When only the best will do.....

Unsurprisingly, this year's A-Level results have created an intense pressure for university places, before the fees go up next year. Although the proportion of pupils getting As or A*s, at 27%, is only slightly up from last year, as far as getting a place on the course of your choice is concerned I think you could be forgiven for thinking that anything less isn't worth the paper it's written on. At any rate, it's a far cry from the 1960s, when I took mine, and the top 27% would've included both As and Bs and the top 2% of Cs as well. And an overall pass rate of about 98%, I think has to raise questions about the validity of an exam which hardly anyone now fails.

Not that I'm knocking the achievements of this year's A level students. Thinking back, I remember two years of solid hard slog to get there, wondering at times whether it was all going to be worth it. Both French and German - the two subjects which gained me my As - have undergone a decline in popularity over the last decade, despite the fact that the students of today no longer have to sit through the interminable study of set texts which plagued me when I did mine.

As far as the question of "soft" options go, this is another question which yet again rears its ugly head. The then-new A level General Studies wasn't counted as worth anything by Universities, and so I didn't bother to take it, opting instead for a couple of now-defunct S-Levels. If subjects such as Media Studies are to be denigrated as not "proper" A-levels, then to my mind that is the fault of the examining boards for not devising a syllabus which is exacting enough, and the fault of the Universities for giving them a parity in the points allocation. Whatever happened to the proviso that you had to have a track record of excellence in the subject you were applying to study?

There again, the tendency of Universities to broaden the scope of degree offerings has contributed a lot to the 'Micky Mouse Degree' accusations. In 1980 I went to Polytechnic part-time for three years and got a BA in Librarianship. As a primarily 'vocational' qualification (which my employer declined to pay for, incidentally) it hardly rates alongside an Oxbridge Honours in Classics. But although it didn't bring me fame and fortune (or even an increase in salary) I'm kinda proud of my achievement. And in an educational system which seems these days to be increasingly focused on mediocrity, I guess that's reason enough.

Use it or lose it

I was surprised the other day to get an e-mail (albeit an auto-generated one) from the library, asking me to take part in their current consultation exercise. After I'd left work, I'd kept my old library card, although I haven't in fact used it in the intervening two-and-a-half years. It was pretty much a case of "I'll pop in and see you all again sometime"... but I never did. I did bump into a couple of people by chance, and heard some dark rumours about what had been going on after I'd left, but that was all it amounted to.

Driven I assume by the government's demands for public spending cuts, the proposals amount to the closure of 16 libraries, cuts in opening hours at all but one I think of the remaining ones, and consequent reductions in staff. The rationale behind it is declining levels of use, to the point at which those scheduled for the chop are "unsustainable in their current form" - including two which I remember being built from new during my last few years there.

Interestingly, one of the options on offer is to try and get the locals to take over the running of "their" library: what support there's going to be for this idea remains to be seen, but it was a concept that I recall was in fairly common use back in the 1950s - not that long before I started work. On the other hand, if no-one's willing to do it, then presumably the closures will go ahead, leaving large areas of the county without a library, although perhaps not - arguably - a "library service".

And that I think is the underlying question which this sort of consultation tends to fudge. In the 21st century, do we actually still need libraries? The successful ones which will remain are being turned into one-stop shops, advice centres, cybercafes, rock concert halls and police stations. The "virtual library" will be in competition with Amazon Kindle and any number of helplines, online forums and bulletin boards. And you can always have a few paperbacks delivered along with the week's groceries. Or maybe the good villagers of Westbury-sub-Mendip had the right idea!

We are all doomed!

I was reading a blog post the other day about the Amazon Kindle. I haven't actually got one and I don't know anyone who has, though I think I've seen someone using one. However, in the course of the comment thread on the future of books, I spotted the comment "Libraries are doomed"!

As an ex-librarian of some 40-odd years' experience I get the distinct impression that libraries have lost the plot nowadays. Books can be bought comparatively cheaply in supermarkets as well as online, and the traditional role of libraries as purveyors of information and homework answers has been eclipsed by the widespread availability of the Internet. Librarians have been renamed "customer service advisors"; libraries are now "one-stop shops" where you complain about your bin not being emptied; an army of IT and HR "support staff" is on hand to hinder any attempt to get on with the day-to-day job of serving the customers; and the whole show is presided over by a senior management directorate on telephone-number salaries with no practical experience of ever working in a library in their lives.

The old people (who demographically make up the majority of those who still actually borrow books) constantly bemoan the fact that they can never find anything decent to read on the shelves because the bookfund's been cut yet again. The young people lured in by free computer access constantly bemoan the fact that an hour isn't long enough to get their emails, chat to their mates and update their Facebook page before they get kicked off again. And all the while "initiatives" swallow up chunks of the budget, generating grandiose ideas for refurbishment projects but leaving little money for the basic essentials.

And maybe that's where the problem lies. Are we flogging a dead horse? In the 21st century, are libraries still "basic essentials" for anybody? Or are the remaining services that they provide ones which could be carried out better, more cheaply and more efficiently by other means? Doomed indeed!

Anarchy rules... OK?

I see from the news that Rentamob have featured heavily in the recent student protests against rising fees, and - inevitably - have left a trail of damage and destruction in their wake. It's harmed their case, in my view, because however jealously you regard the right to free speech and legitimate protest as being a fundamental cornerstone of a free democratic society, the right to go out to deliberately smash things up isn't, and reflects badly on those who do it.

I'm not unsymapthetic: I was a student myself once - more than once, in fact. At the age of 19 I travelled by bus and train from home to college in Birmingham every day for two years. I was lucky in that about two-thirds of my tuition fees were paid in the form of a grant (not a loan) from the Local Education Authority, but I ate my parents' food and used their electricity at their expense and subsisted off £1.50 a week which even in those days wasn't a lot of money. I didn't have the money to go out and get plastered on a regular basis, and they wouldn't have let me back in the house if I had.

Fast forward ten years, and I was working full-time with my own home - and with a mortgage and bills to pay. Doing a three-year part-time degree course was hard going and left little time for 'fun', but I thought it was worth it. I'd got my own motorbike, so getting to polytechnic on the outskirts of Birmingham once a week wasn't problematic. I can't remember how much the fees were, but since my employers decided that getting a (relevant, job-related) degree was for my benefit rather than theirs, they backtracked on a decision to pay for me to go, and I had to fork out the several hundred quid a year myself. So much for "investing in people", "workforce development", and all that claptrap. I did one night a week as a pools collector to raise the money - the old 'working your way through college' idea.

So yeah, being a student is no picnic. There again, there's no such thing as a free lunch - and there never has been.

Will the person who has 12,000 of our books on loan please return some of them.

According to the local paper today, there are apparently 12,000 library books missing over the last three years. It's not altogether clear exactly what "missing" means, as the article starts off talking about knowing who's got them but not how to get them back, which isn't really "missing" as in 'we don't know where they are'.

When I was working in libraries, people who borrowed stuff from us generally brought it back, and most of them did so on time, although the fines levied on those who didn't were a nice little earner for the Council. The cry of "What!! I could've bought it for that amount" inevitably resulted whenever the charge rose to more than a couple of quid, and the likelihood of getting something back decreased more or less in proportion to the rate at which the fines went up. For a while, I think at the auditors' suggestion, they experimented with taking people to Court, but needless to say the people they chose to sue hadn't got any money, so it was simply an experiment in pouring further money down the drain without getting a result. Peversely enough, the one thing that did seem to work was "sending the boys round": contrary to what you might've expected, most people were quite relieved to get the books off their hands without further ado, which was the main object of the exercise.

On the other hand, the article's a bit vague over whether theft (as in taking a book without actually bothering to "borrow" it first) is included in the figures. It always used to be difficult to quantify this, as it was often simply the fact you couldn't find something when a customer asked for it which prompted the "missing?" categorization. Even then there wasn't any conclusive proof it hadn't simply been put back in the wrong place. I won't go into all the ins and outs of security systems other than to say that it's not really feasible to tag every £2.99 paperback in and out each time - any more than it is for a supermarket to tag every tub of margarine that they sell.

But given that book borrowing from libraries has been declining steadily for a number of years now, it seems logical to suppose that book losses have too, and the comparative figures they've quoted in the article do seem to bear out that inference.

Free speech... but not when we're paying for it!

An odd little news item I came across tucked away inconspicuously yesterday reveals that two people were banned from using the city library's computers in the last three years for *allegedly* accessing porn. Rather oddly, I thought, there wasn't any comment on the significance of this, especially as it was in response to a Freedom of Information request which presupposes that the information wouldn't have been revealed otherwise. It doesn't say what they were looking at, but to rate a three-month ban it can't have been anything "serious" and obviously wasn't anything illegal. In any case I believe that Coventry Libraries are one of the majority of UK public libraries who use Websense to block supposedly objectionable material.

The argument used in favour of having this sort of ruling is that users are accessing material in a semi-public place and that in any case some people would not appreciate their Council Tax being used to fund the provision of free porn. On a very simplistic level, that argument has a certain degree of merit - but as an ex-librarian who always firmly upheld the principle that consenting adults should be free to choose for themselves what material they do or don't read and look at, I find this particular form of censorship - and that's basically what it is - particularly abhorrent.

Throughout the history of libraries, there's always been a tradition that access to free speech is an important right to be safeguarded against attempts by "the authorities" to censor and block it. It's rather sad, I think, that in the 21st century the very technology which should make it easier than ever before to promote the free exchange of ideas is now being used instead to stifle it.