Ahh, GCJDH. A really important piece. Totally captivating. It speaks to situations well beyond libraries.
And it really is the rallier's rally piece. Tremendous call to arms.
I'll be with you in spirit.
I find it easier here in the Principality of Krondorf, head happily buried in the sand. Thousands turned up to the Barossa Christmas Parade (think 1968) and our libraries matter and are valued. Vigilance is required, of course. Please keep a lid on the secret of Barossa Life.
Funnily enough, JTH, the library is now overseen by refugees from the State Library of Victoria, Kyleigh Langrick and Tim Hogan, so my two favourite libraries are linked. We'll only get one David, of course.
Did you know Betty Mullins died died last week? What an absolute champion, right to the end.
A great piece, as was your article in the Guardian. How did this managerialist class emerge? The same language and ethos is used in the universities. Hugely overpaid senior executives, who justify their salaries by arguing it "attracts" "talent", then go to the Big 4 to do the work that they are supposed to be getting paid for. And what do EY/KPMG et al all tell them to do? Get rid of the professional staff, restrict public access, increase management and redefine the "business" to one that is driven by "customers". And they hide behind what Don Watson rightly called the weasel words, it's all about "outcomes" and "experiences". It is an attack on the social contract and public institutions. The only question that should be asked about the SLV is how much do they need to do what they need to do as a public library. A healthy vibrant society would not put a price on what a great public library gives us. That you have to lead this charge is an indictment on what we have become. The key here is Colin Brooks and that fact that they are heading into an election year. He will not like the negative coverage, nor will the Premier. The high profile campaign is hitting home, keep the pressure on him and the Labor government Gideon.
Well stated Gideon - I'm afraid that this is just one high-profile example of the death of libraries more generally. A focus on "experience" rather than being a place where people can fulfil their need for information, a move to replace chief librarians with people from other professions, and a view that libraries are a financial drain rather than an investment in people is now so widespread as to be almost unremarkable.
The role of a library can be encapsulated fairly simply - to provide information to people, and to assist those people in finding, understanding and using said information. Ultimately a library is a collection appropriately organized, and people who can assist users in accessing that collection. Unfortunately, these fundamental aspects of a Library are not attractive to boards, CEOs or management of any kind.
At a public library level, Councils have moved to thinking of libraries as a place where they can dump all their other services, and we see more and more that the "libraries", especially in regional areas, are being staffed by customer service people with no library background. They are as likely to be able to help you with a library query as your kid brother.
In academia, University libraries are caught between cost-cutting VCs and money hungry publishers who are in the process of re-selling to them what they had in print as digital for 5 times the price, and are now expected to spend some of their collection money to enable academics to publish their articles and books.
The SLV (and other State Libraries and the NLA) are in the unique position of being libraries that are not beholden to a higher power (council or university). They are libraries that are just... libraries. That has over the years been a double-edged sword. They have been able to engage in the "purest" librarianship (many people including myself have while working there become better librarians ), but they suffer from not having an instantly recognizable constituency (ratepayers, academics, students). The SLV is, frankly, a nuisance to whichever government is in power (unless they can open or launch something), and being on the Board is a nice little job for those people from "wealthy and entitled Australia" that you oh so perfectly skewer in your piece.
As someone who has worked in libraries for over 30 years (public, academic and the SLV), I am starting to lose the will to keep banging the drum that libraries are collections - if we (as librarians) are doing something that is not adding to our collections, or assisting people in accessing those collections, we really need to question why? I'm afraid that this latest SLV car-crash is no surprise.
Digital is a much abused word. I should preface this by saying my professional role is styled as a 'Digital Engineering and Information Management Consultant'. I don't have skin in the game as librarian or, alas, a regular library goer any more. I could prima facie one of the enemy! However:
Digital has to always mean something specific (it's pretty clear in this Vic Library plan it doesn't). In engineering it doesn't mean electronic drawings. Drawings have been electronic since the 90s and no-one misses a drawing board. It instead refers to process and end use. Instead of handling your electronic drawings like your old physical drawings, your cutting edge deliverable is a 3D model with all the material designations and asset tags contained therein with as much automating of the process of development (not the expertise) as possible. Its better than the old approach. This does not apply to books, or, more specifically collections of books yet and won't on any meaningful timeframe. Why are books and libraries important in my view:
1) A book is a container of pre organised knowledge. To steal ideas from Nassim Taleb a bunch of unread books is enormously useful in that it provides a scope containers taking you directly to what you may need. If you go digital you have to research from first principles every time.
2) No digital UI can match the pre built and highly visible one provided by books on a shelf. You don't know what you don't know, physical books can point you in the right direction but you can only search digitally for something specific, not the absence of it.* Until that experience can be replicated digitally, you need books and libraries.
3) A substantial fraction of the sum of human knowledge exists only in printed form, until such time as it is digitised it has to be treated as information and not purely historical artifacts. thats not happening any time soon.
* And no AI is not a substitute here. I always say at work that with AI you can't use it for any question where you don't know what the WRONG answer is.
So good that this platform gives you such freedom to present your paragraphs of common sense, Gideon. Good luck to all Victorians in the hope that common sense should prevail. Important from that POV; other state Govts will surely be keeping an eye out to see what "silly" manoeuvres they might make.
Read all the way through to see when this would tie into Bazball?
Never thought I would be this interested in the Victorian Library - good article, containing a great quote - "The idea of ‘moving with the times’ is always alluring. But what if the times are not good? What if the times involve knowledge and veracity trading at a worsening discount to noise and ignorance?"
This second diatribe has some telling points. But, fundamentally, I reckon the imagined wholesale digital revolution will never happen. Why - cos it will be uncost-beneficial for a start and, second, it would break any budget that the Vic Treasury would set fot this library. From Peter Kettle of Balwyn.
Go for it! Libraries, and some more than others, are essential sources of real knowledge and it is from those institutions real progress has been made. It seems that we are entering a time described by Robert Harris in ‘Second Sleep’- everything digitised and vulnerable to an outage or beyond real consideration. Please make a huge protest; the VSL needs saving for our future - and not in a ‘progressive’ or ‘digitised’ form. A real library with real librarians and real printed artefacts - books, for starters. So, FIGHT!
The sad 'death of libraries' is everywhere. Most schools no longer have trained and passionate Teacher-Librarians, and in some schools, the name 'library' has even disappeared.
I hope the campaign of Gideon and others is successful. We should never lose libraries, and digitisation should complement, not replace, print copies.
Anyone else thinking Gids would be a perfect Board Member of the Victorian State Library ..??
He's exactly the sort of person they need - serious, questioning, and someone who actually understands what the SLV is there for!
Thoughts are; he's a "bare-bones" reader and researcher. Not sure these are the right credentials for Board membership, Chris!
Ahh, GCJDH. A really important piece. Totally captivating. It speaks to situations well beyond libraries.
And it really is the rallier's rally piece. Tremendous call to arms.
I'll be with you in spirit.
I find it easier here in the Principality of Krondorf, head happily buried in the sand. Thousands turned up to the Barossa Christmas Parade (think 1968) and our libraries matter and are valued. Vigilance is required, of course. Please keep a lid on the secret of Barossa Life.
And, as for the MCC Library?
Funnily enough, JTH, the library is now overseen by refugees from the State Library of Victoria, Kyleigh Langrick and Tim Hogan, so my two favourite libraries are linked. We'll only get one David, of course.
Did you know Betty Mullins died died last week? What an absolute champion, right to the end.
A great piece, as was your article in the Guardian. How did this managerialist class emerge? The same language and ethos is used in the universities. Hugely overpaid senior executives, who justify their salaries by arguing it "attracts" "talent", then go to the Big 4 to do the work that they are supposed to be getting paid for. And what do EY/KPMG et al all tell them to do? Get rid of the professional staff, restrict public access, increase management and redefine the "business" to one that is driven by "customers". And they hide behind what Don Watson rightly called the weasel words, it's all about "outcomes" and "experiences". It is an attack on the social contract and public institutions. The only question that should be asked about the SLV is how much do they need to do what they need to do as a public library. A healthy vibrant society would not put a price on what a great public library gives us. That you have to lead this charge is an indictment on what we have become. The key here is Colin Brooks and that fact that they are heading into an election year. He will not like the negative coverage, nor will the Premier. The high profile campaign is hitting home, keep the pressure on him and the Labor government Gideon.
Well stated Gideon - I'm afraid that this is just one high-profile example of the death of libraries more generally. A focus on "experience" rather than being a place where people can fulfil their need for information, a move to replace chief librarians with people from other professions, and a view that libraries are a financial drain rather than an investment in people is now so widespread as to be almost unremarkable.
The role of a library can be encapsulated fairly simply - to provide information to people, and to assist those people in finding, understanding and using said information. Ultimately a library is a collection appropriately organized, and people who can assist users in accessing that collection. Unfortunately, these fundamental aspects of a Library are not attractive to boards, CEOs or management of any kind.
At a public library level, Councils have moved to thinking of libraries as a place where they can dump all their other services, and we see more and more that the "libraries", especially in regional areas, are being staffed by customer service people with no library background. They are as likely to be able to help you with a library query as your kid brother.
In academia, University libraries are caught between cost-cutting VCs and money hungry publishers who are in the process of re-selling to them what they had in print as digital for 5 times the price, and are now expected to spend some of their collection money to enable academics to publish their articles and books.
The SLV (and other State Libraries and the NLA) are in the unique position of being libraries that are not beholden to a higher power (council or university). They are libraries that are just... libraries. That has over the years been a double-edged sword. They have been able to engage in the "purest" librarianship (many people including myself have while working there become better librarians ), but they suffer from not having an instantly recognizable constituency (ratepayers, academics, students). The SLV is, frankly, a nuisance to whichever government is in power (unless they can open or launch something), and being on the Board is a nice little job for those people from "wealthy and entitled Australia" that you oh so perfectly skewer in your piece.
As someone who has worked in libraries for over 30 years (public, academic and the SLV), I am starting to lose the will to keep banging the drum that libraries are collections - if we (as librarians) are doing something that is not adding to our collections, or assisting people in accessing those collections, we really need to question why? I'm afraid that this latest SLV car-crash is no surprise.
Keep on kicking against the pricks.
Digital is a much abused word. I should preface this by saying my professional role is styled as a 'Digital Engineering and Information Management Consultant'. I don't have skin in the game as librarian or, alas, a regular library goer any more. I could prima facie one of the enemy! However:
Digital has to always mean something specific (it's pretty clear in this Vic Library plan it doesn't). In engineering it doesn't mean electronic drawings. Drawings have been electronic since the 90s and no-one misses a drawing board. It instead refers to process and end use. Instead of handling your electronic drawings like your old physical drawings, your cutting edge deliverable is a 3D model with all the material designations and asset tags contained therein with as much automating of the process of development (not the expertise) as possible. Its better than the old approach. This does not apply to books, or, more specifically collections of books yet and won't on any meaningful timeframe. Why are books and libraries important in my view:
1) A book is a container of pre organised knowledge. To steal ideas from Nassim Taleb a bunch of unread books is enormously useful in that it provides a scope containers taking you directly to what you may need. If you go digital you have to research from first principles every time.
2) No digital UI can match the pre built and highly visible one provided by books on a shelf. You don't know what you don't know, physical books can point you in the right direction but you can only search digitally for something specific, not the absence of it.* Until that experience can be replicated digitally, you need books and libraries.
3) A substantial fraction of the sum of human knowledge exists only in printed form, until such time as it is digitised it has to be treated as information and not purely historical artifacts. thats not happening any time soon.
* And no AI is not a substitute here. I always say at work that with AI you can't use it for any question where you don't know what the WRONG answer is.
Correct, “digital” is used as though it is an all power elixir. Books define commitment to thoughts, opinions and ideas.
enthralled from 15,000 kilometers away. beautifully written. save all libraries and save all librarians. positive vibes for an impactful rally.
So good that this platform gives you such freedom to present your paragraphs of common sense, Gideon. Good luck to all Victorians in the hope that common sense should prevail. Important from that POV; other state Govts will surely be keeping an eye out to see what "silly" manoeuvres they might make.
Great article Gideon. I agree with above that you’d make an excellent SLV board member
Read all the way through to see when this would tie into Bazball?
Never thought I would be this interested in the Victorian Library - good article, containing a great quote - "The idea of ‘moving with the times’ is always alluring. But what if the times are not good? What if the times involve knowledge and veracity trading at a worsening discount to noise and ignorance?"
Bravo GH!
This second diatribe has some telling points. But, fundamentally, I reckon the imagined wholesale digital revolution will never happen. Why - cos it will be uncost-beneficial for a start and, second, it would break any budget that the Vic Treasury would set fot this library. From Peter Kettle of Balwyn.
Go for it! Libraries, and some more than others, are essential sources of real knowledge and it is from those institutions real progress has been made. It seems that we are entering a time described by Robert Harris in ‘Second Sleep’- everything digitised and vulnerable to an outage or beyond real consideration. Please make a huge protest; the VSL needs saving for our future - and not in a ‘progressive’ or ‘digitised’ form. A real library with real librarians and real printed artefacts - books, for starters. So, FIGHT!
Starting to think this sounds like another step toward no more public libraries, contents sold to
private institution perhaps like this one https://about.proquest.com/en/about/who-we-are/ .
My contacts with them didn't lead to any positive results.
SO TRUE ON SO MANY FRONTS. Upper case intended.
The sad 'death of libraries' is everywhere. Most schools no longer have trained and passionate Teacher-Librarians, and in some schools, the name 'library' has even disappeared.
I hope the campaign of Gideon and others is successful. We should never lose libraries, and digitisation should complement, not replace, print copies.