Operation Clearout

I’ve been having a major library declutter over the last month or so. Call it a Majestic Work In Progress (it feels like it at times!).

I’ve thrown out lots and lots of duplicate copies of things that were much used when new and don’t require multiple copies any more.  Lots of journal issues of titles whose importance declines radically with age or can be accessed quicker electronically for less storage space. Lots of things that are too dated to remain but without going shelf by space, and without going item by item round the shelves, would probably have escaped attention for a while yet. I have scythed through what I have in off-site storage too while I was at it…

I have manhandled stock around to get things on shelves in the right places that wouldn’t fit before, or so that I can get things out of storage (hurrah!) onto that shelf I always envisaged for them in the correct place in the classification sequence. I have made space for 2013 to sit for all the continuing publications.

In this process - which involves some weeks of determined bravery, valour, many bin bags, and a lot of sitting down afterwards – in the shelves I’ve found baffling amounts of sweet wrappers (not mine, honest!) lurking behind books, all kinds of half-written abandoned notes (also not mine). I’ve removed scores of sticky tabs with scribbles on them from books by people who may, or may not, still be here.

This week in burrowing into the deep recesses of my drawer unit on Operation Clearout I have discovered everything from notepads from deceased organisations, to labels from ten years ago, to miscellaneous business cards from people long gone. I’ve found reference stickers yellowing around the edges, ink pads and stamps for previous incarnations of the firm….I’ve unearthed abandoned umbrellas…

Unless items have a current use reason to stay, need archived because it could need revisiting yet for a 'point in time' need re the law, or is retained because it has some other particular purpose (e.g. a corporate archive) - throw it out.

Preferably often so it feels less like a military exercise requiring a cardboard medal of distinction that has to be done in December with Xmas all around in order to get at it for long enough to do it.

Worth it though (grins).

Where are all the corporate archives?

 Using a company's history

There’s an article reprinted in the December 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review on benefits of using a company’s own history as a leadership tool which is an interesting read.

It argues that a company’s history has a real value in informing the present and future. These include helping to underpin group values and beliefs, in knowing the past in order to better formulate workable plans for the future, as a way of phrasing change has been successfully achieved before, etc etc. Things well beyond key dates and celebrations.

It gives seven tips for getting history on your side which are about maintaining corporate archives as a function to mine for it, and about what can be expected to resonate most within and outwith a company both to be valued from them.

There’s some classic KM and / or risk management, some are things associated with archives or information services if they’re also keeper of said, some are more usual as marketing function.

Corporate Archives

Musing on this all it occurs to me that a lot of corporate archives are very much historical in use– never used for anything current or real-time, more for selecting from at or near anniversary’s or when particularly long-standing members of staff retire when the hunt goes up for the ‘year one’ photo.

Also, the ‘archives’ of lots of companies are more implicit than explicit, you could say in classic KM-speak they’re more within the heads of some of the staff than they are recorded in written or photographic form. Even if they are it tends to be patchy.

Corporate archives is not something that cries out ‘Resource Me Urgently / Spend Time Here’.  Often it’s the dusty boxes or the files in the corner. Often they’re patchy and quite what collection management policy existed to construct the collection that does exist would be anyone’s guess, there is often no ‘formal’ designated keeper or policy re, no central place for. Because their relevance is under-valued for present business because there is often no one in the upper echelons seeking to link past with present and future using them as an aid.

Linking business future to archival knowledge

Which brings me to another couple of sentences from the article.

“For a leader then, the challenge is to find in an organization’s history its usable past.”

Now that’s intriguing for all kinds of reasons. Sifting, selecting with care, sieving through for the bit that speaks to now / the agenda under consideration. What is there in the past that can articulate the vision for this specific future being undertaken. How does it help make the argument.

“The reality is that we are all historians when it comes to making decisions.”

As to that line… well it’s true to an extent, we all base decisions on prior learning, knowledge, experience. Most of us build up some form of overall surrounding context that grounds us and helps us. But perhaps the short-term is appreciated more than the longer-term in timescales of what is deemed relevant, which is often about how current the information is perceived to be.

Lost and inaccessible knowledge

Corporate archives tend to get very short shift, even if they do in fact exist. Try getting ahold of any document in a hurry that is published by an organisation that no longer exists and it soon becomes very apparent how few merged institutions keep anything deemed superseded, old, out-of-date, and how inaccessible it can be and dependent on someone’s memory who was there before. That’s even more so when it comes to internal information. What happens to the archives of all those places that simply go out of existence?  Are they given to some other archive or institution? A few are. Is there anywhere that would be relevant? Not always. Very often for lots of practical factors they reside in the bin instead as people are in a hurry, don’t have room, time, don’t realise that superseded doesn’t mean irrelevant or useless. Even if donated, can that place then afford to keep them, to make them accessible and promote them? If kept in-house will anyone not within the company ever know they exist? There are endless issues with corporate archives.

Finding a present tense value in Corporate Archives

So it’s nice to read something arguing for the use and relevance of corporate history in general beyond the historical context.  Properly maintained corporate archives have a place within that I would argue.  And that would only realistically happen if the corporate archives were seen to have an internal present and future business use beyond internal event celebration season and any wider research and access agenda.

If not now, then when

The Amusements of Seasonal Advice

The last two weeks of any December are full of Seasonal Advice.

Start of December is more about how to sum up and analyse the year thus gone for clues as to where it went right / wrong / a bit wobbly for the odd 8 (days /  months / apply as suits).

Second Christmas Day is over it’ll go into the how to formulate New Year’s Resolutions that are do’able, keep’able, and won’t (probably) half kill you in the attempt or send you into weary despair as they unravel about February while seeming to dance a merry jig of ‘told you so’.

Safe to say December is full of advice on everything from how to survive the season to how to live a better life for ever and ever afterwards. It’s kind of impossible not to read at least a bit of it as it appears just within in the corner of your eye.

Applying Artifical Constructs to Reality

Of course a reasonable person might well point out that the difference between 31 December one year and 1 January the next is completely artificial, modern, made-up, a social norm we all collude in applying to ourselves to keep us all in synch with one another.

Plus new habits formed on the darkest days of the year in the middle of winter are utterly ‘bound’ to be troublefree and easy (ahem – not).

If not now, then when

However, that said, one thing I caught somewhere out oh the corner of my eye (could be a newspaper, or online variant, or a blog, no idea) basically just said -

“if not now, when would you do it”

Which I liked enough to put it on here. Because I’ve always thought that’s true.

The Horrors of 'Sometime becomes Never'

Because ‘sometime, never’ is very easy to fall into otherwise, and it lasts a very long time.

It’s quicker to do things than it is to not do them. Not doing is endless, runs mercilessly into the dim and distant future beshadowing it, becomes hugely wearisome. 

It's kinder to ourselves to just say 'am I seriously intending doing this or not, if I am what am I doing about it'.

Doing at least is defined, has progression, will reach an end-point, can  move on from.

Seasonal Felicitations to the BL

As always at this time of year I'm feeling grateful to the British Library who do some lovely ecards.

I appear to have been making great and splendiferous use of the science fiction 'Out of this World' range recently. For which ability I am very grateful.

As a service to harassed busy seasonal humanity I cannot rate these highly enough!

Though it would be nice if the Xmas range  could be re-instigated for next year.... Anything that sends a tonne of folk flocking to the BL website in relived gratitude at Xmas can't be a bad thing.

Public benefactors and The John Rylands Library

The John Rylands Library

The most gorgeous library I discovered this year was The John Rylands Library in Manchester.

 It was hosting an exhibition I wanted to see.  So I planned my visit and went for the exhibition primarily.

However, once there, the building and collection is fascinating, so I found myself exploring the building and library top to bottom and wandering round the exhibition on the history of the Library.



Never got around to blogging about it at the time but meant to. 

So in seasonal end of year miscellaneous catch-up mode this seems very appropriate to talk about…  I enclose lots of photos and a few thoughts on what interested and amused me most about it.

A Gorgeous Space

It  is architecturally utterly gorgeous over several floors, it’s an odd mix of gothic cathedral in look, but without the religious symbolism much.  So lots of stone vaulted spaces, incredibly intricate design work in wood in the ceilings and tiny design detail, and gargoyles and other statues abound.





Working Library

It's still a working library (main reading room photos above) as well as being open to the public, and it was indeed designed to be modern in its time (using electricity, not gas for example, as that was thought to be better for the books). These days it hosts most of the Special Collections of the University of Manchester Library. Which is what brought me down to see an exhibition partially consisting of works from its papyrus collection.

Public Benefactor



Enriqueta Rylands, main reading room



Also, it's really unusual. 

It was commissioned by Enriqueta Rylands as a Memorial Library for the people of Manchester to use. It's dedicated to the memory of her late husband.

It opened in the Deansgate area of the city as an independent charity in what was then a hugely industrial Manchester.

Building Issues

In some ways the story of the Library is incredibly modern.  It took a week to design it (though the design changed continually throughout the building process), but it took ten years to build it and open it in 1900.  There’s something hilariously funny but rather wonderful in a way about a week to design (we’d take years) but ten years to build (somehow that chimes with the modern age somewhat closer to home!!). You can sense the frustration, problems, time and energy, the love and sheer money involved,  just in those two figures.



Element from exhibition text on the Library



Charitable Status

The John Rylands Library was an independent charity for a very long time.  It didn’t merge with the University of Manchester Library till the 1970s.

Purpose

The evolution of libraries, how they came into being, and when, due to what factors…  Always interesting.  I like the fact that this is a huge library commissioned for a purpose, and it’s still a working library now in a very different age, but it still fulfils the original purposes intended, and it still benefits the people of Manchester and beyond as well as the academic community it is now part of.

Worth a visit

There’s regular tours, so if you happen to have a few hours unaccounted for in Manchester, go in, and have a look round.  It’s a rather amazing place.  Plus, it's always nice to grin at a nice big ediface of a card catalogue in nostalgia mode!



Memories of the Browne system abound!



From Shared Cultural Services to Wider Shared Services

A few weekends ago I was unexpectedly musing to myself on shared services while sitting under a replica cast of an italian classical frieze, eating chicken sandwiches -




Frieze element, Harris Museum Cafe



- and gazing into the central lending library through the door opposite. As you do...(!)

Main Lending Library



Indeed, I was in Preston! In the café, in the middle of the Harris Museum, that adjoins through open doors straight into the public library.


Lending Library doorway off the Cafe area



 



View through Lending Library door



Shared Cultural Services

All in all the set-up brought back to mind a visit to Leeds Central Library a couple of years back. Leeds Central Library adjoins onto the Tiled Hall (gorgeous café) and you walk straight through doors in the Art Gallery seamlessly into the Art Library. So it’s a quite similar feel to it as in Preston, only more so.

Of course it’s not to say similar things don’t sometimes happen my (Scottish) side of the border. The public library in the basement of GoMA (Gallery of Modern Art) is a few streets away from my own workplace for example…

So there is a bit of a tradition of large spacious public buildings grouping together various different cultural services under one roof for ease of access and to form convenient hubs. Also presumably assuming that folk who access one of the services are also likely to be users of at least some of the others.

To…. Shared Services

Shared services as commonly understood term has expanded in reach a bit recently though.

On the purely public sector side it’s become a lot more associated with a wider local government delivery agenda. That may encompass services from job centres to housing advice to local taxation to the library all in one fairly open-plan space. Staff may work between various parts of the Council rather than just within one domain such as the library service.

It’s also become more common parlance in cross-sector delivery agendas too. Shared spaces that deliver public and school library services for instance, or access initiatives that share resources between university and public libraries, or wider regional groups of library services.

So mostly what I found myself thinking about as I ate lunch and gazed through into the Library beyond is that shared services isn't really new in some aspects. The ambit and scope in some of the current applications has been widened hugely though.

Following or Being Followed?

It was commented to me last week that libraries appear to follow me around.

There’s a lot in that.

Never quite sure where the borderline between what I consciously seek out, and what inadvertently finds me, actually is though. Perhaps librarians are just dab hands at finding reference to libraries and librarians.  Or, then again, perhaps it is just an inevitable consequence of the fact that libraries permeate all area’s and walks of life.

So we’ll take the last five days in my life and just look at the ‘unintentional’ list – things not actively sought out.

Last Friday – The St Andrew's Day Lecture with Val Mcdermid at The Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh on use of forensics in her writing. 

In which she also talked a lot about libraries and the need to support them and their impact on her and her career, on writers generally, and for the economy through the publishing industry.  Shouldn’t really have surprised me as I know she is a great supporter of libraries, but I’d gone in more in corpses and forensics thinking mode.

Last weekend - I picked up a novel to read (almost finished). One of the Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus books. In which I was not remotely surprised to find central Edinburgh libraries and librarian characters featuring as they often permeate the books.

However, to the normal National Library of Scotland and Central Library and Edinburgh University Library he’d even managed to add in an oil rig library. Which I wasn’t quite expecting. Had a very daft thought that I really wished he’d described it rather than walked the characters through or past. Which triggered an equally daft notion that I’ve never been on an oil rig library.  Any descriptions of oil rig libraries anywhere I wonder? Never read one.

Start of this week - My other half took an urge to watch some Porridge (the classic BBC tv comedy series about prison life starring Ronnie Barker).

I found myself going “ah yes, I’d forgotten this is the episode he manages to land the job as Assistant Librarian through his schemes” as I watched him making somewhat unusual use of one Book Trolley and a copy of Little  Women as he trundled it through the prison hospital. I don’t THINK there’s ever an episode with him actually in Slade Prison Library. But I could be wrong…

[And wrong I was, various episodes in Season 2 feature Fletcher in the Prison Library and going about his related activities. Everything from trying to get through the chitty to buy 'The Great Escape' (denied) to ordering book of precise width to sort the Governor's ricketty bookcase. I was thinking that the whole losing the paint enough times not to have to paint the library isn't exactly something that comes up much in real life, and then I remembered various stories down the years fof ingenious librarian DIY skills to patch ail'ing buildings and changed my mind a bit....]

So, whether libraries find me or I find them… I’m not always very sure. They’re still utterly fascinating though, real or invented.