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.

1. What, in your view, are the current debates in Information History?

I think the main debate concerns the nature of ‘Information History’ itself: how it connects or differs from ‘Library History’.

Is ‘Information History’ the politically correct designation for essentially the same area of study (encompassing modern systems of information retrieval in the same way that ‘World History’ would take this morning’s developments into account) or is it an entirely separate school of discourse? If it is a separate school, does data on ‘Library History’ continue to be generated for future historians or will they be concerned exclusively with ‘Information History’?

2. How would you like to see the subject develop?

I’d like to see the field come together more seamlessly with other areas of library and information science. Library and Information History isn’t taught in library schools to the extent that it may once have been and I think that’s a shame. Maintaining a collective knowledge of the history of information makes our discipline an exciting one. It puts us into an historical context: shows how our daily professional activities, no matter how mundane they may seem when we’re doing them, are grounded in the human timeline.

3. Why, in your opinion, has Information History (however defined) tended to focus on Nineteenth Century studies?

The journals do seem to contain a lot of nineteenth-century studies, though I don’t know how objectively we can claim there is a tendency to focus upon them. If this is the case, however, it’s probably a combination of three things:

‣ records of Nineteenth-century librarianship (Mechanic’s Institutes; significant developments in academia; developments in open access) are both thorough and intact (compared to, say, the libraries of the Ancient world, for which records were not as meticulously kept and for which a lot of evidence has not survived),

‣ a disproportionate interest among investigators in this period, probably due to ninteenth-century developments being temporally ‘graspable’ yet slightly – teasingly – beyond living memory. The legacy of these libraries is all around us – in the the way we work, in the architecture of our older library buildings – so it’s a highly stimulating and relevant era of study.

‣ it was probably in the Nineteenth Century that scholars began to take an earnest interest in library and information history, library science being properly founded by Dewey in 1887 and the application of subject-specific classification by people like Thomas Jefferson. It may have been the start of earnest study, so the discipline of library history may be grounded to that time intellectually if not necessarily.

4. What do you think has been the benefit of this approach?

Of the proposed tendency to focus on the nineteenth century? I suppose the main benefits have been to capture data and to analyse it before it is lost; and also to offer graspable historical perspective for present-day librarians and library scholars: an investigation into the history of our discipline provides context to what we’re doing. It gives meaning. By focusing on the immediate past of the Victorian era, we can trace the evolution of our present-day libraries and information systems back to a different time without leaping dramatically back into the comparatively quite different libraries of middle ages or antiquity.

The chained libraries of the Middle Ages are often cited as a metaphor for conservative librarianship. Before chains, however, libraries were even more orthodox: books would be retrieved from stacks by a librarian and the reader would usually be supervised. With the chained system, the reader was able to locate and consult her text with minimal supervision. Far from mean-spirited over-protection, the chained book was an important and highly liberal step towards open access and automation.

I bring this up, not because I want to see a return to Medieval ways, but to illustrate that a seemingly conservative library policy can be more liberal and generous than it may appear at first glance.

I first discovered traditionalist Michael Gorman when reading for my dissertation. As a means of steadying myself in a new career, I wanted to boil down a literature review into a shortlist of guiding principles of librarianship. I wanted to learn what the cataloguing, reader development and marketing all really meant. By useful accident, some of the books I’d picked up were written by Michael Gorman. I found that he is excellent at monitoring trends in the profession and comparing those trends with our founding and evolving principles.

Much of his writing is about the overall purpose of the library system, about providing direction and questioning the nature of our profession and our institutes. More noble even than that, his ideas come to a view that libraries exist to serve humanity: something we should remember when grovelling to our funding bodies. We shouldn’t have to fret constantly about circulation statistics and twopenny-halfpenny ways of raising revenue to justify what we’re doing: we’re serving humanity. Reading Gorman confirmed my personal feeling that librarianship isn’t so much a profession as a calling. To me, it is a secular priesthood or a knightly order assembled to promote curiosity and defend against ignorance and propaganda.

Michael Gorman’s traditionalist reputation is sometimes seen as professional xenophobia. On the contrary, he is dedicated to the ALA’s almost internationalist motto: ‘The best reading, for the largest number, at the least cost’. He has also defended library users’ personal information against government monitoring and includes intellectual freedom, equity of access and democracy in his eight cornerstone principles of librarianship.

A controversy arises because he seems to abhor Google, blog culture and the digitisation of books. While I don’t agree completely, there is something sage about his ‘if-it’s-not-broken-don’t-fix-it line of thinking. In a now-famous essay called Google and God’s Mind, he posits that online information retrieval will focus on speed and access to facts, where the books in our libraries are “designed to be read sequentially and cumulatively, so that the reader gains knowledge in the reading”. Books offer full submersion into the culture and grammar of real learning and real pleasure, while the Web simply cannot.

My personal view of electronic information retrieval is not so staunch. I adore the Web and spend a lot of personal time consuming and producing digital racket. I make most of my money online and I met my current partner through Livejournal. But after years of working simultaneously with emerging technologies and traditional services, I can’t help but be aware of the value of books (a technology which has evolved over thousands of years before reaching the pinnacle of the commercial paperback) and the extremely tedious problems involved in electronic information provision: poor quality retrieval systems, never-resolved bugs, slow servers, garish design, unpleasant political restrictions, invasive advertising and inane Tweetery. Quality electronic services (databases and e-libraries) are inarguably the way forward for reference-style information retrieval but the best the library world can hope for from the likes of Twitter and Facebook is a kind of product placement: by positioning ourselves next to something cool, we can appear on-the-ball, but social networking sites have no real, practical advantage to Library services no matter how many pundits and technophiles insist upon it. Twitter is undoubtedly ‘where it’s at’ and nobody likes to feel divorced from the party, but the bottom line is that users of Twitter and Facebook are the victims of a massive global advertising scam. Libraries, perhaps more than anyone, are best off out of it.

Gorman is sometimes accused of being brusque, sarcastic and elitist but I find his ideas warm, generous and inclusive. His eight principles of librarianship are informed by Buddhist wisdom. Even if rumours of brusque elitism were true, is such a trait any worse that the culture of passive aggression around the library blogs? His views are considered extreme but I think that’s what the library world needs. It needs a voice in favour of humanity in the same way that society needs radical Feminism and political correctness: to compensate for the enormous drag factor of reactionary bandwaggoning.

Michael Gorman has been the president of the American Library Association, is the first editor of the AACR2 and has written such inspiring books as The Enduring Library and Our Singular Strengths: Meditations for Librarians.

Rob Westwood is Librarian at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire and Honorary Secretary of CILIP’s Library and Information History Group.

I recently went to London to be measured for a new suit. My librarian salary doesn’t quite run to Savile Row but I have a very nice tailor in the city all the same.

Taking my inside leg measurement, my tailor complains about the pressures of his trade. During a global financial crisis, many people don’t choose luxury goods. The Internet and the high street offer stiff competition.

To Savile Row tailors, however, the money still flies in. They don’t even fear the Abercrombie & Fitch flagship store that opened on the Row earlier this year. Savile Row customers are loyal and abundant and they’re not put off by high prices.

It’s fashionable for libraries to emulate business and to learn from our friends in the retail sector. We think of readers as customers. We worry about competition, revenue and brand-awareness. It is partly a response to a perceived rise in leisure industries, and partly due to those institutes upon whose funding we depend: local councils, universities and the health service understandably demand quantitative results to justify library expenditure, and this means we have to come up with ways to increase issue figures and library traffic.

And so we assemble marketing strategies: we adopt canny new corporate identities, stock popular leisure materials, install plasma screens with rolling news to signify how on the ball we are, lease space to coffee shops and launch viral marketing campaigns with YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. They are all reasonable ideas and part of a natural reaction: to adapt or risk extinction.

The tailors of Savile Row, however, do not do this. Ever stubborn, they adhere to tradition. They don’t dabble with the Internet. They don’t try to move with the times. They never advertise. Ever. They simply tailor. They offer an unparalleled service based upon timelessness, quality and expertise. What it all boils down to is: they play to their strengths.

I worry that the adoption of retail models by libraries is harming our reputation. By emulating those we perceive as competitors – retailers, cinemas, television, the web – we risk entering their domain too completely. If they truly are our competitors, we cannot fight them on their turf: they are experts at marketing, adept at providing cutting-edge products and inescapably appealing to the young. Better instead, I argue, to draw a neat but clear line between libraries and retail. We need to play to our strengths: excellent book stock, knowledgeable librarians and an environment conducive to learning.

Computers, the Internet, audio-visual materials and modern leisure stock all have a place in libraries. Contemporary forms of information retrieval are wonderful things and libraries need them. What we don’t need, however, are the noise, the Playstations, the corporate identity and the gradual elimination of the word ‘library’. Libraries have hundreds of years – thousands even – of gathering a reputation as impartial, horizon-expanding embassies of knowledge. That’s one hell of an asset.

When I hear library managers boast of their new coffee shop or podcast download station, I think of a BBC comedy series called Monkeydust (available to borrow in your public library) in which the Fire Brigade is rebranded as ‘Icarus’ and focuses on selling burgers because that’s what’s fashionable and lucrative. Meanwhile, presumably, London incinerates around them.

A SWOT analysis hangs over our heads. The threats column is filled with retail outlets and search engines. That much is real. The threats exist. A mistake has been made, however, in perceiving these threats as models for opportunities. We don’t need to be like HMV. The best possible outcome of competing in this way is turning the library system into another HMV: something the world doesn’t need.

The tailors of Savile Row understand that they cannot compete with vendors of cheap suits by making cheaper suits. The cheap suit market it catered for by experts. Savile Row caters for something else, and the result is lucrative. Similarly, the demand for cheap music and exciting retail space is catered for. Less catered for are quiet, elegant study spaces with expert human help and great access to quality information. Let’s focus on those things.

If it takes a retail model for us to compete with other industries and to satisfy our financiers, I propose we look to those fusty but fabulously successful tailors of Savile Row. The key is to play to our strengths.

I start work at about 10:00. This might seem late to the skylarks among you, but I owe it to my natural body clock: it prefers me to start late and to finish late.

The NHS Scotland eLibrary runs from an office in the leafy West End of Glasgow. Just fifteen minutes away from my flat, I walk to work every morning.

I say hello to the other librarians and make coffee while my computer starts up.

The morning is usually spent doing ‘reactive’ tasks: responding to email from my bosses, agents, users with enquiries, partner organisations. There are usually about 60 messages in my inbox and my task for the morning is to reduce that number to zero.

After lunch, I get my best work done. This is when my body clock allows higher functions to kick in: I write journal articles, catalogue resources sometimes, design promotional materials (printed materials, e-fliers and websites), manage the department’s training and outreach plan, attend meetings and train users. I manage my tasks with a rolling ‘to-do list’. During these hours, I never procrastinate and the afternoons are fruitful.

I don’t train as much as I used to. When I first started here two years ago, I would do about three training sessions a week. I got to see a lot of Scotland this way. More often than not, my appointments would be in Edinburgh, Glasgow or Aberdeen but I would frequently visit towns in the borders and highlands.

These days, I coordinate the department’s training initiatives rather than deliver the sessions myself. This means I am now largely office based: a mixed blessing. Life can get a little stale beneath fluorescent lights but I do not miss having to start work in the middle of the night to get to an 8am training session in Dunblane or Bonnybridge.

On Monday and Wednesday, I finish at 4:45 so that I can walk through the park to my evening job at Glasgow University Library. Here, I manage a small team of four Library Assistants and five shelvers and run the Lending and Enquiries desks until 8pm. The demands of two jobs occasionally clash but this can generally be avoided with time management.

On Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, I work until about 7pm. In the evenings, I have dinner with friends followed by live music or theatre. My days usually end by talking to my girlfriend (who lives in Montreal) or by reading Philip K. Dick novels late into the night.

While this heft of a document is a reasonable starting point, I am amazed at how naive my ideas and writing style were, only three short years ago. One paragraph relates to another only tangentially. A single sentence is a graceless string of needless adjectives.

In 2006, I was confident in my ability to write a passable dissertation. Looking at it today, I cannot believe I got anywhere with it. The introduction is a poorly structured mish-mash of ideas, oftentimes resembling an action painting of research, random paraphrases blasted onto the canvas.

I puzzled for nights over how to reduce the word count to a tolerable 15,000. Today, I could Biro my way through the whole final product, easily taming it into a more graceful economy.

Hindsight can be both useful and humbling and it’s important that we remember this in libraries.

“The philosophy, objectives and role of the library have sometimes been discernible only in retrospect by the historian, endowed with the objectivity of distance”. – Luckham (1971)

It is incredible how our outlooks can change in such a short time. Change can be giddying, but through the identification of ever present principles, Library History can be our balustrade.

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.

In way of marking this, here follows the slightly controvertial article which may have played a part in my being picked up by the group. This was published in the 11-24 July edition of CILIP’s Library + Information Gazette:

Should Library History make a return to the prospectus?

In 2006 I presented my MSc. Dissertation to the University of Strathclyde. It was boldly titled The Nature of Librarianship and took a deeply historical approach to literature review. I wanted to challenge the idea that we live in a time of excessive change by showing that the history of librarianship is riddled with such periods; that we are constantly in a state of developmental flux; but that a thread of intrinsic values has been present from the libraries of antiquity to the modern day service. Some of these values were practical while others were moral or intellectual. With our hands on this balustrade we would see that there is no particular threat from a rise of “leisure industries” and that HTML should be no more feared or adored than the scroll, the codex, the videotape or anything else one might label as a “paradigm shift”. In recognising these lessons from history, we would have a moral and practical guide to which to turn when change really does occur.

When constructing the initial proposal, I wasn’t sure I would be able to run with this at all. Library History wasn’t listed as a research interest by any of the departmental staff. One ray of hope lay in Dr. Paul Burton’s interest in “Social effects and impacts of ICT”. I pitched it to him and he caught it. But it was a lucky catch and I was glad for it: I really didn’t want to spend three months distributing questionnaires about the benefits of installing coffee machines in public libraries or wondering why SPSS hates me.

After a bit of research, it appears that Library History is largely dispensed with in the modern library school. Vestiges of the subject survive among academics who once lectured in it and are still ready to engage with it at the dissertation or PhD level; it also seems to have survived in some slides accompanying ‘Introduction to Librarianship’ modules. But looking for Library History in the modern library school is much akin to the cultural archaeology practiced by Library History itself. History, if you’ll indulge a silly joke, is a thing of the past. Perhaps this is due to the shifted perspective that Library Studies now constitute science rather than art. Or perhaps it is due to a perception that Library History is no longer relevant.

Let us not dwell on the science versus art debate and turn to the problem of relevance. “Our ignorance of history,” writes Goethe, “causes us to slander our own times”. History is always relevant and what history could be more relevant than that of one’s own discipline? We want to know about family histories; the histories of nations and the comparatively short histories of our favourite bands or television shows so why not that of our profession? One could posit that it transcends mere relevance and heads into the territory of the essential: the history of libraries takes on the war against censorship, the proliferation of science, the changing of formats, the rise of open access, the need for social inclusion, the politics of change and the rise of consumer society.

The marketing process and the installation of plasma screens are not what make librarianship an exciting discipline. A knowledge of Library History makes librarianship exciting and consequently contributes to the dynamism and importance of our services.

Bring Library History back to Library School. It disserves its own module and not to be crowbarred into existing classes. A healthy understanding of our history can only lead to a healthy design for our future.

Instead of the hoary old around-the-table format, I told the team that I would hold a ‘surgery’. I have no idea if this is an example of recognised managerial practice: it just struck me as a good idea at the time.

At a typical meeting, all of our team members would usually attend simultaneously. The idea, of course, is to maximise communication between team members and to ensure that we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet. It’s a good intention. The de facto result, however, is that people get bored after twenty minutes, drift off, make doodles and become increasingly anxious about the slippage of their projects out in the real world.

At the surgery, however, the only individual who needs to be present throughout is the chairperson. The other attendees can drift in and out and make their contributions on an individual basis.

I told the team by email that I’d be in the meeting room between 2 and 4pm and that they would be able to drop in and see me at some point between those hours.

It was very successful. Everyone I wanted to speak to came along on their own volition and I think they were grateful that they only had to gawp at my wobbly face for fifteen to twenty minutes each instead of two achingly long hours.

The main benefits of the surgery format, as we found them, were as follows:

• Smaller investment of time per person
• The time spent with each attendee could focus upon their individual achievements, plans and concerns rather than those of other people
• The less formal structure seemed to elicit more candid information than in a traditional full-team meeting
• We avoided the curse of Groupthink

I’m sure there must be disadvantages to this format too. There must be circumstances were the whole team needs to be present – i.e. when the information needs to be ‘broadcast’ by one individual and received identically by a large number of people – but for this scenario – where the information was ‘broadcast’ instead by attendees and received by the chair – the surgery was perfect.

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