In politics it is an observed phenomenon that when a party loses long-held power it inevitably gazes upon its navel. It then proceeds to tear its navel apart, destroying its electability until such time that the party in power has itself lost it. Public libraries are in serious trouble and academic libraries have some pretty big issues to overcome too. Those are the fights we need to be fighting right now, and for that reason this blog has until now been mum on the whole CILIP rebrand business.
That is not to say that one should not seek to redress problems within the camp at the same time as prosecuting a battle. A well disciplined army may be essential to the victory. There is a fine line between addressing problems at home and burning down the house, and fear of the latter can leave us too scared to light the candles of our extended metaphor. I've made fun of CILIP's name in the past, and something more straightforward would certainly buy extra airtime in a media war of words.
But the way CILIP has gone about the rebrand exercise has been bothersome: bothersomely secretive, bothersomely botched, bothersomely expensive and bothersomely delivered (this post by Tom Roper expresses some of the bothers quite effectively). Now ok, CILIP are a registered charity: the product of lots of lovely people doing hard work in their own time for not much thanks; we might expect (and indeed accept) some degree of inelegant botchery. But they're a charity that exists to represent "information professionals", and frankly stuff like the rebrand consultation report and indeed the exercise as a whole is an embarrassment to the information profession. If any chartered institute should be able to do this sort of thing well (and without the need to use an agency, no matter how 'cheap') then it's surely ours. But hey ho, there we go...
The people at CILIP may have felt it necessary to move this particular deckchair at this particular time, and would have probably expected the move to be met with widespread enthusiasm (it was my first reaction, until I saw the survey). But they moved it right in the middle of the Punch & Judy show and in a way that churned up all the sand on the beach into one really unpleasant sandstorm. The methodology misfired in a big way and has perhaps highlighted deeper problems with the organization. Be our body called CILIP or Information UK, the more pressing issue is that it is not currently geared up to do the job we really need it to do right now: primarily to save public libraries in the face of the biggest wave of shock therapy this country's faced since the more overt privatisations of the '80s and '90s. A name change is not going to solve this (though it might well help in communication, or even just in morale for a profession seeking some self-validation)... it needs a wholesale rethink of what our body is for and is allowed to do. We need a war machine, not a think tank. I personally would love to see something a lot more like a Library Union, though that model would not be without its own problems. Quite what we want is, frankly, part of the problem...
We keep fixating on names. The old chestnut of whether the name "librarian" holds us back was raised at the Umbrella conference today. As a cardigan wearer I feel that our stereotype is a positive one, all the more so for being tangible and identifiable. And I suspect it is easier to mould a stereotype than to attempt to build a new one from scratch. A rose by any other name will still smell of Jif. Big brands can force us into saying Snickers if they're really persistent, but "sex worker" is still just a euphemism. In my view, "librarian" is a good hook we can use, and it has a lot of support, even if it is support that doesn't fully understand what we do. I've blogged a couple of times about the 'Frank Skinner' effect and how it can play both ways. Babies and bathwater require an effective detergent.
The thing is, we haven't got time to sit here squabbling. We may need CILIP to be something it can't be, but by the time we've voted in Michael Foot, lost our Gang of Four, told ourselves "we're alright" and diluted our principles just when we didn't need to, there won't be any libraries left to save. There'll be neither librarians nor information professionals. There'll just be a lot of K6s filled with Catherine Cooksons, and nobody there to clean up the mess.
The issue is bigger than libraries. The latest government spending review slashes another 10% off central funding for local councils that are already struggling to provide the public services that are their raison d'etre. Libraries start to look like a luxury and will continue to feature high in the pecking order of stuff to cut. Perhaps as the cuts take their toll on other areas of local government provision there may be an opportunity for greater unity: the camel's back may finally snap as it gets pressed against the wall, and we will all feel the need to do something at last. We're not there yet, but that, it seems to me, is the angle we need to take. To try to fight for our survival in terms of "libraries/librarians are really important" is not going to work against the divide-and-conquer slashing that pitches us against social care services. We need to make a general stand, something those at the bottom of the wood-pile may be unwilling to do so readily (they came for the librarians but I wasn't a librarian...). We have to fight this in terms of a defence of local government provision (and even state provision more generally) as a whole. But can we do it without sounding like a bunch of Marxists and potentially alienating swathes of the middle classes? Is it all just going to come down to a general strike, another winter of discontent, and who knows what else? Or will we all just sit on our hands and watch the welfare state get dismantled and sold off because those that understand are too idle and those that don't don't?
I type as one of the idle. I'm all fingers, me. Words without actions. More libraries will close. Massive unemployment in our sector. Until the metaphorical faeces hit the other blades of the fan we will just have to keep fighting each individual fire as best we can. Perhaps the sand kicked up by CILIP might be useful after all...
The people at CILIP may have felt it necessary to move this particular deckchair at this particular time, and would have probably expected the move to be met with widespread enthusiasm (it was my first reaction, until I saw the survey). But they moved it right in the middle of the Punch & Judy show and in a way that churned up all the sand on the beach into one really unpleasant sandstorm. The methodology misfired in a big way and has perhaps highlighted deeper problems with the organization. Be our body called CILIP or Information UK, the more pressing issue is that it is not currently geared up to do the job we really need it to do right now: primarily to save public libraries in the face of the biggest wave of shock therapy this country's faced since the more overt privatisations of the '80s and '90s. A name change is not going to solve this (though it might well help in communication, or even just in morale for a profession seeking some self-validation)... it needs a wholesale rethink of what our body is for and is allowed to do. We need a war machine, not a think tank. I personally would love to see something a lot more like a Library Union, though that model would not be without its own problems. Quite what we want is, frankly, part of the problem...
We keep fixating on names. The old chestnut of whether the name "librarian" holds us back was raised at the Umbrella conference today. As a cardigan wearer I feel that our stereotype is a positive one, all the more so for being tangible and identifiable. And I suspect it is easier to mould a stereotype than to attempt to build a new one from scratch. A rose by any other name will still smell of Jif. Big brands can force us into saying Snickers if they're really persistent, but "sex worker" is still just a euphemism. In my view, "librarian" is a good hook we can use, and it has a lot of support, even if it is support that doesn't fully understand what we do. I've blogged a couple of times about the 'Frank Skinner' effect and how it can play both ways. Babies and bathwater require an effective detergent.
The thing is, we haven't got time to sit here squabbling. We may need CILIP to be something it can't be, but by the time we've voted in Michael Foot, lost our Gang of Four, told ourselves "we're alright" and diluted our principles just when we didn't need to, there won't be any libraries left to save. There'll be neither librarians nor information professionals. There'll just be a lot of K6s filled with Catherine Cooksons, and nobody there to clean up the mess.
The issue is bigger than libraries. The latest government spending review slashes another 10% off central funding for local councils that are already struggling to provide the public services that are their raison d'etre. Libraries start to look like a luxury and will continue to feature high in the pecking order of stuff to cut. Perhaps as the cuts take their toll on other areas of local government provision there may be an opportunity for greater unity: the camel's back may finally snap as it gets pressed against the wall, and we will all feel the need to do something at last. We're not there yet, but that, it seems to me, is the angle we need to take. To try to fight for our survival in terms of "libraries/librarians are really important" is not going to work against the divide-and-conquer slashing that pitches us against social care services. We need to make a general stand, something those at the bottom of the wood-pile may be unwilling to do so readily (they came for the librarians but I wasn't a librarian...). We have to fight this in terms of a defence of local government provision (and even state provision more generally) as a whole. But can we do it without sounding like a bunch of Marxists and potentially alienating swathes of the middle classes? Is it all just going to come down to a general strike, another winter of discontent, and who knows what else? Or will we all just sit on our hands and watch the welfare state get dismantled and sold off because those that understand are too idle and those that don't don't?
I type as one of the idle. I'm all fingers, me. Words without actions. More libraries will close. Massive unemployment in our sector. Until the metaphorical faeces hit the other blades of the fan we will just have to keep fighting each individual fire as best we can. Perhaps the sand kicked up by CILIP might be useful after all...
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