Influencing the Elected Member on Libraries: : Proceedings of a Seminar Held at Stamford, Lincolnshire, 23 May 1996

Citation

Hendry, J.D. (1998), "Influencing the Elected Member on Libraries: : Proceedings of a Seminar Held at Stamford, Lincolnshire, 23 May 1996", Library Review, Vol. 47 No. 1, pp. 47-47. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1998.47.1.47.3

These two seminars were held within a few weeks of each other. Both topics reflect the issues of the day, yet both were relatively poorly attended. In each case there were 21 attendees, of which five or six were chairmen, speakers or represented the organisation. Clearly there will be, from time to time, seminars on first class and significant issues that for no good or obvious reason will be poorly attended. A more likely reason, however, may be the substance and the quality of the papers contributed. What, for example, are we to make of a paper, by an elected member, who is chair of his Council’s Information Committee, though this does not include libraries? Particularly when his contribution, as printed in these proceedings, runs to three lines. A footnote tells us, “This speaker did not provide a written paper. This text represents a summary of his contribution”! The exclamation mark is mine.

The first “paper” was given by the chair of the Library and Museum Sub‐Committee of Buckinghamshire. It runs to 12 pages, seven of these are diagrams. Much of the rest consists of “bullet points”. Did this chairman, Cllr John Oakes, write and produce this paper? Only David Liddle’s paper, the Chief Officer’s View, is informative and of substance. And he has taken early retirement.

The proceedings on the Private Finance Initiative are little better. They open with a remark that “the DNH and its predecessors have done much to stimulate good and helpful relationships between libraries and the private sector”. This reviewer was not aware of this.

The first paper, by Peter Rousseau, on PFI, runs to five pages of bullet points. The next paper, by Renata Drinkwater, runs to five pages, too: three of bullet points, two of diagrams. Are overheads to be the intellectual imperators of well argued prose and discussions in this profession? The next paper, by Peter Beauchamp, Chief Libraries Adviser to the DNH, opens with the phrase, “I am not sure I am terribly convinced about the PFI, yet”. The only well argued, properly recorded and competent paper comes from Patrick Conway, Director of Libraries and Arts, County Durham.

For many years the Stamford Seminars, as they were known, were highly regarded as stimulating professional debate and discourse for senior library professionals, under the formidable intellectual wit and guidance of Alex Wilson. The evidence of these proceedings, of May and June 1996, is that Stamford and Capital Planning has lost its way. I hope and trust that this loss of direction is a temporary aberration.