Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

February 2008 Volume 6(1)

President's perspective

Prepare to raise your voice

Libraries provide solutions at many levels, says new CILIPS President Alan Hasson.

Just after the New Year I attended a meeting of the CILIPS Council, where I was presented with the President’s Medal. The next day a photo appeared on Slainte of the presentation. I was feeling pretty good about myself. And then came my meeting with the Library Services Manager for Scottish Borders Council, Margaret Menzies, who was in Dennis Skinner mode. More of which anon.

To those of you who don’t know me, a brief resume. Following university, I started work in the Special Collections of Glasgow University Library, recording – cataloguing would be far too grand a word – collections of Whistler-related letters and ephemera. Towards the end of the project the offer of a position in the Sudan came up, and Kate and I went off to Rufaa, about 100 miles up the Blue Nile from Khartoum. I retain from that time gratitude and respect for the vast majority of the people we met, who were generous with what they had and made a stranger welcome. I also became very aware of just how privileged Scotland is in having local and national democracy (annoying though that can be for us bureaucrats) and that the BBC is a jewel. On my return I started working for Renfrew District. I had the good luck to be sent, as my first professional post, to help open the new Ferguslie Park Library in a team which included librarians, youth workers and teachers. It was what a public library should be, indeed what local government should be: a service which evolved, was innovative, above all it was relevant to the local population and therefore was heavily used by them.

I had various positions in Renfrew District, before being appointed as Chief Librarian at Cumbernauld and Kilsyth and then at local government reorganisation as Head of Service in East Ayrshire. A prominent lesson I learnt in all these and later posts was perhaps simple, but it’s a constant: structures and policies, checks and balances, are there to support the talent of staff to deliver to the needs and wants of their communities, but, they have a siren like danger of becoming the prime concern.

I came to the Scottish Borders in 1998 and since then have changed jobs four times. Currently my title is Head of Community Services, which takes in Libraries, Museums, Arts, Community Learning and Development, Sport and Physical Education and various multi-disciplinary initiatives.

For the next year in my role as President, the baseline has to be the celebration of 100 years of SLA /CILIPS. Officers of CILIPS have been putting a lot of work into preparing for the year, including some good old fashioned paper-based research and threads of continuity, for instance getting young men to read, are constants through the huge changes.

It’s a bit of a cliché to say we live in a time of change, but, clichés become clichés because they are accurate. And this is a time of change. Globalisation, the changing consensus on the role of the state and the continuing process which is devolution, are simply some of the more prominent factors which are affecting us. All have an influence for colleagues in all our sectors. Since I get the opportunity to write a few of these columns, let me pick one of these for the time being.

For us in libraries devolution provides a paradox. The level of access we have to decision makers, both at a political level and on policy issues is unprecedented. We have an opportunity, already being exploited, to get over the message that libraries are a solution to many challenges on many levels. But the opportunities only remain as long as we have a strong, united, Scottish-focused organisation which speaks for the sector as a whole.

This sets the context which I believe may be the biggest challenge for our profession on an organisational level: how it adapts to the new context of increasingly differing priorities and delivery within a devolved UK. To its credit CILIP has recognised, to a much greater extent than some in our sector, that the mechanisms that were appropriate in a unitary UK are no longer those which fit a federal structure with four centres of government. Whether it has recognised the full meaning of this change is still moot. Whether it can continue to evolve, events over the next year or so will give a clearer picture of. We here in Scotland will have to be prepared to make our voices heard in influencing our UK-wide organisation, to ensure that we are redesigning to a purpose which suits all our needs rather than moving some organisational deckchairs on an outdated, centrist model.

Within Scotland it will be interesting to see if we can make it clear that libraries across all our sectors are a ready-made tool to make Scotland,wealthier and fairer, smarter, healthier, safer and stronger and greener.

I look forward to seeing as many of you as I can in the next year, to hear how you are making your voices heard. I hope that I will come up to the standard of my predecessors in this presidential role and not fit the image that first crossed Margaret Menzies mind on seeing my picture, of a Victorian mill owner...

Information Scotland Vol. 6(1) February 2008

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Last updated: 16-Jul-2008