This is more like it! You can’t beat an academic breezing in and using that
hoary old ‘intellectually lazy’ chestnut every time someone tries to raise the
debate above minutiae and focus on a wider picture.
Yes indeed, there needs to be discussion and debate on these issues. But,
librarians being librarians, that debate will spiral into infinity, and we will find
ourselves, Frances Hendrix-like, banging and banging away at the same old
drum until its tin starts to fracture and rot and break away and in the end all
we’re doing is banging a drum-shaped expanse of hot air and wondering why
nobody can hear us.
Are libraries dumbing-down? Yes. Are many librarians complacent and
incompetent? Yes. It’s easy to inhabit the extremes of an argument. The
trouble is, life being what it is, those extremes represent only a minority of
practice, but the voices bemoaning them constitute the majority of the sybil
chorus in the debate. Roy is spot-on to concentrate on trying to develop,
move forward. Dragging us back to have the same old debate from the same
old entrenched positions will not achieve anything. Come on: CIPFA stats –
who cares? Certainly not our readers. It’s an excuse to pontificate and wring
hands and shake heads more in sorrow than in anger. Move on.
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