The Good Library Blog

I spotted this blog, too (yay me!) and was particularly taken with these two sentences:

"Too many libraries are stuck in the last century, offering poor service, indistinguishable aisles of books, outdated administrative systems and an impressive, intimidating atmosphere. Their only concession to the 21st century is often a huge reduction in the books they carry, which have been replaced by banks of faceless computers."

Now you might think I'm about to viciously deride faceless computers and the faceless ***** who mindlessly tried to shove them down my gullet twice a day for fifteen years. Well, I will if you like, but the phrase that actually interested me most was "outdated administrative systems."

Having been condemned to read, first, the LA Record and then the marginally less awful Update for what felt like 883 years, I was beaten down by endless pretentious buzz words, wearing obsession with systems, and most of all endless overcomplication by neuro-typical librarians (non-Aspergers) who, to put it tactfully, had gone completely up their own backsides. The result of all this bull's excrement, I submit, was a complete inability to make any system in a library simple, which should have been their aim in the first place. I will never forget a top cataloguer's brilliant idea re how to solve the problem of long Dewey numbers by, wait for it, making them even longer. Hence the result, outdated administrative systems which nobody but an obsessive compulsive would want to tangle with! Certainly not the general public whom they are supposed to serve. Please note I don't mention OCD lightly. People with Asperger Syndrome (ie me) can have similiar symptoms, I am by my own admission pernickety, I just loved AACR2, but if even I was warning the blocks of dead wood in my former so-called profession that they were overdoing it, then they really should have listened.

But no, off they went on their merry little way to Dingly Dell, liberally stuffing their minds with useless consultants' reports and other stuff only fit to be satirised by Franz Kafka, producing and "overseeing" libraries with incomprehensible systems, stuck not in the 20th century but maybe in the 19th!

It takes real intelligence to make things simple, my former colleagues, so take a good guess what I think of you.

Re Ms Drayton's comments. Looking forward to the next season of the Australian ABC's 'The Librarians'. Let's hope our public libraries don't get any nearer to this level.