Thanks! No more than it has you hopefully! 🙂

Excellent information and comment. as always, Mick. I hope that calling you campaigner has not been detrimental to the cause.

Successfully gate-crashing events like these requires a degree of provocation sometimes and no-one was responding to my (I thought perfectly valid) questions about how volunteers will support technologies like RFID and management systems – in the brave new library world the government is creating.

Yesterday’s event – which was not on my radar until I spotted Miranda’s tweet – would have been a golden opportunity to spread the word to volunteers about some of the responsibilities (as well as the skills) they are being asked to acquire. Like my favourite topic – RFID and its vulnerabilities and legal aspects.

Since the status of volunteer-run libraries is, at best, vague it is unclear whether some (or all) of them will be held accountable – by a new recommendation currently being drafted by the EU for issue in 2014 – for what information is being stored on the tags inside the books that some of them will have in their libraries. This is an issue that is confusing even those public libraries that AREN’T being handed over to volunteers. Most librarians to whom I have spoken seem to think it will be their supplier or their legal department that will be held accountable, but in fact the draft makes it clear that it is the person responsible for the library service that will be placed in the tumbril and taken away to Brussels. (Be prepared for a spate of power transfers in 2014).

In what now seem like the “good old days” the MLA communicated this kind of information directly to librarians (if they were listening) but since its demise ACE has not only shifted its position to communicating solely with the SCL and the LGA (where librarians are, as we know now, are thin on the ground) but also removed the guidance commissioned on the subject by its forerunner from its archives.

My own efforts to communicate with both the SCL and ACE on this and related matters have been largely unsuccessful. I did receive assurances from Janene that the SCL would be taking BIC’s new Library Committee – and its Privacy and Interoperability Groups – seriously, and maybe they are – but certainly not by turning up to the meetings as she appeared to suggest they might.

So in order to inform the growing army of volunteers it falls to individual efforts like mine yesterday to knock loudly on the mostly closed doors where the government and its agencies are communicating the good news about the Big Society to those willing to stand up and be counted – and possibly shot by the EU.

If, as you suggest, our 21st century creative, innovative and tech-savvy (to quote myself) libraries are going to be, more and more often, run by volunteers they are going to face a number of challenges that could end the experiment before it begins.

Thanks for identifying me as a ‘campaigner’ but that may not be helping me in my efforts to try and help since there seems to be a worrying and widening gap between campaigners and volunteers.

I still believe that skilled librarians learn rather more than the best way to hold a date stamp – and that the skills they bring to bear in support of their communities are totally undervalued and underestimated by their employers, the government and even other campaigners, but it has always been the ‘service’ that concerns me more and I’ll talk to anyone that wants to keep it.

My grandchildren love to read, to play, and to learn. They share (sometimes nicely) an iPad, and use the family X Box, Wii, PSP – you name it, they have it. Yet today they still read books – constantly.

Books are just one means of what we have learned to call ‘content delivery’ and the means by which this is done will obviously change over time. However the amount of content available in the world is unlikely to diminish and it’s already obvious that much of it will be out of reach of those without the means to pay for it. So there will still be a role for a service to allow access to those who can’t fund their desire for knowledge and recreation, and to extend the horizons of those that can. (If we as a nation decide we want it).

That looks to me like being a complex and possibly expensive transition that, in my naivety, I had imagined might be one that government would consider too important to leave to volunteers to manage – especially given that we are constantly told that it’s our inventiveness and creativity that makes us successful as a nation – but then I lack the political awareness, vision and agility of Eric Pickles and Ed Vaizey.

But I’m eager to help anyone. After all, we’re all in this together…