We’re all desperate to promote libraries’ unique selling points these days — CILIP and the Society of Chief Librarians are both in the midst of campaigns addressing the issue. Could it be, asks Rob Westwood, we’ve forgotten the obvious one: silence?

Dudley, 1997. Our school librarian (in actual fact a teacher who enjoyed shouting at kids so much that she ran the library voluntarily) would respond with an almighty “Shh!” to the tiniest unauthorised decibel. From what I could see, her main technique of library management was to maintain a level of silence on a par with the vacuum of space.

Should her magic cochlea detect you asking a neighbour for a pencil sharpener, you’d immediately receive Miss Booksworth’s* amazing “Shh!”. Her catchphrase was “This is a library, not a chat shop” and was comedy gold as far as class clowns were concerned.

I remembered Miss Booksworth’s generous shushing when I read the April 20th Telegraph item about Gloucestershire Libraries Service whose decision to introduce piped pop music to four branch libraries has been predictably controversial.

Is quietness still a hot potato in libraries? It probably used to be, but these days we’re preoccupied with the more glamorous hot potatoes of social networking websites and the marketing of library services. It’s entirely possible though, that quietness has the potential to be topical again, this time as a marketing issue. If trade press and the “public perception of the librarian” papers frequently generated by library schools are to be believed, library managers are worried about the appearance or brand of their services. It’s a survival strategy: being perceived as stuffy or bookish could endanger circulation statistics, in turn threatening funding. Success, it is thought, is in the Statistics. It could be argued that quietness is undesirable. To be quiet is to be aloof, focused, dedicated, even spiritual. Silence is for scholars, for Trappist Monks and Quakers; not the (possibly imaginary) hip young dudes that library managers want to attract.

It is this quantitative and potentially misdirecting line of thinking that makes me want to speak up for quiet libraries. Unlike the hysterical Telegraph, I do not hold that Gloucestershire’s decision to play pop music is a harbinger of the end of civilisation. I do, however, suspect that Gloucestershire’s idea, whether good or bad, represents the thin end of a potentially noisy wedge. This is not a problem in itself but it’s a trend worth keeping an eye on.

Whether or not a library should be silent depends upon the mission or purpose of that library. In the case of our old school library, Miss Booksworth was admirable in her drive for silence, albeit she was a little over-sensitive about it. The Raison d’être of the school library was to offer a quiet space in the rambunctious storm of high school life, one in which pupils could do their homework or learn something useful through extra-curricular reading. Piped pop music (or Britpop back then) would certainly not have been suitable.

For the bigger and medium-sized library, music and chatter must remain permanently off the menu. Silent study rooms are not a solution either: they make the user feel like a quarantine case and divorced from the library environment, they may as well have stayed at home. Proper libraries should be quiet. It comes back to playing to our strengths instead of emulating retail: music and chatter are fun but they are already catered for elsewhere – nay everywhere – in the world. Far rarer these days are spaces for quiet contemplation.

If however, you’re a small branch library in 2009 with the main purpose of circulating biographies and novels among the local public, I’m not sure that silence is relevant any more. Just because a practice is traditional does not mean that it’s necessary or right to blindly uphold it. If nobody uses a library for study or reflection, it is basically a book shop. In such an environment, music is perhaps not unwelcome. Let the punters talk! Pipe in the music! But consider this:

Perhaps more than ever before, it has become important for libraries to offer quiet, elegant study spaces: local retreats from noise and bluster and from the voices of the commercial world loudly competing for your attention. “The erosion of silence,” writes poet Yahia Lababidi in the latest edition of the Idler, “is unmistakably connected with our increased stress levels as well as increasingly shortened attention spans.” Libraries, by preserving quietness, have the opportunity to reverse this. We should offer a cure for these modern maldies rather than pander to them.

Keep the libraries stocked with new and classic books, offer a friendly and useful service from well-trained human library assistants and keep the noise and consumer products – takeaway coffee and computer games – to a minimum. Quietness is not formal or aloof: it is blissful, lends itself well to the practices of study and reflection, and is becoming a rare commodity. Rare commodities are highly valuable and librarianship is sitting on a big one.

“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone,” said Pascal. There’s a marketing plan in that somewhere. Let people know that leisure industries – television, holidays, shopping – do not allow for true retreat from busy, tiring, beeping, malfunctioning modern life. The greatest retreat is to enjoy silence for a while. Entrepreneurs have cottoned onto this already, which is why there’s so much money in luxury retreats and why business people spend so much time floating around in sensory deprivation tanks. This is something libraries might want to trade on.

Pipe down. Sell silence.

*You may not be surprised to hear that this is not her real name.

I’ve just read your interesting & useful piece about WordPress in the CILIP Gazette. I’ve been thinking about moving a couple of blogs off Blogger, as I want tag clouds … But a bit perturbed about your spam experience. You say you ‘got on top of it’ — but not how. Did you have to just use lots of filters in your email account? or did you find a way to stop your blog being spammed at all?

True enough, I had some problems with spam when I first experimented with WordPress. Torrents of it.

What I failed to point out in the article is that new versions of WordPress come with a nice little spam filter. I’ve just looked it up and its called Askismet. When I first started using WordPress there was no spam filter (or if there was, it was certainly not very effective). You should receive a lot less spam if you were to sign up to WordPress now.

FYI, email spam filters won’t do the job. While they will certainly stop WordPress spam coming to your email account, you still have an inbox within your WordPress which the spam will still get caught up in. And that’s not good!

More info on WordPress spam at the codex.

Not that I want to discourage you from moving to WordPress (it is a lot better than Blogger) you can build a tagcloud in Blogger if you like! Give this technique a try.

Paul Arden

Exactly a month ago, I co-delivered an Information Literacy workshop at the CILIPS conference in Peebles. I only spoke for fifteen minutes but it’s done my Google ranking the world of good. Thanks to this I’ve been mentioned by Slainte, Sheila Webber, Glasgow Caledonian University and all manner of news aggregators. Suddenly I am credible.

~

At the very same conference I was lucky enough to catch Graham Walton‘s workshop on the advantages of contributing to professional press. (Graham is the editor of Health Information and Libraries Journal).

Graham’s thinking is that publication serves as project dissemination. A project isn’t ‘complete’ until the results of it have been communicated to the wider professional sphere; i.e. the value of your project is limited if it goes no further than your own library service.

I’m inclined to agree. Why work in isolation? When disseminating via publication, you can enjoy the prestige of doing so and help others to benefit from your work. This sort of communication is an important stage in the evolution of our discipline.

Three benefits from project dissemination:

• Spread good practice
• Save colleagues from reinventing the wheel
• Test your methodology by promoting its repetition

Of course, many library services are catching on to the importance of project dissemination. Although they may not do it on a wide scale via global publication, ‘Lessons Learned’ reports or ‘Project Closure’ documents are becoming ubiquitous. This of course makes writing an article easier. You’ve something to go on.

Three actions that need to be completed in order to convert a report into a publication:

• Identify the best outlet for this article
• Obtain permission from your library service (remember your information ethics)
• Convert from institutional lingo to that of the academic or wider professional sphere

Sold? Maybe you should also consider what makes a good article. Will your article survive once it is released into the wild?

Tips on how to make your article useful and popular:

• Be sure to give the article a clear, succinct title and use terms which the user will search for
• Give the article a clear, transparent structure
• Make obvious the ‘new idea’ that your project can bring to the world
• Be strategic and focussed
• Remember that your audience is International

I have come equipped with a set-to-purpose computer hub, a nice big plasma screen and a superfast Internet connection (which also makes for a very convenient and pleasant live blogging experience).

All very high-tech and clever but I find that the best way of capturing people’s interest at events like these is to hand them one of my give-away eLibrary biro pens. Since it contains the URL of the website, it functions as a business card and one which is likely to stay close to the potential user. Simple and effective. Time is limited at these functions: with only a 45-minute lunch break and limited coffee breaks, delegates only have so much time to network and to see the other exhibits. To get them to take a pen is to get them to take a Trojan Horse back to basecamp and then they can explore the website at their leisure.

Demonstrations provide a great dimension to a conference stand though so I still like to keep the option available. In particular today I am demonstrating a new facility of eLibrary; the ‘Web 2.0′-style My Community Space which allows registered eLibrary users to interact with each other based on their shared interests and to tag their own resources, generating tag clouds, for easy future access.

At conferences, a risk is always that there will be a problem with the local wifi connection and so it is best to come prepared with offline alternatives but when your main product is web-based, it is always vexing when connectivity fails you. Despite some teething trouble early this morning, things mercifully went according to plan and I have been able to provide live demonstrations to a surprising number of the delegates.

I’m accompanied by a representative of a library service from a particular NHS health board and she has been charged with the task of promoting her library service to potential users. Since the only people relevant to her promotional efforts are people working within her own health board she is having a hard time identifying interested parties. I think this is another important lesson to learn when promoting library services. Rather than adopting a blanket catch-all approach, it is worth spending some time identifying users to whom your service is relevant and useful. Remember that library services aren’t a hard sell and that ‘awareness raising’ is simply a way of telling potential users that your service exists. You are not fighting for souls and so a successful sell or an unsuccessful sell does not equate to a win or a loss.