There's a London showing of the Hollywood Librarian, organised by Cilip in London and SLA Europe: http://www.cilip.org.uk/branches/byregion/london/events/Hollywood_Librarian.htm
These metropolitan sophisticates have to be coaxed to the showing by the offer of a champagne draw. We needed no such inducements for the Sussex première in February.
The British premiere of the Hollywood Librarian passed off very well. Over sixty people came from all over the south-east to the University of Sussex for Monday evening's showing, in the company of the film's director Ann Seidl.
The film contrasts the portrayal of librarians in cinema with he realities of the modern information profession. So sequences from films such as the 1957 Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn vehicle Desk Set are cut with interviews with modern librarians of all types. We follow the struggle in Salinas, John Steinbeck's home town, to keep libraries open; a group of convicts in San Quentin, who benefit from the library's prison service, raise funds for the threatened libraries. The destruction and looting of Iraq's National Library and the fire at Alexandria are compared.
This is a brief account, so brief as to traduce a very rich film. I wondered how well a film about American librarians would be received by a British audience. But while some of the detail, for example the political processes that the Salinas campaign goes through, are specific to the USA, the problems they face, of closures, of a lack of understanding of what it is we do, of trying to run libraries as if they were supermarkets or fast food outlets, are universal.
I was disappointed to spot no reference to Peter Sellers' performance as a young librarian involved in an affair with one of his readers in Only Two Can Play, a film version of Kingsley Amis's That Uncertain Feeling, which owed a great deal to his friend Philip Larkin's experiences as a public librarian.
The audience last night were mostly librarians; but the film ought to be seen by those who use libraries and, most importantly, by those who fund them, or fail to.
Just as the Arts Council is cutting like crazy, (see Equity's report) so too MLA, the quango supposed to be in charge of museums, galleries, libraries and archives. In a move the spin-doctors call a 'radical step to sharpen delivery', they have announced that their regional organisation is to be scaled back before eventual replacement by a unified structure: MLA press release dated 20 February
CILIP's current illogical branch structures are based on MLA regions. With the end of the MLA regional presence, is there any justification for continuing with them?
The Sussex sub-branch of CILIP is holding the British première of the film the Hollywood Librarian, on Monday 25 February, at 7 pm in the Arts A2 lecture theatre, University of Sussex.
There's a trailer on YouTube
I see that the European première of Hollywood Librarian is to take place in Athlone at the Irish Health Science Libraries Group conference. I believe a UK showing, organised by CILIP, is not far off.
See the trailer on YouTube
Cambridge may have beaten Oxford in yesterday's varsity match, but my team in the CILIP Sussex Christmas Quiz fared less well. I was honoured to be allowed to compete with the University of Sussex team, Adam, Chlöe, Ellie, Mell and Simon. We scored 100% in the first picture round, but were was less successful in a round which required knowledge of the price of everything and the value of nothing. Knowing where Neptune's Staircase is (a flight of locks on the Caledonian canal) would have done us no harm either.
Well done to the winners, the committee team, who triumphed after a tie break.
A bizarre thing has happened over at CILIP Communities. CILIP, my professional association, ran an online hustings area for this year's elections. Voting has closed and I found yesterday afternoon that forum has been deleted.
We take professional pride in our commitment to open access to information. It seems we cannot offer this to our own members.
Technorati Tags: transparency
I was sorry to miss, thanks to the train timetable, Mark Clowes' overview of web 2.0 technologies and Bernice Baker's presentation on blended learning. But I was there in time for an announcement by Ian Baird from Teeside University of the long overdue merger of the University Medical School Librarians Group and the University Health Sciences Librarians Group. In the afternoon, Heather Gardner and David Brunt demonstrated some practical library applications of web 2.0, in particular current awareness services, based on their experience of the Primary Care Current Awareness Service (PCCS) they run in the East Midlands. David moonlights for Intute, and I was interested in how Intute content can now be embedded in other websites. They also showed how the Royal College of Midwives has used Google Co-op to build a customised search engine and how they used Pbwiki for the nurses current awareness bulletin. On issue is that many NHS IT departments block wikis, which brought to mind the similar restrictions school students face in trying to use social software
Anne Welsh presented on Blogging for the bewildered, based on her experience of using Web 2.0 applications in the information service at DrugScope. I was struck by how they use a wiki for their acquisitions manual, but perturbed that the blogs they run don't allow comments. She showed some good uses of screencasts.
Tomorrow I'm speaking in Sheffield, at a Libraries for Nursing study day on Web 2.0, making Web 2.0 work for you and your library.
Here's the handout, as a pdf: download lfnsheffield.pdf and here's my presentation:
More than once, Tim Coates's Good Library Blog has claimed that large numbers of public library authorities pay CILIP subscriptions for their staff. He, and one or two commenters on his posts, claim that if this were not the case, libraries would have plenty of money for resources. Further, they imply that the underfunding of public library services under the current and previous governments is a figment of the imagination, that public libraries are in fact well-resourced, but that the money is wasted on salaries and CILIP subscriptions for overpaid professional librarians.
There is a good case to be made for employers supporting their staff's professional memberships. But Tim's claims are wrong.
I and others have asked Tim for evidence. I have worked in libraries for 29 years, in a variety of sectors of the profession, and have never had my CILIP, or before 2002, my Library Association or Institute of Information Scientists, subscription paid for me. It emerges he knows of "more than two" library authorities who pay CILIP subscriptions, but he declines to identify them. Over at Michaels's 025.04 blog* he has set up a poll. So far 231 people have voted, and only 4% have a CILIP subscription paid for them by a public library employer.
* The name, 025.04, is a librarian's joke, it being the Dewey Decimal classification class number for library operations.
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