Alyson,
I reject your idea that you can live cosily with political penetration of
the library profession (that because it happens it is inevitable and we
must not moan about it but make the best of it). The very first clients of
public libraries were working men (often miners) trying to pull themselves
up by the bootstraps by getting access to information and culture, but
libraries today are for everyone, even for those who can well afford to buy
their own books, computers, CDs, etc. The idea that librarians should
tackle social exclusion seems to me to be both ludicrous and
unprofessional, but social exclusion solving strategies are now centre-
stage in the search for funding, and it will continue in that way until
government turns its attention elsewhere, at which point libraries will be
forgotten and the funding will stop. This is not a prediction. It is
already happening.
As for marketing, I can tell you that I won a national award for marketing
my service (circa 10 years ago now) but that did not save it from the
grimmest kind of downsizing: staffing reduced to zero, budgets that can
only be described as "stand still" budgets with no element for inflation,
and finally the very physical space occupied by the service taken away to
accommodate the government's "Peoples Network" computers. There was nothing
democratic about the way in which this was done. This is not librarianship:
this is willpower expressed through the politics of the day, both locally
and nationally. If something similar had happened in the legal profession
there would have been rather a lot of noise made about it. There is nothing
wrong with "waiting passively". To do anything else is to intefere with the
freedom of choice that the client has the right to exercise, and it also
puts you into a political camp that your client may very well not
appreciate. In the end you can only follow your own individual conscience
when it comes to deciding which way to go.
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