My Struggle: The First Decade

The Summer of 2015 marked the point at which I'd spent ten years working in libraries. It's looking like it might have the makings of being a career. Back in 2005 I took my first library job (not counting my stint as the 'school librarian' in Junior School) as a Shelver at a teacher-training-college-turned-university in Sheffield. Work was three hours a day, four afternoons a week. It was my first steady job after self-employment and some casual invigilation. 

[2005] I sent an email to enquire about the job, but I didn't have the time to write an application for some reason so I decided not to bother. I was invited to an interview anyway, where my inability to communicate effectively gave my would-be-boss, Bernard, the impression that I would be unable to fulfill the hours (I emailed him afterwards to clear up the ambiguity, which was perhaps as well). I got the job.

Prior to this I'd speculatively applied to work at a number of public libraries in the area, thinking it might make a nice job, but early on I'd made a bad impression with the woman on all the interview panels. It was probably a lucky escape considering what would happen to public libraries in the decade that followed.

Shelving was fun - delightfully physical but not too physical. Short hours which suited my sleeping patterns. I got into it and did a good job. After a few months I was offered the chance of promotion. I made my application and got an interview.

Bernard's opposite number at the other campus (also on the panel) described my interview as the worst he'd ever seen. But competition wasn't a thing in those days and my boss spoke up for me. Such it was that I was now a General Assistant, working four hours a day, five afternoons a week. I had made it.

 General Assistant's Eye View

[2006] At first, being a General Assistant was not entirely dissimilar to being a Shelver, except you got to sort your own trollies before you shelved them. But there were other strings to the General Assistant bow, and more were added with each passing year. A big part of the role was processing: checking the shelfmark allocated to new stock, printing its label and attaching it to the item along with any other Library markings as required. 

There were also certain reprocessing projects, complete with extra hours (full time work!). And then there was repairs. I liked repair jobs. Saving dying books, often by ripping out their spines and rebinding them. Plus the glue smelt wonderful. I endeared myself to my third boss, Karl, by doing a good repair job on the family cookbook. So it was that I was sent off to another Library to help get through a repairs mountain they had there owing to a member of staff being off sick.

[2007] The other Library in question was an Arts Library housed in an old Blue Coat School (site of reputed hauntings) attached to some of the best concrete in Sheffield. It was Heaven, alone with my glue-pots (pictured in the cabinet below) and the most interesting books the University had. I could play conservator with wild abandon and gaffer-tape (it was all that was to hand). The backlog was reduced and more brownie-points were earnt.

My base of operations in the Arts campus years

[2008] Then they decided they would shut down the lovely Arts campus, and after my initial success there I was invited back to help with the dismantling (complete with yet-more extra hours). This included the chance to help work out the shelving allocations at the other end, and to supervise the removal men accordingly. Plus I got to wallow in the Special Collection, where all the very nicest things lived, and to hang around with the Art Librarian, Kate, who was well cool. She introduced me to the wonders of Librarianship, and to the realisation that Library Schools were a thing.

 How to repurpose an abandoned Library

I look back very fondly at those bitter-sweet months in the Arts Library. And I miss that campus so much. They turned it to rubble but not before we had a disco in the empty Library (see above). The stock moved to the big Library on the main campus and I went with it for a time, to help rehouse the Special Collection in its new climate-controlled home.

 The Special Collection being rehoused

My old History teacher, Anna, worked at the city campus, doing the same job as me as her post-retirement earner. She was shocked that one of her star pupils was bumming around rather than making something of themselves, and she gave me a stern talking to. At the same time, I had my appraisal with Karl -- the only appraisal I ever had that was worthwhile -- in which the notion of Library School or Archives School was mooted. I decided to give it a go.

[2009] Archives School was in Liverpool, but there was a Library School in Sheffield, so that was that decision sorted right there. Eventually I made my application, which got through at the last minute, and I attended the last round of interviews for the next year's course (2009/10). I didn't give it much thought, and it wasn't until I started that I realised there had been a chance that I might not have made it through the process (i.e. that some people didn't). But my interview seemed to go ok. I said I'd applied to Sheffield because it was nearest, and that I saw it as an opportunity to sit the recession out (ha!). My application made reference to Giles from Buffy, naturally.

 Legoland Sheffield

[2010] I attended Library School part-time, while continuing my work as a General Assistant, and my second/fourth boss, Julia, was brilliant with regard to my flexible working. By this point the General Assistant role had evolved even further. The Library was now predominantly serving a Nursing course and we were manning what was effectively a second help-desk in all but name, as well as fixing the printers, and supporting the more senior Library Assistants with their back-room work: a range of clerical duties from inter-library loans, collections and serials etc. On account of being the 'clever' one, I was also given the job of leading our role-profile review in an attempt to get our grade upped -- it was never going to happen as it would've set the whole house-of-cards tumbling, but it was a worthwhile exercise non-the-less, not least ahead of all those job applications. To the same end I started to get in some work shadowing with the Librarians about the place. This would be essential when it came to my first professional role.

[2011] After two years of Library School I started sending out applications. I was in no great hurry because I had the security of my General Assistant job, so I started out with the wish-fulfilment stuff: rare books collections... Oxbridge Libraries... one of them even demanded a hand-written letter of application, which was just downright weird (plus my wrist ached for about a month afterwards).

[2012] And then, in the middle of 2012, I saw a maternity cover job in York. I'd been an undergrad in York and I hadn't wanted to leave. Plus it was a Health Sciences / Medicine Assistant Librarian job, which was the field I was currently in. So I fired off a quick application, making a few gambles with my life in the process, just to see what might come of it. And I got offered an interview.

The interview went well. I was on it that day. I'd seen a magazine in the waiting room that had an article of relevance that I could drop into proceedings, and that doubtless helped. But I didn't get the job. What I did get was the offer to do three months' sick-leave cover for one of the Librarians, and I snatched it. I had no idea where I might live, but I had a job. In a different city. For three months.

 Obligatory book shot

Savings and parents were employed to pay out six months of rent, on the big gamble that I might eke out another three months in the job. In the end I got four months out of it. And I was working as a Liaison Librarian in Social Work and Women's Studies. And it was great. I loved it. I had indeed made the right choice. But then it ended; a month after it was initially meant to end, but it ended all the same. There just wasn't any more in the kitty. So what next?

[2013] There was an Open Access job at York but my heart wasn't really in it, and I didn't get it. I had a couple of interviews down south before a colleague pointed me to another maternity cover role, this time over in Hull. I applied, and as with the original York post, I must've been on form in the interview, because it seemed to go ok. And again, I got the job. Third time lucky. I moved to Hull in a Liaison Assistant role. I was concerned that it was technically a backward step, and that perhaps I ought to look to a fully-fledged Librarian position, but needs must. And it was a good time. I was able to put to use various skills from York, and develop some serious spreadsheet wizardry along the way. But it too was temporary cover. And it too came to an end.

 I didn't actually work in here very much.

I was in a terraced house.

And then I got a call to return to York - phew! Yet more cover was needed, for the same job I'd been interviewed for a year earlier. I'd dropped on. Hurrah!

So back to York, a year after my first stint. It should've lasted until Christmas. And it did. This time I was a Health Sciences Assistant Librarian: lots of one-to-one tuition with nervous nurses. But in January we were due a restructure, and that job was to come to an end. Fortunately, another job has come up as an Academic Liaison Librarian for Health, Psychology and Social Policy & Social Work. It looked terrifying, but it seemed to have my name on it. I put in my application and duly got an interview.

The interview was a disaster from the offset. I'd planned the whole thing -- all my examples -- with respect to an academic on the panel. But he wasn't there -- the academics were on strike. And without him, all my planning went out of the window. It was a mess...

...or as I see it, a narrow escape. In hindsight, I'd've hated the job. Sometimes fate knows what it's doing.

[2014] But for now, I had a problem. My plans had collapsed. Fortunately, another hole had emerged, as Assistant Librarian for the Medical School. I got to cover it for a few months before it would be up for interview. But that was only half time. The other half I was able to fill with odd-jobbing for now: covering any cracks while the reshuffle bedded in. I was clinging on for dear life.

Another job came up, looking after software licences. I wasn't overwhelmed by the prospect, but I kind of had to go for it. I didn't get it. An e-learning job came up at another University nearby; I interviewed for that; I didn't get it. Another interview back where I started, which I also didn't get. Again, these are jobs that if I'm honest I wasn't really that bothered about getting, save for the need for food and shelter. It was no fun. It was disheartening. It was worrying.

And then came the interview for the Medical School job. If I messed this one up, that was that. You'll be pleased to know that I didn't mess it up. It went Just Fine. It was easy, lovely, and largely without hitch. Thank goodness for that. Half of my job was now permanent. And it was bloody brilliant too. I even got to work with my mates from Hull from time to time.

Meanwhile, the other half of me had moved into the Teaching & Learning team, to cover a sick-leave which became a retirement. I got to play with spreadsheets and design teaching. I now had two good jobs for the price of one. Time wore on, and I clung on.

[2015] A year later, I was able to be offered a full-time job in the Teaching and Learning team, at Librarian level. It meant leaving the Medical School post [sad-face emoticon], but it was a step up and a secure position, so that was that. That was that and here we are: Ten years after this journey began... my first full-time Librarian post. Or rather, Teaching and Learning Advisor post. *breathes*

Action shot: I teach. It learns.

[2016] So what is a Teaching and Learning Advisor? Does it involve books at all? Well, these two questions, and more, will be the subject of another post on another day. For now, just be content with the knowledge of a job well done and another blog post in the bag.

Cheers to everyone on the journey. And good luck to all. We Librarians... I think we've got nine lives and we land on our feet, just like Shakespear's Sister. I hope you land somewhere nice too.

Hollywood Answered the Google Question in 1957

That big Chock-A-Block wannabe there is EMMARAC, the new computer that's going to revolutionize the reference library of the Federal Broadcasting Network. The librarians looking at this great machine are about to get the pink slips from payroll that indicate their impending redundancy. The entire library has been rendered as machine code and fed into the computer, enabling it to retrieve in seconds an answer that took the woman in the black and red several weeks to ascertain.

This is a still from the 1957 film Desk Set, written by Phoebe and Henry Ephron from a 1955 play by William Marchant. It stars Katherine Hepburn as a librarian (which is kind of like looking in a mirror for me, as you can imagine) and Spencer Tracy as the efficiency expert re(/dis)organising her library and her life. A Kat Hepburn film is seldom a bad thing, and this is no exception to that rule. Indeed, it is rather lovely. It's got Katherine Hepburn and librarians: how can it fail to be rather lovely?

But let us get to the point of this post: The Google Question. It is an assumption among some people out there in the wild (sometimes even people in government) that the library and the librarian have been made redundant by Google. We, of course, know this assumption to be flawed: even ignoring the limited range of Google with respect to the Deep Web; even casting aside the slightly privileged assumption that Google and its fruits are an affordable and available presence in every home; the truth is that Google is only as smart as the person at the keyboard: to get the right answer, one sometimes has to ask the right question.

And this is precisely where EMMARAC fails too. For example, when asked a question about the King of the Watusi, EMMARAC's best effort is a film review of King Solomon's Mines. By way of comparison, Google also resorts to a film as first guess (in this case 1959's Watusi; it's not until the 9th hit that King Solomon's Mines turns up; oh, and Desk Set is the third hit). To get an informed response, one has to know a little bit about what one is typing about. In most day-to-day cases that may be easy enough. For everything else you can call upon your local Information Professional. Google is an amazing tool but getting the best out of it requires knowledge and skill.

Desk Set reaches the same conclusion about EMMARAC. This machine is not a replacement for librarians: it is a shortcut; a new index to consult when required. There will be no redundancies in this reorganization (indeed, a new business venture may, conveniently, even require some extra staff). The panic subsides and everyone lives happily ever after. Or more likely they spend the next fifty-odd years continually reproving their worth as further technological efficiencies are introduced.

Librarians are not, and have never really been, in a war with Google; rather their adversaries in this case are those who think that Google renders librarians obsolete. Here's 103 minutes of half-a-century-old gentle romantic comedy that clearly and relevantly demonstrates the shortcomings of that notion. Not only that, but they have the sort of office parties to which we should all aspire.

 

 Trailer (contains spoilers)

[The full version of Desk Set is available, pay-per-view, on YouTube,

or from your local lending library]

"Will no one rid us of this turbulent membership?" Mustering techniques to avoid.

I am a member of CILIP. I am a member of CILIP because my peers at Library School were also members of CILIP. I am a member of CILIP because maybe at some point I’ll get around to doing the Chartership thing, even though I’m not still 100% convinced that the whole enterprise is not just a white elephant money-making racket for CILIP. I am a member of CILIP because I believe it is important for an area such as librarianship to have a strong body that represents the interests of libraries, librarians and library users.

Things I am not a member of CILIP for:

CILIP Update; training events (though some would be nice); opportunities to engage in democratic processes; small print scrutiny; trying to get my head around an at first glance bizarre organizational structure; reading a CILIP councillor describe dissatisfaction over a rebranding exercise as betrayal; reading an ambassadorial figure within CILIP shrugging off dwindling membership as aninevitable function of library closures and deprofessionalization; reading the same figure address the same issue of dwindling membership in terms of “quality over quantity” (I don’t want this to drift anywhere remotely close to an ‘answer-post’, let alone character assassination -- there’s something wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time about the CILIP President role and a slip of the keyboard is all too easy -- but just take a few seconds to mull the ramifications of that statement)...

There were more different types when I were a kid.

In case you’ve missed it, the fiddles are out at CILIP again, this time regarding the recent Governance Review. You may have missed that too. I’ve a distant hazy memory that I once followed a link from an email (though a search of my inbox suggests that I deleted whatever email provoked it), saw lots of boring governance stuff and then got distracted by BuzzFeed or something. It’s not really been a debate I’ve followed, partly because it’s not really been a debate. I could express in broad strokes (and reasonable reasoning) my sense of rights and wrongs, but the simple truth of the matter is that this one seems to have slipped under the radar in a way that the whole ILPUK debacle didn’t. It’s all building up to become another deck-chair shuffle of an AGM.

The first deckchair to be vacated was that of enfant terrible Tom Roper, who explained his reasoning in this blogpost. His resignation brought the detail of the Governance Review to the attention of twitter. In a way it’s a shame he didn’t go before the review’s close-date (think of the traffic!), but such is the nature of cause and effect. Council chair Martyn Wade responded to Roper’s post, and Roper’s replied here. And this weekend President Band added her thoughts. 

From my perspective, CILIP’s governance is overly elaborate: an elected President and Vice-President with so little power and influence that nobody stands anymore; an appointed Chair (to assume the Presidential office in the proposed regime) overseeing a mixed bag ofelected and appointed Councillors; a paid CEO “delivering the change programme and effective charity management”. Some simplification might not go amiss. The problem seems to be that the proposed simplification is a simplification that reduces rather than inspires member involvement: the role of President becomes more relevant but we’re not allowed to vote for who might get it anymore. The number of elected Councillors drops from nine (or potentially all) to eight, which seems another backwards step.

Voting in these things is always going to be pretty low. We don’t generally know enough about the candidates to feel too strongly. Therefore, CILIP elections should be at worst a formality and at best a way to engage any membership so inclined. So why reduce the membership’s say? That just seems stupid. Almost as stupid as ILPUK. Seriously... why would you do this?

Why?

And it’s the fact that CILIP’s powers-that-be seem to make such a mess of the easy things like sensible, positive member engagement that is so frustrating. These things should be non-issues.

So will this September's AGM be dominated by yet more belly-button stare-offs? Or will there be some motions tabled that actually engage with the very real threats that library services (in all sectors) are facing? Perhaps you have a motion you’d like to put forward. You’ll have to be quick, though. You’ve got until 5pm tomorrow (Monday 21^st July). More details on how to submit a motion can be found here. I hope some of you are more inspired than I am.

Barbara Band says some good stuff in one of her replies to a comment on her post:

“[We] are best served by having a national professional body that can have a positive strategic impact on Government policy... [via] the work it has done with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Libraries, or the work on Information Literacy, or the policy responses it has submitted, or the frankly bloody good work that Annie Maguer does 7 days a week [weekends are important, Annie, but thanks all the same] on securing influence and credibility with policymakers... [This is] the only effective way to defend the long-term and precious principle of the right of access to library services... CILIP needs to influence Downing Street and Treasury... CILIP needs you... like we need everyone in the library and information professions.”

I agree with most of what’s being said here. This is the important stuff. Getting a clear message deep into the halls of Whitehall and Westminster. Saving libraries. 

Barbara continues: “We need a credible brand and a professional presentation.” This is at the heart of CILIP’s recent efforts regarding rebranding and governance. Maybe CILIP are right: politics has always had an obsession with image after all, especially in the last couple of decades. “Most of all,” Barbara adds, “we need people to understand that whether the battle is personal or professional, we get absolutely nowhere by fighting amongst ourselves.”

Which is the underlying sentiment of this post. It’s also why members get affronted when CILIP’s governance seems to start picking fights with them, be it by conducting lip-service surveys ahead of an unpopular namechange, or by reducing the few democratic pathways though which the membership can influence said governance. This is a particular affront at a time when some of the membership may feel that the governors in question are not doing enough on things other than name-changes and internal restructures.

It seems that I agree with Barbara (and probably the rest of the CILIP great-and-good) that we should stop fighting among ourselves and start concentrating on fighting for the future of libraries. What we probably disagree upon is the reason the in-fighting is there in the first place (and indeed the potential solutions to it). The disgruntled membership are not out to cause trouble for trouble’s sake and I doubt CILIP's leaders are too. We’re not the agents in this so it’s a bit galling when we’re told to be quiet.

The argument can perhaps be summed up as: 

CILIP MEMBERSHIP: Stop messing about!

CILIP GOVERNANCE: Stop arguing with us!

CILIP MEMBERSHIP: Stop making changes we don’t like!

CILIP GOVERNANCE: Shut up!

The elephant in the 'blog post.

I’ll be paying my subs for another year because I really really really want CILIP to be out there fighting for libraries. And I really want to be able to support them in that fight. But I’ll not be shutting up. And I will be exercising my ballot at the AGM. I voted for Tom Roper in the Council elections last year and I thank him for his efforts in representing the membership during his brief tenure. I also thank him for being a one-man publicity machine for CILIP’s internal democratic processes, as without his annual agitations the AGM and its agenda would doubtless pass me by un-noticed. Finally, I thank Barbara Band for everything she does in being an ambassador for The Cause. It’s far far more than I do and it’s very much appreciated. 

Full and frank debate is healthy and proper, and a necessary part of good governance (wherever possible taking place ex camera so we all know what’s going on). In the course of such debate we should, of course, never fail to lose sight of the fact that the real enemy is without.

Another lap of the Sun being done...

On the 7th January, #uklibchat will be discussing New Year's Resolutions. Last year I submitted the following ambitions:

Write more; get involved; be more assertive; generally get stuck in... 

At the risk of pre-empting the twitter conversation, here's how I think I did:

Write more...

This is my 18th post of 2013, compared with 21 posts in 2012, so I've not written more here. Have I written more elsewhere? I've not crunched the Twitter numbers, but I expect they're healthy. And I've got published in print without doing an awful lot, so that was nice. It's a start, and not too bad considering I've had two house-moves and two different full-time jobs this year to keep me busy. I think that's a fair excuse. 

Get involved...

Not as many Library Camps this year as last, but I got to three. I also attended a Northern Collaboration event and the 50th birthday bash at Sheffield's library school. I'd call that treading water, really. I've maintained my presence in the library world. But I've been too busy settling in with new work colleagues to dedicate much time further afield. One thing I have done is taken more notice of matters CILIP, and I suspect I'm not alone in this regard (see previous posts). As a consequence of the whole name-change thing, I've voted in two CILIP plebiscites, and followed the coverage / live-streaming from two CILIP meetings. That's two more of both those things than I've done in previous years. I might even be tempted to get involved with something CILIP-y if there was anything CILIP-y to get involved with around here. Might. There are probably better causes to assist, and I do so enjoy my own time...


Be more assertive; generally get stuck in...

I'm sticking these two together because I see them as part of the same thing. It was that prize cock Steven Morrissey who, in one of his saner moments, sang "Shyness is nice but shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you'd like to". I continue to be too wet for my own good, though now and again my bushel gets too hot and starts smoking, attracting some attention. I seem to get by on such smoke-signals, but my reticence remains an obstacle. I have to learn to be able to talk without the aid of half a bottle of wine. Writing's a different matter: I have time to develop my buzzing thoughts and overcome inhibitions. But my brain doesn't seem to cope so well at speaking-pace. Part of that's speed-of-thought, but most of it is a lack of confidence, or an unwillingness to chance my ability to wrangle my thoughts into some sensible utterances (which amounts to much the same thing). The more I get to know people, the more at ease I become, mostly, I think, because I better know how they work and what their reactions might be to whatever I end up saying. But this character judgement takes far too many months and in the meantime I suspect I end up looking aloof. This remains a frustration to me and I don't suspect there's a quick and easy way to overcome it short of plugging away bit by bit and learning that I'm perfectly capable of holding my own. I'm not sure I've made an awful lot of progress in this regard this year (a disastrous job interview didn't help my confidence any, either) but I just have to keep plugging away. Or pre-loading on gin (probably not the answer).

In conclusion, then, I've not really met these self-imposed objectives in any truly satisfactory way. I've been too busy hopping from one temporary job to another and trying to find a firmer foothold from which to preach. But at the same time it's not been an utter disaster. I don't think I've lost much if any ground, and so it is that they stand for another year. Here's hoping I'm in a better position to act on these resolutions in 2014.

Happy New Year, and may it be full to brimming with wonder and joy enough for us all!

Whither CILIP? (or I.L. Stretching Time)

Last week was the third national Library Camp. This time we were in the new and distinctive Library of Birmingham: a place full of books, escalators and ideas. I thought it would be interesting, after this summer's fun and games, to pitch a session dedicated to coming up with good ideas and inspiration for the future direction of CILIP. The aim would not be to rehash the old moans, which are now pretty well rehearsed, but to come up with some positive ideas about the way CILIP should be heading, and how it might better prosecute its cause. The results are presented below.

In the main body text we have an account of my scrawled notes, wrangled into some sort of sense, and not nearly as glossed as my Library Camp write-ups usually are: this is, I think, a fair summary of what was said, made slightly more comprehensible to an outside observer, and in some places re-ordered in the interests of a less tangled narrative.   

On the right, a little way below the side-bar stuff, is a Storify summary of relevant tweets gathered using a search for cilip AND #libcampuk13 . If you have a tweet in there and you'd rather it wasn't, let me know and I'll gladly get out the scissors.

Let's start, then, with the first idea that was pitched, and work our way through from there...

We should take the example of free student membership and extend it to, for example, one year's free membership for para-professionals; one year's free membership for all first time members.

Get them in, get them hooked. Admittedly, CILIP is hardly crack. But hopefully some value can be demonstrated in those 12 months of freedom. There's still probably a need to make the first step into paid membership a little less sheer (those pay bandings are still bizarre), but we're here to make new suggestions and not get bogged down in the old standards.

Ok, so what wonders can we offer in this gratis year? What can we give that will be worth the fees once the novelty's worn off?

Most of the people attending this session were CILIP members, but we were here giving up our Saturdays for a library conference thingummy so maybe we're naturally that way inclined. The reality beyond the golden lattice of Brum is a little less rosy, with membership at an all-time low. Why do so many of us feel it's just not worth joining? Is it simply a recognition that accreditation lacks the degree of importance it has in certain other professions? We don't need the accreditation and hence we don't need the professional body? And while we may be put off applying for a job that doesn't ask for a library qualification, in the current climate perhaps we lack the luxury of being so choosy. To this end...

CILIP needs to be an advocate for the profession to ensure a) an appropriate professional standard and b) its own relevance.

One avenue that might be exploited is LIS Job Net: the main route through which our profession advertises its vacancies. It currently charges its advertisers, which doubtless has certain financial benefits for CILIP, but how about if we...

Make it free to place an ad on LIS Job Net, thereby increasing interest, creating an industry standard platform, and allowing proper monitoring of pay and standards within the profession.

One of CILIP's difficulties (though also a potential advantage in other respects) is the diversity within the profession(s) it exists to support. CILIP needs to be able to operate across this segmentation while catering for each slice accordingly. Perhaps the one unifying demand from across the sectors is this appeal for greater advocacy, but joining everything up seems to be a struggle. Maybe we need...

Some sort of coordinated Advocacy Toolkit to promote knowledge and develop our skills base.

There are plans and hopes for online training and MOOCs, and a space to pool stories of good practice and impact. This sounds like a good platform from which to build.

CILIP also needs to bang some heads together in local authorities, of course. Maybe our services are such a pervasive, ubiquitous thing that they blend in and become part of the furniture. We therefore need the occasional bit of waving and shouting. To enjoy the living room, you need a really good settee, and it's easy to forget that detail until the springs go and the stuffing falls out, or the thing gets repossessed. CILIP needs to be pointing this out, albeit on a metaphorical level (we've dabbled enough in home furnishings for one year).

We want CILIP to be louder! 

Some of us would even quite like a Library Workers' Union of sorts, though given current membership of both CILIP and the unions it would take a lot to set such a thing going. Maybe a spot of gentle, coercive rattening would bump the numbers up for CILIP??

CILIP is felt to have moved away from a unionish role (for "unionish", I suspect we are to read "militant", "protectionist" etc.) in its efforts towards advocacy, and that it now stands at something of a crossroads: is the "soft" advocacy working, or do we need to get angry?

CILIP should be more controversial!

The no-confidence vote in Ed Vaizey is seen by some as a much-needed exclamation of serious disquiet, and by others as a retrograde step that complicates essential diplomacy. The truth is that we want CILIP to be promoting our interests in all directions: leading a good librarian / bad librarian assault. Good advocacy takes time: softly softly catch a politician and all that. CILIP is proud of its deep advocacy and the results it produces (an example was given of a school libraries promotion) but it can only do a couple of such projects at any one time, and the process is far from dramatic. It can all too easily look like we're doing nothing very much at all while Alexandria burns.

CILIP is not a union, it's a charity. And it has always worked tirelessly behind the scenes on advocacy projects, in the interest of the public good, or education and of libraries. But we expect it to do more. We see wholesale dismantling of our public libraries and we say "surely CILIP could be doing more to stop this?!"

CILIP is not Ridgmount Street. We are CILIP. And if we don't like it we need to change it.

In a way, maybe the membership question (the lack of membership question) is a white elephant. Certainly, more members will produce more money with which to fund more projects, but the reverse is also true. Part of the membership problem is the cost, but the other part is the benefit. Maybe we're not showing our worth at the moment...

We, the members of CILIP (and recall that the vast majority of the people in this session were current members), are CILIP. If CILIP isn't offering us anything, part of that is down to us, because ultimately we do the offerings. We need to be coordinating local meetings, putting on development events, getting out there and doing. We have to put things in to get things back. And if we build it, others will come...

So why aren't we? It's not purely indolence (we've all given up our Saturday, remember; we've all come here of our own accord, spent money on transport and accommodation; dug into our pockets to help fund Library Camp; maybe even helped with the organization on some level). There's a blockage in the pipes, somewhere. To put it crudely, why are we at Library Camp and not at CILIP Library Camp? There is something wrong with the internal structure of CILIP (which current plans will hopefully soothe).

CILIP is not Ridgmount Street 2: London is a long way away for many members. We need to decentralise, and we need to have more going on in other parts of the country.

Yes, the AGM was in Birmingham this year, and yes there have been other major events in Manchester and other reaches. These are Good Things. But there is a definite imbalance. It's inevitable that CILIP uses its HQ for things, and so it should, but sometimes it does so without adequate notice (cheap train tickets need prior planning). There is a perceived dearth of activities in the North, and even in the Midlands. More problematic is that while some local groups are lively hubs of excellence, others are mere zombies. There's a real lottery according to where you live.

There needs to be more interaction between branches, and more equity. 

Does that lead to duplication of effort? Is that a problem? The money / bums on seats equation is certainly a problem. And it is a self-perpetuating one. A person may want to get involved, but if there's nothing to get involved in then they don't. It's ok to say "if you want something, do it yourself", but most of us need some sort of structure to support that ambition. An active group can offer that support, creating a healthy turnover of participants; a dead group cannot. How do we shake this up?

Increased canvassing in Library Schools.

So we've got the students interested with the free membership, now let's get them involved. Go into the universities and say hi. Promote the possibilities. Some of our biggest Library Schools are in some of the least active CILIP regions. That's partly a problem, but maybe it contains the germ of a solution too? There's much-needed experience to be gained, and students are (necessarily) into the experience-gaining game.

Try asking your local network for some pennies.


Fancy organizing a Library Camp? Maybe CILIP can help. It's worth a go, at least. But how do you get involved in your local CILIP group even if you want to? We're Librarians so we should be able to find it out, but it's the weekend and the last thing we want to do is struggle with the CILIP website. Therefore:

Create a simple route to involvement: an idiot's guide.

And once you are involved, it pays to keep others informed. Again, some of this comes down to just being bothered enough to read the right things at the right time (something I'm particularly guilty of not doing). But there are a lot of special interest groups out there, and most of us will only be a member of two (such is the way it works). Maybe, in the interests of unity (and promotion) we could be promoting the activities of all the groups to all the members a little more effectively than we do right now:

Produce a digest of special interest group news and activities.

...just a case of creaming off the best of what each group's been up to and sharing it (say in Update) to advertise and to inspire.

Speaking of inspiration, my favourite suggestion of the session:

CILIP should propose a name change every year.

Let's face it, I doubt this session would've happened without that particular debacle.

So there we have it: a handful of ideas to hopefully offer some inspiration for the future. We did fall into the odd spot of moaning now and again, which is probably inevitable, and while the presence of @johnrdolan permitted some discussion of practicality, context, and current practice, it might have limited opportunities for a more fanciful unleashing of our imaginations. Maybe that's something to try in a future session!

Thanks to all who took part, and if you feel I've missed anything, do add any suggestions or clarifications below. x

Radical Library Camp, 28th September 2013

I'm getting worse. It's nearly two months since Radical Library Camp. It's taken me far too long to write this thing up. But at last I have. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from Radical Library Camp. My initial impression was something involving skateboards and neon, or perhaps something like this:

On further inspection, it became apparent that we were talking anarcho-syndicalist Radical. Given that librarians have a (not necessarily militant) tendency to swing to the left, was this just going to be Library Camp but shoutier? I brushed up on the lyrics to the Internationale and O Tannenbaum, just in case they might be needed, and hopped on the train to Bradford.  

This post employs my usual blend of notes, reportage and personal opinion. The sessions we'll be looking at are Space, Crisistunity, Copywrong and Supporting Activism, should you want to skip down the page.

Space…

“You said you wanted some space… well is this enough for you?” 

@librarygirlknitset us going on a subject very much to my interest: library spaces.  To inspire our chatter she had us draw our ideal library. This is something I’ve been working on for some time, but unconstrained by space and budget I usually end up with piles of ridiculousness. This time I kept it provincial, with a four-cell branch of scribbled vagueness. We then set about describing our plans, and immediately we hit the enquiry desk.

The desk has been kicked about a bit in academic libraries for a good while now. Converged counter services; low-level desks; to have a librarian or not to have a librarian; to have a desk or not to have a desk…

Is the desk a barrier? A great wall of formality at the gateway to the books? Does it perpetuate an unhelpful schism between library staff and library patron? Or is it a useful box to sit at and store bits and bobs? An obvious port of call for those in search of help and information?

An effective enquiry desk in operation

I don’t really have a problem with an authoritative enquiry desk, though I can see how they might seem formidable if you were unsure of the value of your query. Personally my biggest reason to avoid the desk would be the queue. The truth is that different people like different mediums. Some like self-issue and some like librarian-issue. Some like queuing up at a desk and some like chatting on the internet. Some might fear the barricade; others might get the willies from polo-shirted floor-walkers stalking the stacks with their here-to-help handbags. But a counter takes up quite a lot of real estate (it was about an eighth of my impromptu design), even as a panoptical hub rather than as a wall of chipboard. That said, it’s also a handy storage space for all manner of bits and bobs, a useful leaning space for filling out forms or making notes, and a fitting place to do some work at quieter moments.

That’s not to say that a roaming, counter-free service-desk model can’t actually have some tables, chairs and storage somewhere in the room: “break-out spaces” or “hubs” or whatever you may wish to call them. I picture coffee tables, staff-room seating and little shelf-stack islands topped with spider-plants and filled with ring-binders, but then I’m a child of the ‘80s. I quite like such an image, pretty much as much as I like the omniscient oracle at the enquiry desk. Pros and roundabouts. What isbeneficial, whether you have someone at a desk or you don’t, is tablet-touting floor-staff with answers at their fingertips. Library users ask floor-staff questions. They do this because a) they don’t differentiate between grades of staff, b) they want a quick answer and don’t want to queue. Most staff in this situation will be able to help, too. Especially if the library has a catalogue terminal to hand. But giving them a tablet in a handbag opens up new levels of potential support: especially if the library management system (LMS) is in there too.

This raises a potential problem of staff grading. Shelvers know many things and answer many questions. But they probably aren’t being paid enough to operate an LMS, and in such cases we are faced with a two-tier roaming service. I’m not sure it’s good practice to have library assistants crawling everywhere, touting for enquiries without being given an interim task like shelving, tidying or harvesting holds. A loitering librarian is a potentially suspicious creature. Much better to anchor them to some clearly defined point of reference. It seems to me that you should either scrap bottom-end shelvers and incorporate shelving into a roaming service model, or retain bottom-end shelvers as your directional roaming support and escalate more demanding enquiries to a fixed point of contact. The best approach would very much depend on the scale of your institution. A one-man school library needs its desk because that’s where the librarian lives. A college library might be able to operate effectively on an ungraduated roaming model where all the library assistants muck in and do their bit on the floor, and carry a computer with them on their trolley. A much larger place, reliant on casual shelvers, might need to think about how it approaches a roaming model.

That said, I’m not sure that any model is fundamentally broken, and having to escalate to another roaming librarian is only problematic if they are either sufficiently low in number or lack a parking location of default. So long as you can point to them; so long as you can find them, all is well in the stacks. Teeside University have taken something of a lead in this approach and it seems to be going well. They also approach it with the mindset that if any part of it isn’t going well, they are allowed to change it: the furniture is not fixed. Sensible Teeside. And being able to take the LMS, the catalogue, the website and all the databases with you when you go to help someone is amazing in itself. This is the future and it’s smeared with fingerprints.

The session wasn’t entirely taken up by the to-desk-or-not-to-desk question, though it doubtless dominated proceedings. We discussed the lack of good studies on what sort of space users wanted. Again, some users want one thing and some another. There remains a strong demand for the traditional study space within many a refurbished library, along with the demand for the trendy new bits. The bigger the library, the easier to cater for every taste, but even a small pub can have a tap-room and a lounge.

The first proper essay I did at library school was on the history of Sheffield’s university libraries. Sheffield Uni went from a locked cupboard in the main hall to a panopticon that was already too small by the time it was built, to a gorgeous light-box with air-conditioned shelving and plenty of room but completely unsuitable for the unanticipated arrival of computers, to a glare-free (therefore dingy) box of computers (but not enough of them), to a tall and funky (but compromised) space full of noise and coloured settees. Sheff Hallam designed a too-expensive glass ski-slope and instead built a windowless carpark which only now, after finally getting some paint and light and internal soundproofing, is realising its potential. Building libraries is a tricky game, made all the more so by architects obsessed with atria and the simple truth that no matter how hard you might try to futureproof something, futureproofing will be the first thing you scale back when the budget starts over-running. Hindsight is a wonderful wonderful thing, and no matter how much of it we factor in, we will be left short. It’s all part of the joy of it!

Crisitunity!

En Inglés.

@DanPGrace opened the gateway to Hell that we might peer inside and pluck out the eyes of hope from its smouldering remnants. We're oft told to see the opportunity in a crisis: e.g. your newfound unemployment is a great opportunity for you to develop your job-application skills and your abilities to survive under a reduced income (and a great opportunity for me to give myself a nice meaty bonus as reward for my cost-cutting successes). But are there any genuine (non-soppy) opportunities to be plundered from the current decimation of public library services?

“I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the Braun, let’s make lots of burgers.”

Kids use public libraries... kids and old people. Do not forget this. Public libraries do not, by and large, cater for the working adult, at least not with regards to their book-lending services. Working adults can buy their own books, if they find time for such fripperies. Children and pensioners have the time to develop greater book-reading appetites, and while books these days are cheaper, tis true, a reading habit can mount up into an expensive thing were one to go out and buy this stuff.

But it's not all about the books. We are information centres catering to broader information needs than the latest western or picture book. We do have things we can offer the working adults (and not just those interested in the contents of our metals database [Sheffield reference reference]). Why can't our paymasters see the value of our service? Because the state sees its primary role as encouraging economic growth. It's all about the growth. It's the growth stupid. Can we help grow things? We can help grow tiny minds. And even big minds. Is that the growth you're looking for? We can and do serve the economy (cop a feel at our metals database, etc.), and today's inspired children are tomorrow's grasping hedgefunders. But nobody likes a long-term gain in a politics of five-year plans. What else have we got?

We're a place to access council services online! Government can't get enough of sticking stuff online, but not everyone has a computer and an internet connection. It's a good fifteen quid a month for that privilege. So the council needs to provide some sort of cybercafé for the un-networked masses, and ooh, look, they've already got one. Perhaps we should advertise the service?

God, no... the People's Network is creaking enough as it is. It cannae take any more. And in a small library being all things to all patrons, a room full of studious referees, excited children, and befuddled job-seekers struggling with inadequate technologies and poorly rendered council websites is a recipe for pain.

Striking a balance can be really tricky, but we specialise at our peril. One "ailing" library revamped, ditching its adult lending service to become a children's library and PC room: a process which apparently killed it. The remnants were farmed off as a commercial enterprise in cooperation with a private school and a church. They hire out the hall to make the money to pay the wages of the staff. This is a template being offered for many a community project solution to the Library Question, though it smacks somewhat of enclosure.

Beancounters will be relieved to be rid of the public service liability that is the library, so how do we 'evidence' its value and prove community need? Bloody metrics. Given that a national audience share greater than EastEnders appears insufficient libation, an appeal to more qualitative benefits seems hardly worth the effort. The state as currently governed does not look beyond its nose end. Yet the current government, on one of its Big Society damn-fool idealistic crusades, did devise something dubbed a Happiness Index. It was a crude yardstick based on Morris Dancing and bunting, but they made this thing and it is a thing that could be appropriated to serve our own interests. God save strawberry jam, and all the different varieties. The village green preservation society is made up of blue-rinsed Conservative Club regulars, and we are the village hall. The Tory grass-roots are children of the post-war consensus, and they are our nostalgic allies. A fine mission, involving copious quantities of gin, might be to infiltrate this community and ensure that sops to the heartland are sops that benefit us too. The demands of the public and the demands of the state can sometimes be harmonised.

The stats game infects our own services though, sometimes in counter-intuitive ways: the mentality exists such that that which cannot be measured is first against the wall, ignoring the fact that that measurement is no measure of value. So it is that newspapers are cast out of libraries because there is no efficient means to gauge their use (beyond the testimony of staff and users - a measure which for some reason is seldom observed). Removing the newspapers removes the people who came to read the newspapers (however great or not that untallied number may be) who then become people that don't read newspapers (is that a positive or a negative from the government's perspective?) and don't use the library. Reading newspapers is an expensive business these days, but so is providing them to those people who don't want to pay up. And so there goes part of our core user-base, and we know not what devastation that causes because we're rubbish at measuring long-term social return and 'soft outcomes'. We could sellotape a camera to a tramp but we might never get it back. The most telling way to assess the value of our service is to compare places with libraries and places without, but that's an awful lot of variables to juggle for good science to prevail. That's the problem with evidence: beyond the lab it becomes a subjective issue.

Meanwhile, libraries are being handed to the well-meaning and ill-prepared. There's no real funding beyond one-off grants which create vibrant and well-used libraries until the novelty wears off and the money runs out. Libraries need money and money, we're told, is in short supply. My own feeling is that whilever there are couples going on Grand Designs, there is no acceptable excuse for a reduction in public services or working conditions: the money exists within the economy but it is being spent on bespoke kitchens and never-to-be-used mezzanine dens. This is not the economics of envy (as much as I'd love a mezzanine den) but of the basic mathematical fact that percentage pay increases (not to mention other more ideological factors) have prised a monumental gulf between the richest and the poorest which is not being curbed by legislation or plugged by taxation lest the invisible hand take umbrage. Instead, why not work for free?

One might contrast the growing professionalization of councillors over the last few decades with the drive towards an amateurization of council services. It's a crude contrast but worth making, if only because the same arguments for the professionalization of the council membership apply more broadly, and no argument works half as well as direct analogy to ones own predicament. Except again we face the sour grapes fob if we are too indelicate. But while I sit here typing my Marxist rhetoric, volunteers are out there manning the desks and learning the argument the hard way: without pay, only the richest can sustain voluntarism; with pay (token pay, inevitably), a community body is reliant upon fundraising efforts, and these efforts are distractions that are to the potential detriment of the wider service. So it is that we pay councillors: so people from all backgrounds can represent our interests without pecuniary distractions that may run counter to those interests. Oh the irony.

Copywrong

"Q: Why do anarchists only drink herbal tea?

A: Because it can be locally sourced and responsibly cultivated."

In every Library Camp comes that point where one session you want to attend gets pitted against another you'd've quite liked to see, and so it was here. But this session on copyright seemed to encapsulate my expectations of what Radical Library Camp should be and I feel my expectations were adequately met.

In academia we're in the business of telling students that plagiarism is naughty. But how many of us then go on to quietly breech a bit of copyright in some way shape or form? Maybe we do it by accident or maybe we're just downright naughty. Perhaps we're really good, and never break copyright ever, but even then we are sure to have been frustrated by the lengths to which we've had to go to be so angelic.

There are ways to get out of some copyright obligations: agreements reached in smoke-filled rooms that allow organizations like universities a little more freedom than the rest of us might be dealt. But these breaks only go so far.

What is copyright for? Copyright is about asserting ownership on something you've made, and that can be very advantageous if you intend to make your living from things you've made. But if you're in the business of making knowledge then your copyright may perhaps hinder the greater good. This is a problem keenly felt in the world of patents, where areas of invention are closed off from innovation in the interests of a potential cash cow. This is not a new problem by any means: Thomas Savery's steam engine patent served him well: Thomas Newcommen had to enter into partnership with Savery to develop the innovations that were instrumental in the industrial revolution, and Watt had to stick all manner of bits of brass hither and thither to negotiate patent obstacles. Still, it's hard not to be freaked out when Google patents hand gestures, and the morality of medicine patents serves as a useful shorthand for the free-market economy more generally. The whole thing is a bodge, of course, designed to balance competing interests, but some interests are capable of speaking louder than others, and while the likes of the IFLA may seek to lobby in one direction, certain corporate interests have heft to pull the other way.

Given a commodity-based economy, copyright serves a useful purpose in the protection of a creator's interests. But when that copyright is passed to a publisher, things become woollier, not least because publishers do not have the same cuddly reputation as artists. Publishers have a reputation for being a touch greedy at times. Artists do, too, for that matter: just witness the inflation of copyright life: printed works have gone from lifetime of the author + 7 to lifetime of the author +70, with such inflations being retrospectively enacted on previously escaped works. Clearly this does not serve the author's interests (the author being dead) which makes the whole arrangement seem rather dubious.

Copyright does not necessarily benefit the creator of a work even when alive. While some popular musicians are keen to extend the 50 year watershed on recordings in an effort to maintain an income from '60s releases, many more obscure acts have benefitted hugely in the exposure gained from expired copyright works making their way onto cheap CD compilations. It pulls both ways, but again it more generally pulls towards the more vocal "haves".

Where do we come in? Well libraries have a particular interest in copyright as our very existence is predicated on a wilful (sanctioned) flouting of copyright law (much to the irritation of some authors and to the delight of others when they get their PLR cheque in the post). But we also have a duty of concern with respect to the public good, not least because we are in the business of disseminating knowledge, and copyright is all too often a hindrance to that mission. This duty of concern extends to our professional body, CILIP, a registered charity with the obligation to the public good that that entails. CILIP needs to be in the thick of the copyright debate, lobbying for the public interest. And if CILIP's charitable or chartered status is considered an impediment to charitable behaviour, perhaps it needs to think twice about whether charitable or chartered status serves its purpose. Or perhaps there is a need for another body that can act in these ways.

It's fair to say that this session lost its focus a little at this point, as we voiced various frustrations with a certain Chartered Institute. The feeling in the room was that CILIP was almost as broken as copyright itself. But perhaps the answer lies not in moaning about CILIP but in getting involved and taking the bridge for ourselves: not just radicals but entryists!

Supporting Activism

I went to this session expecting it to be something else, and I didn't engage very well with it, but here's a summary of what I took down in my little red book:

State.

Employment law etc.

Community statistics project.

National Archives / Public Records - anyone can access, but requires the tenacity of a librarian to find stuff. [We are professional finders of stuff. We're good at it, and we enjoy it (some people don't). It's a living!]

Voluntary ⇒flaky [I don't have time for that this week. I don't have time for that this month. I don't have time for that this year.]

Active participation  → "I know that" ∴ "someone else knows that"

Give the methodology - doesn't necessarily do us out of a job - still need to know what to do and still need to do it. [It's a living thing!]

Radical... a mental landscape...

                Radical referencing...

                                Trotsky, L. (1928)...

I'M INVESTED

...ok, so sometimes my notes make more sense than at others, but there's some fab doodles too, including one of a little bus, which I'm pretty sure was relevant, and one of a drilling squirrel, which I'm pretty sure was not. I guess the radical cake was kicking in at this point.

The afternoon ended with a plenary session, during which the revolution was set back until after the next meeting, in accordance with radical lore. We did agree to make a fanzine though, and I do look forward to seeing its fruition. I hope that the radical library camp goes on to create some beautiful things, and to not simply talk about them.

Thanks to everyone who was involved in another excellent day's camping. We concluded in a rather fantastic private members' club complete with radical library, which is very much a fitting end to a radical library camp, I think.

Working Lives of the Saints

Thanks to The Wikiman I am aware of a thing : another internet version of one of them foldy things we used to make at school. Like a moth to the energy-saving lightbulb, I am compelled to complete...

Location: Yorkshire.
Current gig: Academic Liaison Assistant (an assistant librarian).
Current mobile device: an LG mobile telephone (second generation) with a qwerty keyboard.
Current computer: a Lenovo laptop (Intel, 6GB RAM, Windows 8), plus peripheral keyboard, mouse and monitor.
One word that best describes how you work: Fitfully.

What apps/software/tools can't you live without?

The Opera web-browser. Also on my quicklaunch toolbar at home are Oolite, Spotify, Corel Photo-Paint, XChat, Eudora, SeaMonkey, Notepad++ and Foobar, some of which show my age and my willingness to embrace change, though not all are essential to my existence. Before I made the error of buying a 64-bit computer, I also had a 16-bit copy of the OED to hand too. Windows is another bit of software I've come to rely upon a great deal (running Classic Shell these days, necessarily), and I spend a considerable amount of time in Microsoft Office.

What's your workspace like?

I am rather messy. Papers everywhere. I'm currently at home, sprawled out on the settee, keyboard on my lap, mobile phone by my side, bottle of coke and tin of biscuits in near reach. On the coffee table are:

1x roll of gaffatape

1x Royal Opera House ticket (used)

3x bottles of nail varnish

1x steel ruler

½x adhesive fabric for putting inside evil shoes

1x pair of scissors

1x pen

2x AA batteries (spent)

1x ring

1x hair grip

1x ear-phones

1x sunglasses

1x badge from Library Camp

1x nail file

2x coasters (pads in my vocab)

1x mug of water

1x wireless dongle

1x microSD to SD adaptor

1x monitor

1x laptop computer

What's your best time-saving trick?
Shortcuts. Make shortcuts to documents and use "Recent..." folders. Self-plagiarise instead of repeating work. And remember that few things have to be "perfect", they just need to be "pretty decent". It also helps if what you're doing's fun, of course.

What's your favorite to-do list manager?
I use the one in Outlook. It does the job adequately.

Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can't you live without?

Plumbed water and electricity are pretty essential to my lifestyle. Oven, fridge-freezer, washing machine, shower... The telephone is less essential (very presumptive of you, that), and I use it more as a clock / portable Twitter device than as a telephone. Aside from my computer, I'd say the lamp that's illuminating me is currently the most essential bit of tech in this room.

What everyday thing are you better at than anyone else?

Being half-decent at things. I think I'm a bit of an all-rounder, probably specializing in computery stuff. My general knowledge used to be pretty good too, but less so now. 

What are you currently reading?

Salway - Roman Britain; Cooper - Appassionata; Nabakov - King, Queen, Knave; Grand - Babs the Impossible. I'm not generally a big reader, especially of fiction. Mostly I read history books. 

What do you listen to while you work?

If I'm really hard at work, music can be a distraction. Otherwise, music is good. Verdi tends to be my default option at work, or maybe some Mahler or Shostakovich. I am currently sitting in silence but only cos I forgot to put Spotify on earlier. Instead I shall now fire up Foobar and open the playlist that is just the entire musical contents of my hard-drive at random. First up is a MIDI version of Creep by Radiohead [fastforwards] the right channel of a noise piece I made, entitled "Lynch" because it sounded like the sort of sound you might hear in the background of a David Lynch film [fastforwards] The Chromatics - Cosmic Radio Show [fastforwards quickly] Gainsbourg & Bardot - Comic Strip... As you can see, playing my hard-drive is a little too fraught with trouble for working porpoises. 

Are you more of an introvert or an extrovert?

Introvert, mainly. Except when the mood takes me. I'm an only-child. At school I could be quite zany, with all the horror that implies, but I lost some of that after I left university and failed to sell records for a living. Once I get to know people I start to come out of my shell. Alcohol helps this process slightly. I'm trying to come up with a better method.

# A MIDI version of one of my own compositions [fastforwards] Michael Hurley - Hoodoo Bash #

What's your sleep routine like?

I like my sleep. At one point, in the days before a proper job, I got a bit too much sleep and started getting sleep paralysis of an afternoon's lie-in. That's how much I like sleep. I try to avoid getting out of bed until the Sun has had chance to warm up the world. My natural sort of pattern tends to be to sleep from about 3am to about 1pm, but working life has intervened. I currently get up at about 7am and go to bed at about 10:30pm, except at weekends when I try to approach the preferred behaviour. Sleep is important to me. I enjoy it a lot. Dreams can be brilliant entertainment.

# Pink Floyd - If #

Fill in the blank: I'd love to see ______ answer these same questions.
You. But only if you want to.

# Heddy Lester  - De Mallemolen (Eurovision '77 version) #

What's the best advice you've ever received?

Oh, the usual "life is for living" stuff, I guess: get stuck in and enjoy it. Can't point at anyone specifically. I expect the best advice I was ever given was something I failed to act upon. The advice to go to library school would have to be pretty high in the list (thanks to Karl (my ex-boss) and Anna (former work-colleague / former History teacher) for that).

# Danny Elfman - Theme From Black Beauty #

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I've not really talked about "How I Work", which was the point of the exercise. I should like to add that.

# Off-air recording of Five Live Drive (2008): Jane Garvey interviewing a little boy about a hamster (radio palladium) #

Leonardo Da Vinci had a bit of a reputation for starting great works, getting bored and moving onto something else before completion to his or his sponsor's satisfaction. I aspire to such greatness: my hard-drive is a graveyard of abandoned projects.

# Unlistenably crusty recording of Pulp - The Boss [fastforward] Marais and Miranda - What is an Animal? (What is a Plant?) #

When being paid, however, I operate to different rules. I tend to add things to a To Do List (a recent development to save me juggling calendars), prioritising the more urgent demands and interspersing with contrasting activities if available so as to thicken the plot. It's worked so far.

# Carlos Paião - Playback (from Eurovision '81) #


Some of it... a lot of it is intuitive. I don't sit and analyse my workload. There is no complicated mathematics (if task x takes two weeks and task y takes three days etc). The sense of a deadline and the safetynet of flexitime can help, but I've moved on from the last-minute Saint Monday mentality of my undergraduate days.

# Nico - Ari's Song #

Still, I don't usually get properly stuck in to a project until I can begin to feel a modicum of urgency (like starting an essay with a couple of weeks rather than a couple of months)... I prod at it and poke at it with a little too much leisure, making too much of a fuss; developing too many vested interests in bits I might later have to dismantle. As such I prefer to get heavily stuck into a project, work through it quickly, and get it done.

# Spirogyra - The Furthest Point #

Unless it's something that really really fascinates me, in which case I will lovingly explore layer after layer of it (as was the case with a recent LibGuides project). It's this type of project that comes too close to playtime and runs a risk of being abandoned before satisfactory completion when something else shiny catches my eye. Spirogyra are singing...

"We, who started off so wide eyed / Never doubted success / But we were foolish to undertake such a mammoth task"

...which is a little defeatist if you ask me, but presents a cautionary tale. So far I've been chewing my morsels sufficiently, and at school my party-piece involved seven Highland Toffee bars and a single mouth. Back then I had the good sense not to step up to eight. People, know your limits!