Librarians Hate Blogs

No, really - it's official.
Blaise Cronin, Dean of the School of Library and Information Science, and Rudy Professor of Information Science at Indiana University writes:

One wonders for whom these hapless souls blog. Why do they choose to expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism? The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better.
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/news/story.php?story_id=958

This is just so wrong on so many levels, and arrogant beyond belief. Who, after all, is to say whether someone's thoughts are worthy or not? Many blogs are full of teenage angsty, it's true, but many are not, and do indeed contribute to the sum of human knowledge. Heck, some blogs have been deemed so sinister that people have been sacked for slagging off the company...

Joined up thinking

I am currently re-applying for my old job back at The Library, going from part-time to full-time. The Library is Library A, part of the Oxford Universtity Library Services. To apply for this job, I must apply to completely unrelated Library D. Huzzah.

In an interesting aside, the Bodleian apparently Does Not Exist anymore. And they wonder why people are angry and disillusioned! The Management seem to underestimate individual library loyalty, which is every bit as strong as college loyalty.

A fair day's pay

Of course, this blog will get used to whine about my pay more often than not.

An old colleague of mine, since moved on to the heights of church archiving, used to get angry when anyone said that our pay was low. "What do we do that is vital?" he would rant. "We aren't in the dangerous front line like firemen, or nurses." Yeah, and look how little the latter earn. Oh, that I could earn as much as a NQN! Yes folks, ~£13K looks to me rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Of course my job isn't front-line in the dangerous sense (though I might later argue that having to fend off the vagrants and thieves from the street calls for a bit of danger money), but am I not a man? prick me do I not bleed? etc.

The major problem in Oxford is house prices. On a basic shelver's salary, you can barely afford to rent a room in a house around here. This is despite the fact that I would bet that same year's wage that Oxford has the highest qualified library assistants in the country! The university libraries are full to bursting of students, many with 2:1s and even firsts, who just want to stay around Oxford another year. A good proportion of them might actually want to go into librarianship. But you just cannot afford it round here. I saw one fantastic candidate turn down my old job as soon as he found out the salary. I only managed it because the old Head of Library very kindly rented me a dirt cheap room in her house.

It doesn't get much better when you have a LIS (Librarianship, in old money) degree either. My boss only has a mortgage because he's been here for donkey's years and bought a house when it was possible to do so. The university libraries only run because of the hundreds of hours unpaid overtime the librarians do - I've rarely seen my boss leave before closing time, even when his shift finished two hours before that. The old Head of Library rarely left before 9 at night. And what does the OULS management want to do? Cut these peoples' salaries, and look for voluntary redundancy (effectively). Don't they realise that the libraries only run because of goodwill? Because of the love that we have for our jobs? Apparently not, otherwise they might not alienate us quite so much. They might also consider docking their astronomical salaries to save some cash.

Or not publish glossy shit like this in an attempt to turn our readers into Users. (Frankly, if they insist on making them Users, the management deserve all they get). No reader will read it. If anything, it'll go for hamster cage lining, otherwise straight in the bin. Because we all know, readers rarely read anything. If they read the signs in my library, I'd have to deal with half the number of pointless questions with which I currently get deluged.

Dominus Disillusionatio Mea

I return to library work at possibly the worst time in the history of Oxford libraries. For lo, the library is run by a team of managers rather than proper librarians, and we have the joys of the Establishment Review. Wherein we see that the Director wants us to lose our jobs to streamline the organisation, and turn the Radcliffe Camera into a visitor centre.

There is no way I can put in one post all I think about this, so I will have to do this over the course of a while. But I notice that we've apparently been "consulted" about our imminent job losses. Have we buggery! No-one's allowed to talk about all of this, mention is banned in the staff rag, and readers have been threatened with expulsion for asking about it. Huzzah for the OULS climate of fear.