Comments on: CILIP AGM and the art of not taking things personally https://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/2015/09/cilip-agm-and-the-art-of-not-taking-things-personally.html What's happening to your library? Thu, 08 Oct 2015 20:51:13 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 By: Frank Daniels https://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/2015/09/cilip-agm-and-the-art-of-not-taking-things-personally.html#comment-7320 Thu, 08 Oct 2015 20:51:13 +0000 http://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/?p=9750#comment-7320 Re: “not taking things personally” when discussing volunteers and public library budgets. We cannot all be professional about this, as you suggest, as to do so involves ignoring the ethics of the profession. Any chief librarian in tears because of what he/she has been forced to do in public (all these are your words being recycled) is, in my view, only crying crocodile tears. As long as they can hold onto their highly paid posts they won’t worry at all about those in lower positions, those who actually have been running the service and facing the public daily for years.

In a civilised society no one is forced (in public) to do things detrimental to their professional ethics. You do it because you deem budgets more important than ethics, and you read the lay of the land, which is to say that you know that politicians expect you to give primacy to budget cuts over and above anything else, including professional ethics, or the careers of those who work in the library service which you “head up” and “take responsibility” for. You make a choice, and it is always the same choice. Do tell me if I am being unfair in my analysis of the situation.

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