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Who needs consultants to tell us about our libraries?
• ANY gardener knows that if you damage the roots of any plant it can be severely damaged and wither.
The libraries and services they offer are the roots of the entire library service yet the leaked report Growing Your Library plans to cut and disrupt services, even selling off parts of Holborn Library.
The terminology in the report is dire. I feel the New Journal should run a competition and choose five of the more ridiculous sentences in it and ask readers to guess what they mean.
I cannot imagine anyone could solve all of them.
Comments by staff on the proposals are to be sent to a person with the job title of Growing Your Library People Workstream Manager.
Monty Python’s department of silly names could not have produced better.
I understand that the proposals are the result of consultants being let loose.
The record of consultants looking in particular at Holborn Library has been very poor.
When I worked there two sets of consultants were appointed one after the other to look at that library.
No reports were produced but they were paid.
A third firm of consultants were appointed but the report they produced was inaccurate as they miscounted the number of floors in a building therefore all their financial figures and conclusions were rubbish.
They got paid.
Now we have a fourth one to look at the library service and the improvement they propose is to cut staff.
They will get paid.
For decades in the past the Camden Library Service was headed by people with experience, vision and knowledge who did not need to employ consultants to tell them how to do the basic job that they had been appointed to do and, as a result, its reputation and services were extremely good.
I am certainly horrified by what has been proposed for the Local Studies and Archives Centre where one of the staff is now expected to do the work of three people.
One of the posts deleted is the archivist post I held until I retired from Camden two years ago after moire than 40 years.
I received an MBE for this – certainly not just for what I did but for the standards and quality of service that the department offered.
Sub-standard services now seems to be the target.
Malcolm Holmes MBE
Oxhey Avenue, Watford
The Archivist
The archivist listens as though enthralled
and so the reader asking a question
flourishes in conversation
that Google could never stimulate.
From faded press cuttings too frail for the copier
hand written letters, priceless, original,
engravings of pastures, shopfronts and brick kilns
photographs ranging from sepia to digital
his seedbank will germinate speeches and fiction
school plays and theses and nurture the needs
of conservationists hot for heritage
family detectives pursuing that wedding snap
railway fanatics a good head of steam.
His cross-reference memory isn’t musty
it’s always expanding and constantly dusted
by papers he reads and buildings he passes.
Rob Inglis, NW1
• Rob Inglis is artistic director of Musical Flying Squad who have dramatised local history since 2003 with the assistance of Camden Local History Archive
It’s about expanding the service
• YOU may have read a lot of scary stuff in the local papers about changes to Camden’s libraries.
None of it is true.
No libraries are being closed and no librarians are being sacked; this is about expanding the service.
We want to introduce self-issuing machines alongside librarians so that we can use librarians for more important jobs like answering your questions.
You won’t lose your friendly local librarians to a bunch of faceless machines.
It also means we’ll have more space in libraries and we can perhaps have more books, or offer other facilities.
We are not planning to close any libraries, just make better use of them.
A few middle management posts may be lost but no front line librarians.
We expanded opening hours last year and our aim is to do it again if possible.
Cllr Alexis Rowell
Liberal Democrat, Belsize ward
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