But my point is that it's in our own hands. Ultimately a profession gets
the associations it (a) deserves and (b) can be bothered to maintain.
After 13 years in the BMA you would expect me to say this, but my
experience in what must be one of the best professional associations in the
world has shown me the benefits of an ambitious association with an active
membership. By contrast, I was elected to LA Council as a national
councillor with 1,700 votes (c7% of the membership) and have been elected
unopposed as chair of LA Enterprise Board without having to do any of the
things you need to do to be elected to one of the BMA's seminal committees.
It would be unfair to characterise the whole of LA Council as supine, but
there are a lot of members whom that description fits and in the time I
have been on it Council has absolutely not functioned as an effective
scruitineer of staff and of Policy and Resources.
To repeat my point, this isn't the LA's fault it's our fault. For my
personal needs, HLG is a good enough reason on its own to belong to the LA
and I think that every working professional librarian in our field ought to
belong to HLG and seek to contribute actively to it. But we need a strong,
determined and unified professional body to promote libraries, the good
they do and the value to society of those of us who work in them - mostly
for poor-to-derisory salaries.
Starting from a huge amount of hard and effective work by Ross Shimmon, the
LA has made a major contribution to getting libraries up this government's
agenda. this sort of thing doesn't just happen because Tony Blair and
Gordon Brown cut their teeth listening to Nye Bevan talking about the
university of the working man - the LA has put time and money elbowing
aside competing claimants and convinced people with tax money of what we
all in our hearts feel to be true: that librarians are cheap, good and
make the world a better and more prosperous world.
Gawd elp us I sometimes find it hard to feel strongly about the LA when
thumbing through endless pictures in the Record of children's librarians
dressed as clowns in refurbished Carnegie branch libraries or bus-queue
photographs of men in suits signing national concordats, but we are as
disaprate a profession as you will find. I got my lifetime reading habit
from Ilford children's library and my members benefit from international
copyright lobbying. If we want to be regarded as professional people worth
taking account of and not as a disposable item replaceable by the PG Dean's
secretary's assistant we must behave like professional people and make our
associations something to be proud of.
Tony McSean
----- Forwarded by Tony McSean/Secretariat/BMA on 08/02/02 14:17 -----
Keith Osullivan
<[log in to unmask] To: [log in to unmask]
ox.ac.uk> cc:
Subject: Not really an easy solution...
08/02/02 13:50
> And after all, it is our membership organisation and if we don't like it
> and don't think it's doing a decent job then there's an easy solution.
>
Depends on the subject, Tony. I'm sure that many members would have liked
the old LA to have taken a more robust or at least pro-active role on
the issue of salaries than it did...
Keith M C O'Sullivan
Librarian, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine
University of Oxford.
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