Libraries

[bunn]

 Caught a section on the radio earlier today about the library closure protests. They were saying: use them or lose them. 

This is a call to action that works well for, say, local pubs or milkmen.  I don't think it should necessarily apply to libraries though. I live in a rural area, and am currently,  relatively time-poor and shelf-rich.  It makes sense for me to buy books rather than driving to a library during opening hours.   I am not a customer that particularly needs a library at present: in fact, using one would be something of a pain. 

However, I have certainly been shelf-poor and time-rich (or more conveniently located) in the past, and very likely will be again in future.  The fact that I am not using the library much *now* should not be interpreted as a vote to close the place!  

 I'm not using the local primary school, police station, hospital or prison either, but nobody thinks that means I never will.   Surely public services should be used primarily by those that need them, not by those that merely think that they should remain open...?

Comments

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Hm. I think it works about as well for libraries as it does for local pubs and milkmen. Police stations and hospitals, only different in as much as ppl don't usually CHOOSE to use them. So they will get closed if they are not used heavily (or if studies suggest the outcomes would be better elsewhere, eg cottage hospitals which are much loved by their communities but actually have worse death rates than the big hospital in the city), but it's a bit impractical to urge people to deliberately go and use them. Although of course one is often urged (by Alistair Campbell et al) to use state schools and hospitals not private ones. So actually, quite similar it seems to me. I'm in your position though, we hardly ever use the public library round the corner from us. -N.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced. I would happily pay a levy to support my local library, even though at the moment, I don't want to actually borrow books from it. I'm prepared to pay to keep it open because I think I might want it in future, and because I think there are collateral benefits to my general area, similar to a police station. Ideally, all areas would have a police station that would keep crime down by simply being there. Remove the police station on the grounds that there is no crime, and bingo, crime...

Seems to me library is similar. Remove library, even fairly quiet one, and the effects will be hard to monitor accurately as they are likely to spread over 10-20 years and be difficult to clearly separate from general cultural change during that period. It's hard to take an entirely evidence-based approach to something with so many changing factors.

If I did use library, I'm not paying a fee per book, so no more money goes into the system than if I didn't. So, by using the system, it seems to me I am tying up resources that might be used by others that actually need them?

Whereas, I buy milk from the milkman because it's a convenient way of obtaining milk, and the more milk I buy, the more money the milkman makes and it's no skin off anyone's nose except possibly Mr Tesco.

Re : cottage hospitals I have a suspicion that some of those cases the numbers don't necessarily tie up, because some of the people that would be prepared to go into a local hospital to die never make it to the big regional one. If I thought I was on my last legs, no way would I trek to a monstrous city to die among strangers, surrounded by things that go *ping*. Qualitative factors are hard to assess. :-/

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

AIUI the sort of people that urge you to use local shops instead of Tesco essentially are urging you to make a donation to what they regard as a good cause. I agree with you actually: I would happily make a donation to my local library even though I rarely use it. Maybe that's what people should be doing instead of organising these borrow-all-the-books events.

Re cottage hospitals: AIUI these studies are meant to be comparing like with like, e.g. they compare how well people do after hip replacement in the local hospital (with the general orthopod) vs in the city hospital (which is so big it has a dedicated hip replacement surgeon), etc. I gather the evidence on outcomes is pretty conclusive - although I take your point that you might be prepared to accept a worse outcome in a nicer place.

-N/

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do understand that the studies compare like with like but - well I dunno, but when people are dying it always seems like many things are awfully *messy* to be expressed in statistics...

So many poor people kept going in conditions where if you treated your dog that way, it would very likely be an RSPCA case that you kept the poor beast lingering in such a state rather than let him go with love :-( My friend's mother is going through that just now, and it's just awful. Length of life is such a crap metric sometimes...

I like local shops and given free choice and time, would far rather shop in them than Tesco/Coop. Tesco in particular is utterly depressing, and for the stuff I buy, quality often very poor. Also, supermarkets have such sophisticated systems for persuading you to buy extra stuff that they often aren't as cheap as they should be. I am too suggestible... Much cheaper to go to a greengrocer where I can only impulse buy grapes or garlic! Not as quick, though.

[lanciatore.livejournal.com]

"AIUI the sort of people that urge you to use local shops instead of Tesco essentially are urging you to make a donation to what they regard as a good cause."

eh? What gave you that idea? The big arguments for supporting local independent shops is -

i) Producers can actually get a realistic price for their produce rather than being bullied by Mr Big Tesco/Asda etc into accepting a deal that is disadvantageous for them but which they can't afford to say no to.

ii) Low Food Miles. Most meat in the local butcher's around here comes from <10 miles radius. Check all the items on your next Tesco's shop and work out the food miles involved.

iii) Supports local economy. People who shop locally eat locally in the cafes and restaurants, buy services locally etc. It creates & sustains addditional economic oportunities rather than losing them to the out of town supermarket. If people can't get one staple item from local independent shops, they have to travel elsewhere for it and probably end up doing more and more of their shopping elsewhere, local traders suffer and you can get a domino effect. Bank branch and Post Office closures can have a similar "seeding" effect.

Food Miles

[bunn.livejournal.com]

LOL, so true, here's our local food miles tale :

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1307305/Cornish-pastys-250-mile-journey-factory-Tesco-store-door.html

Re: Food Miles

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

I must admit that when I was in the US, I balked just a little at buying cheap fresh flowers (hardly a staple item needed to keep the nation going) flown from Ireland, but I think that says something about the taxation of aviation fuel as much as anything else.

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Precisely the point that Neuromancer was making, I think -- they're a Good Cause for all these worthy reasons and should be supported for reasons other than the purely microeconomic benefit for the consumer. You could count anything above what you'd pay in a supermarket as a donation towards keeping Local Producers And Retailers in business.

Personally I far prefer Tesco. Quick, cheap, reasonable quality (and I never succumb to impulse buying). Also, closer to our house than any of the 'local' shops, which perhaps skews things for me!
Now, if they only had a bank and a post-office in the branch (they already rent space to a barber, a dry-cleaner, an optician and a foreign-exchange counter)... but that's just me!

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

The "microeconomic benefit" for the consumer would include the warm glow from having suported a "good cause".

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely; of course, if you think it's a good cause worth supporting, that's a reason for supporting it! I'm not saying that people shouldn't use small local shops, just that I don't and I don't feel guilty about that!

I never succumb to impulse buying

[bunn.livejournal.com]

That would put you very much in the minority. A supermarket is a very scientifically constructed system for encouraging impulse buying in human beings, and they make money because most people can be manipulated into buying more, when things are set up to look like a bargain.

I am not sure it is only 'Good Cause' to think about whether one might spend differently in a different type of shop: I've found that if I am shopping to feed 6 hungry people for a week, it will be a lot cheaper if I can get as much of it as possible from the butcher and greengrocer and stick to dishwasher tablets and looroll from the supermarket...

(Mind you, if it were more expensive I'd pay it anyway if I could, cos Tesco is such a grim place. No daylight and the staff look so *miserable*)

Horses for Courses

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't think I'm a typical consumer in many ways (for a start, my exposure to advertising is minimal) and I wouldn't want to generalise from my case. We have a dingy and depressing mid-size supermarket even closer to us than Tesco, and seldom shop there.

Personally I don't mind the lack of daylight, and the staff seem fine and are always helpful; possibly it helps that our Tesco is one of the biggest in the country, with its own deli, cheese counter, butcher, baker, and fishmonger with appropriately trained staff as well as all the prepackaged stuff. But whatever is best for your circumstances!

my exposure to advertising is minimal

[bunn.livejournal.com]

If you shop in a supermarket and use the internet and Google, your exposure to marketing is considerable. You may not see much television advertising - but marketing is an awful lot more than that!

You go to food shows! You may not think of that as 'advertising', but essentially a food show is one big mass of adverts which has the unusual advantage of being able to hit the punter using his tastebuds and nose as well as all the usual channels.

Re: my exposure to advertising is minimal

[(Anonymous)]

Point well made and well taken -- it's probably working subconsciously on me all the time, in that sneaky way it has. On the conscious level it all washes over me!

Re: my exposure to advertising is minimal

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Point well made and well taken -- it's probably working subconsciously on me all the time, in that sneaky way it has. On the conscious level it all washes over me!

Re: I never succumb to impulse buying

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

"That would put you very much in the minority." But then Kargicq is very much in the minority in so many ways! :-)
Neuromancer
(*I* freely admit to impulse-buying; it makes shopping more enjoyable for me!)

[lanciatore.livejournal.com]

"I'm not convinced. I would happily pay a levy to support my local library"

which is essentially what the IoW council are asking some people to do (see Lady of Astolat's recent post) by saying the cost of some local libraries will have to be borne out of the parish precept rather than the council tax.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Not quite the same thing, I think. Parishes don't map neatly to library coverage and the parish approach fragments things unnecessarily.

Things are silly enough here on the edge of Cornwall/Devon (because although the geographical area between Bodmin moor and Dartmoor would make far more sense in terms of population and transport, considered as a unit, because half of it is in Devon and half in Cornwall nothing is done in a joined up way. Take it down to the parishes, and I reckon it would get even messier...)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

... plus of course on Wight, there is the whole thing that some parishes get to keep their libraries, so those without them will have to pay more for less.

[thecatsamuel.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, library funding is worked out in terms of who is using them now. Eg when deciding which books should be got rid of, if they've been borrowed less than a certain number of times in a certain period, they get withdrawn. It's not terribly practical to think of it in terms of person x MIGHT want that at time Y... No space, for one thing

And libraries aren't static. It drives me nuts when weasely local councillors talk about volunteers running them and so on. Libraries aren't just rooms with books. Someone has to order what's wanted by those borrowers at that time, process, catalogue, organise. What about providing new reference materials and removing outdated ones or dealing with licensing online reference sources etc?

So you might well want to use a library in the future - this is a very good thing - but it won't be the library/collection that is there today. And unfortunately, that's the one that's for the chop and is unlikely to be replaced adequately, if at all.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know that is how they are funded, and how the decisions are made - what I'm saying is that I think it's a bad way of doing it. Too mechanical.

I don't expect (or want) them to be static, but I would rather like them to be *there*, without me having to make a great point of trotting in and out carrying books that I don't need at the moment, just to make the numbers add up.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

... I meant to say, that I do think volunteers probably could achieve a great deal more than just sitting in a room with books in and stamping them in and out. Volunteers can do amazing things, and I'm not against the idea of volunteer involvment per se. I do think that people tend to expect everything to be done for them, and maybe that's not ideal.

But one cannot expect to go from a state-funded professional library system to a even reasonably acceptable effective volunteer-run one in months without support, for free, even if that transition were definitely desirable and workable ( I'm not at all sure it is). So my final conclusion is the same as yours. :-(

[thecatsamuel.livejournal.com]

I'm not suggesting it's rocket science, but there is a big difference between what a professional librarian does and what the assistants do. So volunteers can (and do) do great work to keep libraries going, but it is more likely to equate to replacing library assistants. I'm a chartered librarian and that meant an MA course in library/info studies and then two years in-post completing a further training programme and a portfolio showing my professional development. And that isn't something that you can or should replace with someone in off the street.

Also, I do agree it would be lovely if services ran until you happened to want them, but in a cruel hard world of budget cutting and costing, it's not only libraries that don't work like that!

it would be lovely if services ran until you happened to want them,

[bunn.livejournal.com]

That's not really what I am saying. My point is that you can support the existence of a service without being a user of that service. Even if I as an individual never entered a library again (which if I was rich enough, I might well not!), I think it would be a good idea for society in general to have libraries, and for me to contribute to funding them. It's not particularly that I want them for my own use in future.

I don't see how my going to a library does anything other than tick boxes: that doesn't make me into someone who needs a library.

In the same way, I am happily childfree, and will probably never have any need in future for any kind of state schooling - and in fact, I am privately educated. But for my elected representatives to assume from that that I support the abolition of publicly funded schools would be something of a leap. I want other people's children to be educated, even though I am not a user of the service myself.

I liked inzilbeth_liz point about not needing to support the fire service & A&E by setting self on fire ;-D

re: library qualifications: I have a similar qualification in museum studies, (though I don't use it), and worked in a college library, many years ago. If I volunteered in a museum again, then I would have similar qualifications to the curatorial staff (though my experience would be way out of date). It would be quite a stretch to find enough suitably qualified people who were happy to work for free though.

I suppose you could have volunteer fundraisers who would raise money that would then pay for so many hours of time from a freelance professional librarian. Not that fundraising is exactly easy-peasy work either.

Re: it would be lovely if services ran until you happened to want them,

[thecatsamuel.livejournal.com]

A&E and the fire service are funded by looking at past use and projecting further requirements (more or less) so they are (sort of) working on the assumption that a given number of people will need a particular sort of help over a particular time period. Schools plan on projected population patterns and assuming some people won't have kids (boy did they get that one wrong round here). But I'm still not 100% convinced that you can plan ANY public service to be fit for purpose on the assumption someone might at some time want something from it.

I'm sorry to sound stroppy here, but I have a big problem with the idea that volunteers can simply step in and replace trained professional staff. If a volunteer, who had put the same effort to get the same qualifications, has the priviliged position of being able to work for free, where does that leave the rest who gained those qualifications thinking it was part of a career path? On the bloody supermarket checkout forever, perhaps?

I have a big problem with the idea that volunteers can simply step in and replace trained profession

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Didnt' say that they could - only that maybe there is space for volunteering in there somewhere.

Re the qualifications though, I think that's the 'where does it leave people thinking it was a career path' is just the gamble you take with qualifications. It would be nice if you could be sure the qualification was going to mean a job, but it just doesn't, unless it's in a field where there aren't many people.

There are a *lot* of people with museums qualifications now working, like me, in IT and its related fields, because when it comes down to it, there are a lot more jobs in IT than there are in museums, and the qualifications give you skills that are useful in both. I remember attending a conference a few years back when I was in the bar chatting to about 6 people, and it turned out all of us had fled the museum field...

If you want work that isn't short-term contract work and can't afford to work for free or very little, then in such a very small and competitive field, I found I was an immediate disadvantage compared with the people that are prepared to drop everything and travel anywhere to live in a single room to get six month's worth of work (or, live off Daddy and work for free till you finally get appointed to a decent job). I concluded that I just didn't want it quite that badly. :-/

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

(pardon late comment, I'm always behindhand with lj. Also OTT really.) " Eg when deciding which books should be got rid of, if they've been borrowed less than a certain number of times in a certain period, they get withdrawn." LOL, I remember working that out when I was 10, when I deduced I was the only person ever withdrawing my then-favourite library book (bear in mind this was pre-computers, so all they had to go on was the number/recentness of date-stamps in the front of the book.) So I made a heroic effort to stop getting it out, waited on tenterhooks, and sure enough it eventually turned up on the 'withdrawn books for sale' trolley, whereupon I pounced! And it's still in my collection today :-) (I figure this wasn't bad for the library since it freed up some stock room/shelf space for a book that would be borrowed by more than one person.)

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

Well put! I can appreciate there's an aspect of supply and demand here which is slightly different from that applying to say A and E or the fire service [ I'm not about to set fire to myself to keep both in business, for instance!] but I do worry about where things like wildlife will feature in these sort of equations.

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

Couldn't agree more. It might not be fair to compare libraries to the emergency services in importance, but their existence is certainly a measure of civilised society. A lot of people who love to read can't afford a monthly splurge on Amazon. And when it comes to pensioners living in a rural area with poor transport links, the library has to be local, not an hour's bus ride away.

As a child, the library was my second home. There's no way my parents could have kept up with my reading habit if they had had to buy all the books I read. My local library made me what I am today - ridiculously over-educated for my station in life.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I can certainly see the argument that in short-term financial woe, one must cut something. But what seems to be being put forward here is not temporary retrenchment or reductions and mothballing of stuff we can't afford right now, with the intention of putting it back better, later, but permanent one-way change with no intention of any restoration...

Same with the sale of the forests: I can see cutting back on staff, management and repairs, but selling them off wholesale?