Save our Libraries, SAVE OUR SOULS

Friday I'm in Love

I love Fridays... They are the best days of the week. They usually go very quickly with lots to get done in time for Monday morning mentalness. I like getting home and having a lazy dinner and pottering about and sewing. Lots of sewing at the moment. Lots of preparation, lots of organising which is much easier for me on a professional rather than personal basis, and lots of thinking and planning. I'm grabbing the bull by the horns and setting up a business. It'll be the making of a new life, and I hope the making of me in the act of sewing. There is a lot brewing for the Lewis-Newtons. Friday, today, maker of happiness and maker of a new beginning, I love you.

Yorkshire Tea sends "little Urn" to the States!

How cool is that - hope "Little Urn" converts all he meets!

Libraries and Librarians and the way of the Dodo

well... It seems in this country we don't require the services of public libraries and Librarians.. or so the government thinks. The Con-Dems think that it is adequate to remove half of them and staff the rest with volunteers. As a Librarian and a user of public libraries I AM DISGUSTED. Volunteers have always been appreciated in libraries of all kinds and they are valued, greatly valued, I have had the great fortune to work with many in my career and I think that most would be the first to agree, Librarianship is a PROFESSION. Would you expect a volunteer to give you a filling? or an injection? or teach your children? No you wouldn't, so why should you expect them to run Libraries? It's not just about public libraries either, hospitals, universities, they are being squeezed, staff are leaving and not being replaced, or being actively made "redundant". Librarianship? it's all about stamping a few books isn't it? Well no. It's about selecting the stock for your customers, it's about having the skills to organise them in the correct way, your average volunteer wouldn't know their way around a MARC record. We have so many aspects to our work, we are expected to teach new users how to search bibliographic databases, we have to be experts on copyright, we have to know what books will be suitable for a 10 year old to read, where to find old family history documents for those assembling their family trees. We have to find research documentation for nurses and doctors working for our fantastic NHS, teach students from all over the world how to reference articles for their dissertations and peel them off the ceiling when the computer they are working on crashes and loses their work. Its about indexing and organising case notes for Barristers arguing your court cases. We run Institutional Repositories to get organisational research out into the world. We push for and support the open access movement. We provide safe refuges for the homeless to read the paper and for old people living on state pensions barely enough to provide the essentials find books and surf the net. We support, educate, entertain and inform the world at large because despite popular opinion you can't find everything on the internet. Google is NOT a cure-all. We CAN help you! We are Librarians, we work in Libraries, In Law firms, in hospitals, in schools, in universities, in government! and IN YOUR COMMUNITY. Use us, and tell the government that you value us before it's too late, because when we are gone, you'll miss us.