Excuses. Well, during the past month I celebrated Halloween and Thanksgiving, plus Bonfire Night and Diwali. Fireworks, torch processions (yes, real torches, in the hands of children), mulled wine and mince pies - hurrah! Who needs daylight hours?
The good news is that I've generously been given a work experience opportunity in one of London's public libraries; the bad news is that due to my advanced age, associated wisdom, and strong desire to find a paying job in the future, I'm not going to blog about that. Instead, let me tell you about how the London libraries are organized. Also, I need to ask - where are the volunteers?
London has 33 boroughs, each run by and referred to as a council. Unless you're a Londoner, you probably don't have any idea what the councils are called, or where their borders are, but as a Londoner you pay housing taxes to your council so you're bound to care. One tax-supported item is libraries, and the amount of local financial support for libraries varies tremendously from council to council. In one council, the libraries have RFID, state of the art OPACs, a million computers and plenty of staff available at help desks. Meanwhile, a mile away, across the borough line, overwhelmed staff are manually processing completed reservation (hold) forms and filing them in tin boxes when they are done covering themselves in black ink from the date stamps. I guess the good news about having low local funding is that there is a better chance of winning the Lottery. Yes, the National Lottery gives a fair bit to libraries!
Within each council the libraries act as a system, performing quick interlibrary loans and the option to return materials at any branch. The council branches also share a single catalog, and there is council management of libraries and council library specialists, technical services etc.
However, until London Libraries, there was no way easy way to find out if a book was held in another council. London Libraries provides a catalog that offers more or less all the holdings in London's public libraries.
Sadly, while readers can locate a material using London Libraries, they will need to place an interlibrary loan reservation and pay the associated fee to request it from another council. Alternatively, the reader could go to the other council and apply for a library card to check out the material directly. According to one librarian I spoke with, the documentation requirement for a library card has recently changed from work/live/study in the council to a broader requirement just to live in London. In other words, I could hypothetically collect the whole set of 33 council library cards. Hmmm, makes me wonder what type of centralization might be coming down the pike...
Note to self: do not collect 33 library cards, or you will collect a lottery-worthy sum of fines.
Note to others: library cards are called library tickets in London.
On volunteers in Libraries Based solely on my inquiries, the London libraries do not use volunteers to help complete routine responsibilities (shelving books, making up labels etc). Given the library funding crunch in many councils, I wonder why? Some reasons may be: fear of further deprofessionalizing library work, UK socialist desire to pay everyone, concern over the management of volunteers... Any thoughts?
