Lines

On Wednesday 29 December it will be thirty years since the onset of my imposition-writing phase.

I had been working three months as a library assistant in the Inter-Library Loans office at the University of Sussex. I have forgotten most of the gaffes I made during that time, and cannot say which of them triggered the imposition. Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of gaffes made in the whole length of the autumn. But on 29 December 1980, having been presented for Christmas with an erasable ballpoint pen, and knowing therefore that I could minimise the waste of paper involved, I set myself the task of writing out, one hundred times:

I must not show off in the Library.

It cannot be said to have worked. I have memories of gaffes that resulted from showing off in Sussex University Library, and even in adjacent libraries, in the spring of 1981. Indeed, the imposition story itself came in time to be a sort of calling card. And the practice of writing impositions began to be habitual. In general they were a hundred lines long, but my most ambitious effort in this genre was five hundred lines, after missing a plane, on the subject of punctuality.

The phase ended as abruptly as it had begun. In 1987, I was involved in 'Walk for the World', an awareness-raising event run by the World Development Movement and, I think, fifteen other agencies. This involved a lot of local media work, and letters to celebrities, and co-ordination of walkers. After it was over, it seemed to me that some action was necessary if I was to come back down to a realistic view of my importance relative to the rest of Cambridge. An imposition seemed to be the very thing; and a text suggested itself:

I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.

I found some paper, and a pen, and settled down to write the above sentence, with 99 repetitions:

I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avo

-- at which point, quite unexpectedly, I found the situation so comical that I couldn't hold the pen, and had to admit that I had kicked the imposition habit.

I would like to mark its 30th anniversary in some way. I have toyed with the idea of using it as a fundraising opportunity, perhaps with a sponsored imposition (asking friends to pledge so much line) or a sponsored anti-imposition (pledging to tweet the text of an imposition one hundred times less the number of sponsorships received, so that 33 sponsors wd lead to the text's being tweeted 67 times). But I have not got my act together as regards a fundraising pitch, and so any donations made on 29 December will have to be wholly unconnected with this eccentricity remembered from my twenties. Maybe it's a project to consider for the 25th anniversary of the end of the phase, in June/July 2012.

Communication amongst librarians

How serious is the problem of non-communication amongst Cambridge librarians? The means of communication are there — a whole heap of them, in varying degrees of activity, including CULIB, the Cambridge Library Group, the Camtools Cambridge Librarians site, the Facebook Cambridge Liibrarians group, the ucam-lib-discuss email list, the brownbag lunches, the Arcadia seminars, the libraries@cambridge annual conference. So if we don’t communicate it’s not for lack of opportunity.

I raised this question in the early days of the Facebook Cambridge Liibrarians group. I sought people’s favourite instances of things within the Cambridge library landscape that

• should have been communicated & hadn’t been, & the consequences
• had been communicated particularly badly, & the consequences
• needed to be communicated now, & weren’t being, & the actual or potential consequences
• had ever been communicated particularly well

I’m trying to remember what examples of any of the above have been cited in the course of the communications arising from recent Cam23 activity.

Perhaps what’s needed is not new channels of communication, just bolder use of the existing ones. As Cam23 is showing, when we’ve something to communicate about, we do communicate.

Brown-bag 2 June 2010

The brown-bag discussion was lively. It's not in the nature of brown-bags to produce structured minutes, with resolutions and actions, and this one didn't. But the discussion never flagged, and I didn't have to throw in any of the prepared questions -- either to restart things or to get them back on track.

Highlights:

• an amazing cadenza from a school librarian, frustrated at the poverty of provision in school libraries and the effect she saw this having on youngsters' literacy
• speculations about what provision for online voting might do to re-invigorate CILIP's democracy
• disclosures about the number of backchannels of communication, within CILIP and within the Cambridge library world
• frankness about the need for librarians to learn new skills, especially programming skills
• pleasure in the progress of Cam23, one organiser and several participants being of the party

Ten people were present. I had perhaps placed too much faith in Twitter -- indeed, I can be said to have fantasised about the likely effect that announcing the event there might have on attendance. I had not ignored other channels, but I suppose what I had put out through them was either too early or too late. A fruit of Cam23 is a burgeoning of individual blogs by Cambridge librarians, including this one; it'll be interesting to see how far we come to communicate as a result.

Next brown-bag will be at 13:00 on Wednesday 7 July, hosted by Libby Tilley in the English Faculty Library. See you there!

Brown-bag on Phil Bradley's CILIP 2020 post

Today's brown-bag lunch for Cambridge librarians will be at 13:00 in the Archaeology Department's South Lecture Room. Note that that's not where librarians' brown-bags have been held before. Enter building by Museum door in NW corner of courtyard, & get up to first floor, & you'll see South Lecture Room by the top of the stairs. See map.

Grist will be a blog post from internet guru Phil Bradley.

Phil Bradley is a regular in Update, and this particular post is on what the librarians' professional body CILIP might be like in the year 2020. He is daring CILIP to be something very different from what it is today. Here's a typical paragraph:

"I want to see CILIP get it wrong. I want them to make mistakes, and try things that fail. I want this for several reasons -- if they fail, and I can see how they have failed, it means that the rest of us can learn from them, and hopefully won't fail ourselves. If they fail, it means that CILIP is exploring and experimenting. Failure comes out of attempting something, and without failure you don't get success. I want CILIP to throw caution to the wind and to realise that getting it wrong isn't a bad thing, and that 'getting it right' isn't always the best result."

So -- whether you're in CILIP, or not in CILIP, or even if you haven't heard of CILIP -- come at 13:00 with your thoughts about that way of doing things, and that way of being a professional body, and what you would look for, or what you shun, in a professional body.

And the bonus of Betty's Tiffin from the CLG recipe book, recipe by Patricia Ward, cooking by Clare Baker.