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One thing’s clear from this library gobbledegook – the redundanciesWriter and library activist Ruth Gorb takes a close look at Camden’s ‘consultation pack’ on the future of its service… and finds it incomprehensible
IF you find the instruction manual in an Ikea assembly pack a bit of a facer, try this one for size. It comes from Camden, goes by the name of a consultation pack, and purports to tell us all about the proposed changes in our library service.
It is incomprehensible.
First of all, it is very, very long.
If you knew what they were talking about, you might say it was repetitive. Whoever wrote it seems a bit worried about that, so we are given a summing up.
It is in very large letters in case we have trouble reading. It starts with what they call corporate workforce remodelling principles, and goes like this: “Larger resource pools through departmental defragmentation and reductions in job demarcation.”
We all know what that means.
Redundancies.
There are other gems, such as “widening of spans of control”, “peaks and troughs,” “staying slim” – all this, remember, presented as a sort of précis.
God help you if, like the good citizen and library-user that you are, you decide to wade through the whole thing, pages and pages of gobbledegook tastefully illustrated with graphs, family-tree type charts and, best of all, some interlocking circles setting out the services libraries offer.
“Personalisation” is a bit of a puzzle, but the best is “Older People”: they are described as “heavy users of universal service especially book borrowing.”
Tut-tut.
It would be funny if it were not so distressing.
The team that produced this document is responsible for the good health of our libraries, centres of literacy and scholarship and a love of good English.
And behind the torrent of words is the very sad, simple truth: a proposal to replace human beings with machines, self-service machines, which will cost a great deal, which are sure to break down, and which nobody wants.
It is about more than that, of course; it is about the certain erosion of the very ethos of public libraries, the pride of this country for so long.
It would not be fair to say that this has happened by stealth, but there have been deceptions along the line and consultation has been a bit thin on the ground up until now.
And it has to be said that on the very last page of the consultation pack the timetable of what is about to happen is laid out clearly.
We are in the middle of the consultation period now.
The new structure will be put in place in April 2010.
Staff (no longer called librarians, but libraries customer service officers) have been told that if they have anything to say they should contact one Michael Anderson.
His title? “Growing your library people workstream project manager.”
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