Private fears in public places

You'd think, with experience of the disasters of rail, gas and water privatisation, that privatising libraries would be a non-starter, even for this government. Oh no. What is interesting here is that, after a long period of silence, Tim has found his voice again, speaking out about how mean library campaigners are to LSSI, the US private equity company that has now taken over a fifth of the land of the free's public library services and wants to expand over here. LSSI's British operation (which intriguingly shares a London office address with the Sue Hill employment agency) has been making overtures to several British library authorities, hoping for easy pickings.

Tim's post is all about how opposition to LSSI is based on xenophobia, ignoring the fact that a lot of Americans oppose them too. It represents a volte-face, for not so long ago Tim was saying that privatisation would not work, 'there is no profit in it for anybody and there is no income because it has to be a free service.' Croydon Advertiser, Friday, June 10, 2011 http://www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk/Message-clear-Labour-s-open-meeting/story-12747932-detail/story.html

The question for Coates Watch is this: is Tim's change of position on library privatisation real? In which case what has happened to change his mind? Or, did he always believe in it, but thought it politic to keep his thoughts to himself until now?

Farewell to Jolly Jack Tar

Tim's old chum Roy Clare is off to New Zealand. Poor Kiwis, first the Christchurch earthquake, now this.

A little bird has forwarded us an e-mail Tim sent to the great and good, seventy-three of them, no less, in which, fighting back his tears, he demands that Roy be refused leave to travel until a parliamentary inquiry takes place into the MLA and the DCMS.

Tim has an uncanny instinct for aiming at the wrong target. What do library campaigners want from Parliament? A moratorium on cuts and closures? Teeth for the Public Libraries and Museums Act? Hunt and Vaizey called to account? According to Tim, none of the above, we want inquiries into an MLA press release. Of course we do. In pubs up and down the country, we speak of little else.

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?