Information Scotland

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

December 2008 Volume 6(6)

Librarians do the ton

A poem by Colin Will

Written for, and read at, the CILIPS/SLA Centenary Dinner, 24 Oct 2008.

This land, where edge and centre
come together, where Scots Pine flourishes
in a silicon glen, where Shetland and Skibo
are as close as Durness and Dunbar,
Linlithgow and Luncarty, this land today
marks and maps a century.

100 years for the trees of knowledge
and the trees of refreshment
to grow, bear branches, clump in copses,
forests, associations, national
and across the world.

Four centuries of printed paper,
a few short years of digital data,
formats for storage and retrieval –
the book; the shelf; the stack;
the library, the sums of more
than one and nought;
the hyperworld of connections
and indexes, then a knowledge base
was born; a bookly band
formed itself in Scotland,
held out hands to the wider world.

This group of braw bibliophiles,
earnest lenders, storytellers,
custodians of culture with open doors
for all definitions of that word,
all denominations and the innominate;
orderers, Borderers, borrowers and buyers
busy bees, bawbee-coonters;
learners and loungers,
astronauts and gastronomes,
poets and ploughboys,
scholars and browsers,
idealists and pedagogues,
altruists and clock-watchers,
agreed to work thegither
for the common weal.

It’s still so today, we gather,
each with individual visions
but a single purpose,
to “Rax That Buik”
or “Rax That Info”
to whoever asks,
whysoever they need.

The founders were no different
from us, grounded in bookfunds,
biscuits and tea, not Big Folk, just
big-minded, and which amang us
has ony less conceit o wirsels?
We’ve served our time,
trained in Dewey and bibliography,
learned the special meanings of ‘cat’ and ‘class’,
aside from the zoopolitical.
We breathed deeply and swallowed
the indigestible – budgets, spreadsheets,
human resources, health & safety,
while balancing the books,
our stock in trade.

We’ve cherished our staff
nourished our readers,
anointed our bosses
with ambrosial malts –
come on, they all did it –
met up in Peebles and elsewhere
to warm the social bonds
of fellowship, and plan
the services an unguessable
demographic would require.

We’re in the vibrant hearts
of our communities,
and always have been,
and ‘Wheesht’ is a word
long banished to the library’s
haunted wing.

We’re the ones that cantilevered out
the information superhighway
from the buttresses of Carnegie,
one profession in a nation
that’s never stood still,
reserved its laurels
for the deid stane busts
o the unco guid.

A hundred years, eh?
And fit for the next?
I think so, in fact I’m sure of it.
We’re protean, polymorphous,
a multiplex of possibilities.
Show us a tabula rasa and we’ll
write on it. Show us a book
and we’ll lend it. Show us
a library and we’ll fill it.
Show us – no don’t show us –
let us show you,
how to adapt to a people’s needs
and give a century more of service.

Here’s tae us!
Wha’s like us?
Damn few,
An we’re a’… lightly foxed.

Information Scotland Vol. 6(6) December 2008

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Last updated: 22-Jan-2009