Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Yesterday: serve

Today: return:
"A room that is merely full of books is not a library, no matter how the councils dress it up. Most importantly, how will authorities determine whether a ‘library’ in a sports centre has been a success? Without being able to provide data to prove its usage, how long will it be before the council seeks to withdraw funding altogether? [....] As has been seen before, retailers will not hesitate from removing a book if it is seen to cause offence. How will a library based in a shop manage this? How will they reconcile the needs of two different sets of customers? Will they be pressured by the potential impact on their revenues if they continue to provide access to a controversial text? And what then for those that wish to access such resources?[....] As the mission of the public library is lost, councils will fail, or continue to fail, to understand why they should provide a library service to their citizens."

Side-note: LSSI is really taking a beating these days. I would hesitate to point out that they, and similar library partner companies (please stop saying jobbers!) employ many librarians, and in many cases do excellent work while committed to the same values as the rest of us. But, you know, that allows for a grey area in the discourse. That's not really allowed anywhere these days, right?

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