Sunday, January 30, 2011

As you were

First of all, he's back: http://www.goodlibraryguide.com/blog/archives/2011/01/somerset_1.html

Secondly,'it is unlikely that there is a need to close a library anywhere for financial reasons in order to meet the requirements of deficit recovery'. Oh well, that's all right, then. Tim has spoken.

 

5 comments:

  1. Grow up and get a life

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  2. Oh, we wish we could. Trouble is, so long as Tim persists in his delusional belief that everything can be solved through the application of the Pickles principle, we feel we have to carry on.
    You don't have to read us, P Miles, if you don't want to.

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  3. I read your blog in the vain hope that you may some day write something constructve.Pickles principle or Pickle principle? Would you care to elaborate? What exactly are your proposals to solve the malaise affecting public libraries? Or is everything perfect?

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  4. We need to explain: our intention is satirical. Do not read us in search of a programme to save libraries, any more than you would read Jonathan Swift for a solution to the problem of hunger in Ireland.
    However, and this is precisely the reason we wish to shine a light on some of our subject's claims, we know enough about public libraries during the past thirty years to know that they have been cut, cut and cut again. That is why the Coates-Pickles argument, that it is possible to find huge saving from the so-called back-office, is such a delusion, and a dangerous one.

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  5. The idea that no library needs to be cut is a farcical one. By that I of course do not mean that libraries should be cut. It is disgusting that they are. No, I mean that with the level of cuts that councils are facing there will be library closures. That is the reality. Or would you rather cut social services? That is the reality.

    To peddle a completely unrealistic line that the savings can always be made in "efficieny" savings is naive in the extreme. Librarians get this. Are they not on a mission at all times to find them under the pressures of their bosses and political masters? Do you not think that councillors would rather make such savings than suffer the political consequences of closures?

    This line of arguments comes from those who understand bookshops but we are not running bookshops. Added to which there has been an ongoing attack on the integrity of librarians which cannot be supported.

    And why do ideas like this get profile, because journalists who hear them, we presume round the dinner party tables of a select group of the London metropolitan elite, give it one.

    And what do those journalists know about running multi-million pound services?

    Absolutely nothing.

    If you want to save libraries, the last thing you do is agree with Eric Pickles, and we who care about libraries should be suspicious in the extreme of those that do.

    This is why, for a load of hard working public servants, this blog is such a breath of fresh air.

    Does that help you?

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