There may be more significance to this topic than meets the eye. Why do
public libaries have to depend on an academic mailing list? Because they
have no reliable way of setting one up for themselves. The problem is not
technical, it's organisational.
There is no national infrastructure within the public library sector for
doing anything. All planning, funding and decision making is local.
Public library networking couldn't have happened if it had been left to
local public library authorities to organise. To get it done required
national bodies *outside* the public library service to take the lead and
channel the funding. Networking is a classic candidate for thinking
globally, acting locally but the public library service in the UK has no
existence except locally. It has no mechanism of its own for the wider
strategic thinking that ought to inform local action. That's also why
there's no marketing of the public library service as a whole, no
co-ordinated asset management, no investment planning and no systematic
exploitation of the Internet as a means of developing library services.
Networking exposes the tension between 21st century technology and our
exclusive reliance on a 19th century localised organisational structure.
At root this discussion about Lis Pub Libs is a symptom of the absence of
a public library dimension beyond the local. I reckon we'll see more
symptoms as more public librarians discover more things they want to do
on the network and find that the organisational structures aren't there
to enable them.
Museums have used the Internet to give themselves a national collective
profile. They didn't do it by relying solely on local or regional
infrastructure.
Robert Harden
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