Shaun Bailey's back office

One cannot fail to notice how both Eric Pickles and Tim bang on about their back offices at every opportunity. There is a PhD waiting to be written about this obsession, both from the psychoanalytic point of view, retardation at the anal phase, and a reception studies approach, tracing the phrase from its origins in an airport-bookstall management book to its use by the government to justify their wreckage of public services.
Up popped Shaun Bailey, Cameron's anointed evangelist for the Big Society, or BS as it is popularly known, on the Today programme on Wednesday morning. He ranted against libraries, and those who work
in them. Though he stopped short of calling us all Russians with snow on our boots, his animus against librarians had a very Coatesian feel. However, if this post is to be believed, he seems to have failed to apply these principles to his own charity, My Generation: http://politicalscrapbook.net/2010/04/shameful-accounts-of-tory-candidates-charity/

Vanity publishing

The Good Library Blog has a curious approach to the blog medium. You can search slabs of text for hours for a hyperlink, whether to evidence (hard, isn't it to use the word evidence anywhere near the GLB?) of an assertion or to an organisation Tim is praising or, more likely, disparaging for having failed to recognise his god-like genius. There's no comments feed and you could grow a beard waiting for comments to be approved. Maybe the blogging platform offered by his hosts, that household name in British, sorry US, publishing, the Berkshire Publishing Group (pronounced, no doubt, incorrectly, as the Americans will insist on doing) doesn't do such fripperies.

Odd, too, is his tendency to take a comment on one post and turn it into a whole new post, often without attribution. It's as if the Daily Telegraph were to make up the front page of today's edition using the content from the letters page of the day before. Stranger even than this is the latest effort. Almost all the post is taken, with no attribution, from a report of a Picklesian (Pickled?) rant about the 'back-office' from the report in the Kilburn Times, apart from a couple of lines at the end.

Talk to a librarian, Tim. They could tell you something about the ethics of blogging, about the importance of acknowledging one's sources, and about intellectual property. And save posts like this for the (s)crapbook.

Tim warns of the red menance

Before he deletes it and tries to pretend he never said it, here's a screenshot

 

Sheffield revisited

Remember the Sheffield debate, organised by SINTO? Our Tim, as we feel we must call him, now we know of his Yorkshire roots, was to appear on a panel with library campaigners to discuss the way forward.
It never happened. All the speakers, we were told, Tim included, agreed that it was not the right time for such a debate.
Now he says it was the others who withdrew, in fear. Not what was said at the time. We think that Tim might now have cause to feel a little, if not scared, at least apprehensive, of what will happen when this news gets out.
In case you'd forgotten, he's a great man for what he calls his reputation.

Der Zauberlehrling

Tim has let the apprentice loose with an incoherent attack on CILIP. Remember your Goethe; this is unlikely to end well.

'I learnt librarianship by trial and error in a rare books library with a copy of AACR2!'. Rare books librarianship requires a very particular set of skills, and one fears for scholars of the future if they have to try to disentangle the cataloguing errors made by during the apprentice's learning. What other lessons were learnt by the same empirical method one wonders? Don't stub your cigarettes out on the incunables?