wrong, a café in a library; toilets; WiFi; computers; even the sub-post office one of our local council hopefuls wants. Great. All of them.
If there’s room.
Libraries are about books. Take them away and it’s not a library.
It may be something else the community wants, but it’s not a library.
If we shoehorn the WiFi and the IT and the crèche and the Advice Centre into the library we’re going to turn it into something else. A Not Library perhaps.
Maybe that’s why some councillors really like the idea of an Ideas Store.
It sounds pretty groovy; shows the council is on the hip side of things-
They call it updating the libraries image, attracting new people into libraries who otherwise wouldn't come; but actually it’s about accommodating all those other things we feel we need without actually providing space for them.
I call it fibbing.
It's also the same sort of thinking that makes a library assistant rebuke my friend Dan when he asked someone not to use their mobile phone. Mobile phones, he was told, are allowed in the library now. If you have a problem with that, you need to go somewhere else to study for you electrician's exams.
Oh right. Of course. There are, like, so many quiet places you can go to study where people don't talking on their 'phones. How about The Ministry of Sound? That's local. Or maybe MoS could move in upstairs where the reference library used to be, and Dan could go and study at the empty club?
Whatever.
Posted by Perkins at 9:29 AM | Comments (7)
May 8, 2010
Review of Electoral reform should include local government
The two startling revelations of the election campaign, for me, were firstly the graphics that showed that even when the Lib Dems had 30% of the vote in the opinion polls, they would win far less seats than Labour with 28%; and, secondly, that we had local council elections without any publicity at all.
The politicians talked a lot about how they would like people to be able to influence local public services by getting more involved in them; yet none of them, that I heard, acknowledged that our current system of local government does not work. We already have a mechanism whereby we should be able to influence, simply and objectively, what happens locally, and it is called the election of local councillors. Yet time and again, evidence of years of the arguments about public libraries, here, has shown that local councils don't function in response to local needs.
Instead they operate in a citadel responding to intitiatives from central government and a myriad of quangoes upon whom they depend for funding.
Officers of local government have become overpaid protectors of their local councillors, determined, it often seems, to keep the councillors away from local people and their views.
MP's appear often frightened of getting involved in the workings of the local council-- yet the one person whom those people have most certainly elected and will know about is their local MP.
None of it makes sense and all of it diminishes the quality of democracy. Politics, looked at from the back streets of Bradford, is very different to politics from the palaces of Whitehall.
If one outcome of this election is a thorough review of the electoral system and its ability to make democracy work, it should include the nature of local government as well as central government and the relationships between the two, so that it makes sense to the public.
One reads that this review might be less pressing than dealing with the national debt. I have a strong feeling, based on the experience of the work here, that is this dysfunctional democratic process which has caused the excess public spending and the great debt. It is the root of the problem.
Posted by Perkins at 8:47 AM | Comments (3)
May 3, 2010
Are libraries a statutory service in Scotland?
Which is the Act of Parliament which requires library authorities in Scotland to provide a libary service? Does anyone know? - and which minister, in the Scottish Parliament, if any, has responsibility of superintendence of the service?
Posted by Perkins at 5:03 PM | Comments (1)
May 2, 2010
It's a hard life
(With thanks to The Scotsman)
A LOCAL authority has been attacked for wasting taxpayers' money by sending staff on a training course on how to make the perfect cup of cappuccino.
Library staff at Perth and Kinross Council will also be instructed on "lifestyle balance" and how to "relax" during the conference being held tomorrow.
Numerous libraries across the region will be closed for the day while staff undergo the training day at the AK Bell Library in Perth.
Last night, Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Taxpayers' Alliance, branded the scheme a waste of public money.
"There is a real need in any organisation to do staff training but how to make a cappuccino is hardly an essential work skill.
One library worker, who asked not to be named, said:
"I'm looking forward to learning how to make the perfect cappuccino. I love my coffee, but clearly I'm going to find out I've been making it all wrong for the last 20 years."
The course, which will be attended by dozens of library staff, will also feature a "lifestyle balance" workshop which will teach staff how to be "relaxed and revitalised" at their desks on a Monday.
A Perth and Kinross Council spokeswoman defended the course and said the coffee-making lessons were only part of the day-long staff training conference.
"The conference will be covering important issues including policy, strategy, budgets, operational matters and news of new initiatives, all designed to enhance how the service is managed."
She added: "Other sessions will include a focus on health and safety, for example, recognising the long periods staff often spend in front of computer screens."
Posted by Perkins at 10:15 PM | Comments (2)
Keep it simple
In the six months before the election there was quite a lot of activity from each of the three main political parties in England about public libraries.
The Liberal democrats faffed about at length and were unable to come up with any kind of plan at all.
The Labour Party had Mrs Hodge putting 'her own personal mark' on the Public Library Review which had been in progress for nearly two years.
And the Conservatives had Ed Vaizey out front repeating what he had learned over the past couple of years. Credit to him, too, he has taken a real interest in the subject.
In each case the policy view in the centre is important, because regardless of who wins in Westminster, it is still local councils who run local library services and if there is to be any kind of clear vision for improvement, it must come from Whitehall and it must be shared with local councillors. There is nowhere else from which leadership can come- and each party must give leadership to, and engage in discussion with, its own councillors.
If Perkins were to be put in charge of the library service she would want to see dramatic improvement in each and every library building over the next 4 years: better stock of reading material, longer hours and smarter, safer premises and equipment. She would like to see much more local autonomy in each individual library and staff trained, helped and paid to use that autonomy to bring improvement in the service. She would like to see big cuts in the structural costs of the public library service in order to make those changes in the service given to the public.
She believes there is no need to reduce the standard of the public library service anywhere, to meet any kind of budget pressure.
She believes substantial improvement is essential to provide the benefit that is needed for those groups in society who depend on the public library service now- particularly the young and families who need to read for their own sanity and civility and imagination and older people who depend on libraries for their personal access to authors and books in their own friendships and local community.
The changes needed to bring that improvement need to be pragmatic and simple, and the only party which seems to understand that, at present, are the Conservatives, but there is no reason why the others couldn't work in the same way. These are management issues, not ones of political ideology or professional or technological development. Nor are they questions which involve wider government agendas- they are just about running plain good public libraries.
Posted by Perkins at 12:56 PM | Comments (1)
Democracy?
I've said before that a feature of the elections on May 6 is that one would hardly know that there are council elections going on on the same day. And when senior politicians talk about 'local' politics- it is the councils to whom they are referring. I could not tell you who the candidates are for our council election, and I have tried to find out.
I would add to that now that one would also hardly know that there are parliamentary seats being re-elected, such is the level of emphasis being placed on the performance of the three party leaders. Where we live we just discovered that the parliamentary boundary has been moved since the last general election and our MP for the last couple of years was someone completely different to the person whom we thought was the MP. I don't think anyone ever told us. It is the kind of thing we would have noticed. There is very little attention being paid to the candidates in our parliamentary constituency.
Never mind the way this is handled to keep things simple by focussing on just three men, I do believe that the democratic structures are too complicated. Leaders, MP's, Mayors, Departments, Primary Quangoes and Secondary quangoes*, large councils and small councils (to say nothing of the institutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) all seem to run independently of each other without anf grown-up attempt to agree on what they should do for the public. This arrangement gives each of them the opportunity to avoid responsibility for anything. It doesn't work.
I think MP's should be tied to local councils-- the MP should be the leader of the local council amd fully elected into that position.
*Incidentally Secondary quangoes merit attention - if primary quangoes have been created to avoid a ministerial department from having to make decisions and run operations, secondary quangoes are those bodies which, in their turn, do the same thing for primary quangoes. If the primary quango doesn't want to take responsibility for a recommendation they employ either a secondary quango, or a firm of consultants, to make it for them. No wonder we have no money!
Posted by Perkins at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)