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End of the librarian as staff sacked for automatic check out machines

September 29, 2009 - 7:15am — Blake

The Tory-run council defended the decision saying it was part of a wider plan to cut millions between now and March next year. But the plan, disclosed yesterday, has been criticised by staff and locals.
"Lots of staff feared for their jobs because of cuts, but no-one dreamed they would be replaced by a machine, one library assistant said. "

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September 29, 2009 - 2:10pm — Anonymous

Cost savings

So ... they can afford the up-front costs? And good luck with the media.

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September 30, 2009 - 2:21pm — Anonymous

It will be interesting to

It will be interesting to see how much of the collection just walks away...also given the non tech savvy nature of elderly patrons and their voting patters you can bet the Tories just cut their own throats come re-election time.

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October 1, 2009 - 10:45am — Anonymous

Collection won't walk away

As the books will probably be rfid tagged and so set off alarms if 'walked off with'.
Cambridge (UK) Central Library has just repopened after more than 19 months closed (building work, problems, builders going out of business etc) and they have automatic checkout and return machines and they are bloody marvelous. Yes when it's a busy day I'm sure it'll be more work but so much better than the way it used to be that required knowledgable staff to scan and stamp books rather than dealing with queries.

I do wonder how they are going to self borrow cd's, dvd's etc as you need to pay for them, so (as with CAmbridge) for some things you are still going to need members of staff. But generally it actually releaves staff to deal with customers. What the council is doing is using the automatic checkout machines as an excuse. They could do it anyway but then more work would have to be done with less people. This way they make the system more efficient, reduce staffing costs but keep the same level of work. The service would have been better if the relvent staff were allowed to stay but you why go for a better service when you just want to save money.

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October 3, 2009 - 11:05pm — leeb

Librarians not valued

This just demonstrates how valued librarians are to governments. They don't blink an eyelid replacing librarians with auto checkout machines. Obviously, governments think that's all librarians do - checking out... and checking in. How do we demonstrate to our governments that librarians are more than just checkout people? Definitely by not doing things that they, and other lay people, don't understand, e.g. MARC, Dewey, LCSH, all foreign to them. Librarians should start talking about things that everyone understands, e.g. HTML, open source, web 2.0, relevance ranking in searching, semantic web.

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October 3, 2009 - 11:34pm — StephenK

Wait

You wrote: "Librarians should start talking about things that everyone understands, e.g. HTML, open source, web 2.0, relevance ranking in searching, semantic web."

I would imagine the general public, let alone rural populations, do not have any clue about any of that either. They know what Twitter is because they heard about it on Oprah or on CNN. The only way they'd hear about open source is if Fox News Channel gave a daily time slot to Richard M. Stallman with an interesting foil.

Filling a teacup with a firehose spewing complicated concepts is nice but ultimately counter-productive. Breaking things down into descriptions of tasks would be more helpful. From what I've seen of watching levy campaigns start then die at the ballot box, voters are more interested in the "how" rather than the "why".
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Stephen Michael Kellat, MSLS
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