Gideon, I'm so thrilled - indeed, energised - by the SLV management backdown. It shows that concerted public action can derail the authoritarian tendencies of inappropriate people appointed to positions of power by governments that have their priorities all screwed up. The South Australian Museum fought off a similar piece of vandalism recently. The only hold-out (and it's a big one) is the Powerhouse catastrophe in Sydney which is trashing the museum in favour of an entertainment complex - with a bill that will eventually top $2 billion, while every other cultural organisation in NSW is starved to death to pay for this folly. As you know, this has been my bête noire for years, but it just rolls on & on. I think we need reinforcements from Melbourne, as happens when fighting bushfires.
What a great outcome Gideon!! I utilised the State Library when doing research for my cricket’s club’s women’s history book - the staff couldn’t have been more helpful and the treasures I found on microfilm of old newspaper articles - especially an article that appeared in a local paper on the formation of our ladies team going back to 1973! Absolute good - that article would be the opening of the book!
Our State Library and its staff are a treasure that can’t be lost.
But it's a struggle against an inexorable tide. Over the last fifty years, the neoconservatives have shifted the discourse so successfully that now everything is a market, and nothing is allowed to be just a service. You see it everywhere. I'm in a running battle with Australia Post which now, if it tries to deliver a parcel when I'm not home, simply dumps it at a nearby post office without telling me what it's done. Presumably leaving me a note or sending a text message would do too much harm to its bottom line. This attitude hits universities particularly hard: what were once seats of learning are now customer-oriented degree mills, selling their devalued paper to remunerative students from (mostly) China. The department in which I'm about to complete my PhD was recently threatened with merger with another department even though the two disciplines are utterly different and there would have been no improvement in the quality of either. The rationale, evidently, was that it would enable management to cut jobs. But when, I asked, did it become a bad thing for a public institution to provide employment? Of course, when these "costs savings" are achieved, they are then expended on bonuses for senior management, which are somehow as sacrosanct as politicians' travel entitlements.
It would be nice to think that at some point we might recapture the time when it was fine for public institutions to provide services to the public, as well as careers in important (though not richly rewarded) fields. It's curious that much the same people who love reducing everything to a balance sheet and a market love to bray about the vital importance of "saving Western civilisation". Anyone who uses that expression should be directed to the nearest public library and forced to stay there until they've learned something.
That makes two things we have as being ahead of where you live Max.
Where I live in Victoria we at least get the little card in the letter box. The ready to pickup time is arbitrary though. Best to leave it for a day or two.
The other, of course, is our Government spending debt. More than at least several other, including big, states combined. I'm starting to think we are saving the country one tunnel at a time. But the majority of people do live in Metropolis, I suppose.
When the barbarians are no longer just at the gate, but have stormed up the driveway, bashed down the front door and are sprawled on the lounge with their feet on the furniture, thanks for maintaining the rage!
It was such a heartening turn-out. And perhaps would have been better had the management decision not come though late in the week. Kaz Cooke should do more em-ceeing, she nailed it. And Judith Brett was just ice cold on the research revelations. I am so, so glad I attended. Genuine hope that the ship of marketing templates and idiocy can be turned around. Though as others here note, it is endemic.
Wonderful outcome GH even for people from the bush like myself who could not make the rally. Our public library in Mildura is more like a member of the family and full of information about books. I am impressed with the many new Australians who are using the library for their OWN benefit and future members of their families. We just need to keep our eyes wide open on that other little treasure down the road. We might have them playing a few bumpers now!
Congratulations on a great outcome at the SLV, all too rare to see this kind of management climb-down. Unfortunately, though, it seems to be the case that librarians everywhere are coming to see books as an impediment, too costly in terms of storage and too elitist in terms of access, and they see their royal road to professional preferment as enhancing digital facilties. When I was working at the University of Sydney back in 2019, I wrote an opinion piece for The Australian comparing their new prohibition on print books in the Fisher Library to what was happening with Cricket Australia, citing Gideon's critique of their management style. So it's a wide-ranging cultural problem, though the situation at Sydney improved when a new librarian was appointed, so perhaps the current digital mania will, like the South Sea bubble, eventually pass:
"As a recent immigrant to Australia, one of the things that puzzles me most about this otherwise attractive country is its careless attitude towards its own heritage. Two recent areas in which this has been most visible are at the ABC, where an obsession with the promise of information technology led to the appointment as managing director of Michelle Guthrie, a Google executive with no experience in television or broadcast programming, and also in the world of cricket. In the latter, as Gideon Haigh has brilliantly chronicled, the infatuation of Cricket Australia’s management with the short-term monetary rewards offered by the Big Bash League led to the appointment of a raft of “performance” experts ignorant of cricketing skills and traditions. As Haigh says, the “corporate vacuities” of Cricket Australia, staffed by managers importing platitudes from business about how to “smash the boundaries”, led to an “obsession with the new” and corresponding “contempt for the old”, as though any qualities honed over time should be classed as thoroughly redundant in the age of Twitter.
My particular instance of this phenomenon might seem recondite, but it needs to be understood within the same framework. The University of Sydney’s Fisher Library, which opened in 1909, has for more than a century been reckoned the best academic library in the southern hemisphere. So how does the university’s management preserve this precious resource? It takes a sledgehammer to it, by arbitrarily deciding that print books are now a superannuated technology and that all future acquisitions should be in electronic form only. Just as at the ABC, the new librarian responsible for this decision lacks professional expertise in the field her organisation serves (scholarship, in this case), but is instead the product of a school of “management”. The primary concerns now involve saving money in such areas as storage space and reshelving costs. But e-books are to printed volumes as the Big Bash is to Test cricket. They are designed primarily for ease of access and short-form consumption, not for extended study. Ever tried to read War and Peace or Paradise Lost on your iPhone? Or a complex work such as Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature? University managers, most of whom have long since lost touch with active scholarship, have gone the way of Cricket Australia executives in putting immediate financial concerns before long-term sustainability . . . In 30 years, historians may well puzzle over the weird choices made by marketing and management impresarios at the beginning of the 21st century and the damage they wrought on professional networks across a broad cultural spectrum. "
We need you and Helen Garner on the board. Maintain the rage Gideon, stand in the middle of the road and dare them to try and run you down with a fully integrated immersive interactive experience.
Gideon, I'm so thrilled - indeed, energised - by the SLV management backdown. It shows that concerted public action can derail the authoritarian tendencies of inappropriate people appointed to positions of power by governments that have their priorities all screwed up. The South Australian Museum fought off a similar piece of vandalism recently. The only hold-out (and it's a big one) is the Powerhouse catastrophe in Sydney which is trashing the museum in favour of an entertainment complex - with a bill that will eventually top $2 billion, while every other cultural organisation in NSW is starved to death to pay for this folly. As you know, this has been my bête noire for years, but it just rolls on & on. I think we need reinforcements from Melbourne, as happens when fighting bushfires.
What a great outcome Gideon!! I utilised the State Library when doing research for my cricket’s club’s women’s history book - the staff couldn’t have been more helpful and the treasures I found on microfilm of old newspaper articles - especially an article that appeared in a local paper on the formation of our ladies team going back to 1973! Absolute good - that article would be the opening of the book!
Our State Library and its staff are a treasure that can’t be lost.
Fiona McKenzie
This is an excellent outcome.
But it's a struggle against an inexorable tide. Over the last fifty years, the neoconservatives have shifted the discourse so successfully that now everything is a market, and nothing is allowed to be just a service. You see it everywhere. I'm in a running battle with Australia Post which now, if it tries to deliver a parcel when I'm not home, simply dumps it at a nearby post office without telling me what it's done. Presumably leaving me a note or sending a text message would do too much harm to its bottom line. This attitude hits universities particularly hard: what were once seats of learning are now customer-oriented degree mills, selling their devalued paper to remunerative students from (mostly) China. The department in which I'm about to complete my PhD was recently threatened with merger with another department even though the two disciplines are utterly different and there would have been no improvement in the quality of either. The rationale, evidently, was that it would enable management to cut jobs. But when, I asked, did it become a bad thing for a public institution to provide employment? Of course, when these "costs savings" are achieved, they are then expended on bonuses for senior management, which are somehow as sacrosanct as politicians' travel entitlements.
It would be nice to think that at some point we might recapture the time when it was fine for public institutions to provide services to the public, as well as careers in important (though not richly rewarded) fields. It's curious that much the same people who love reducing everything to a balance sheet and a market love to bray about the vital importance of "saving Western civilisation". Anyone who uses that expression should be directed to the nearest public library and forced to stay there until they've learned something.
That makes two things we have as being ahead of where you live Max.
Where I live in Victoria we at least get the little card in the letter box. The ready to pickup time is arbitrary though. Best to leave it for a day or two.
The other, of course, is our Government spending debt. More than at least several other, including big, states combined. I'm starting to think we are saving the country one tunnel at a time. But the majority of people do live in Metropolis, I suppose.
When the barbarians are no longer just at the gate, but have stormed up the driveway, bashed down the front door and are sprawled on the lounge with their feet on the furniture, thanks for maintaining the rage!
Plenty of work still to do....
It was such a heartening turn-out. And perhaps would have been better had the management decision not come though late in the week. Kaz Cooke should do more em-ceeing, she nailed it. And Judith Brett was just ice cold on the research revelations. I am so, so glad I attended. Genuine hope that the ship of marketing templates and idiocy can be turned around. Though as others here note, it is endemic.
Fantastic outcome (so far)! Well done. It does feel like it’ll be a never-ending battle though, doesn’t it?
To paraphrase a saying - what do they know of libraries, who only balance sheets know?
Keep up the knitting, Gideon . . .
Wonderful outcome GH even for people from the bush like myself who could not make the rally. Our public library in Mildura is more like a member of the family and full of information about books. I am impressed with the many new Australians who are using the library for their OWN benefit and future members of their families. We just need to keep our eyes wide open on that other little treasure down the road. We might have them playing a few bumpers now!
Congratulations on a great outcome at the SLV, all too rare to see this kind of management climb-down. Unfortunately, though, it seems to be the case that librarians everywhere are coming to see books as an impediment, too costly in terms of storage and too elitist in terms of access, and they see their royal road to professional preferment as enhancing digital facilties. When I was working at the University of Sydney back in 2019, I wrote an opinion piece for The Australian comparing their new prohibition on print books in the Fisher Library to what was happening with Cricket Australia, citing Gideon's critique of their management style. So it's a wide-ranging cultural problem, though the situation at Sydney improved when a new librarian was appointed, so perhaps the current digital mania will, like the South Sea bubble, eventually pass:
"As a recent immigrant to Australia, one of the things that puzzles me most about this otherwise attractive country is its careless attitude towards its own heritage. Two recent areas in which this has been most visible are at the ABC, where an obsession with the promise of information technology led to the appointment as managing director of Michelle Guthrie, a Google executive with no experience in television or broadcast programming, and also in the world of cricket. In the latter, as Gideon Haigh has brilliantly chronicled, the infatuation of Cricket Australia’s management with the short-term monetary rewards offered by the Big Bash League led to the appointment of a raft of “performance” experts ignorant of cricketing skills and traditions. As Haigh says, the “corporate vacuities” of Cricket Australia, staffed by managers importing platitudes from business about how to “smash the boundaries”, led to an “obsession with the new” and corresponding “contempt for the old”, as though any qualities honed over time should be classed as thoroughly redundant in the age of Twitter.
My particular instance of this phenomenon might seem recondite, but it needs to be understood within the same framework. The University of Sydney’s Fisher Library, which opened in 1909, has for more than a century been reckoned the best academic library in the southern hemisphere. So how does the university’s management preserve this precious resource? It takes a sledgehammer to it, by arbitrarily deciding that print books are now a superannuated technology and that all future acquisitions should be in electronic form only. Just as at the ABC, the new librarian responsible for this decision lacks professional expertise in the field her organisation serves (scholarship, in this case), but is instead the product of a school of “management”. The primary concerns now involve saving money in such areas as storage space and reshelving costs. But e-books are to printed volumes as the Big Bash is to Test cricket. They are designed primarily for ease of access and short-form consumption, not for extended study. Ever tried to read War and Peace or Paradise Lost on your iPhone? Or a complex work such as Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature? University managers, most of whom have long since lost touch with active scholarship, have gone the way of Cricket Australia executives in putting immediate financial concerns before long-term sustainability . . . In 30 years, historians may well puzzle over the weird choices made by marketing and management impresarios at the beginning of the 21st century and the damage they wrought on professional networks across a broad cultural spectrum. "
Well done Gideon, and to all who helped obtain the reversal of this most recent plan to "improve" society.
Doubt it is the end of the war though.
Excellent outcomes already. Time to oust the philistines!
We need you and Helen Garner on the board. Maintain the rage Gideon, stand in the middle of the road and dare them to try and run you down with a fully integrated immersive interactive experience.