Caveat lector: I am in training to become a librarian. This is a Library-Based entry and is likley to bore considerably anyone with a brain not made of sausage meat.

I am writing this entry from the public library in Barrhead, the location of my five-week work placement.

As I may have mentioned before, about 80% of this building is office space while the library itself appears to be a mere sideline. With so much red tape to maintain such a tiny and uncomplicated service, it reminds me of the Ministry for Administrative Affairs from Yes Minister.

Due to a cock-up in their scheduling this morning, I have four free hours in which to do very little. So I’m going to try to do some work, but it’s rather difficult to find a place in which one can concentrate. (Yes, this is a Library but only in the most loose and modern sense of the term). They don’t have a computer to offer me in the whole of the office section due to it being an apparently difficult and time-consuming procedure to procure me a password, and the public-access ones in the library are over-subscribed so I’m having to use a malfunctioning old analytical engine in the library’s ‘health annexe’. It has an infuriatingly sticky mouse. I’ve cleaned the dust out of it and everything but it still doesn’t work. Considering the location of this contraption worthy of Konrad Zuse, it really should come with a health warning: “Warning: use of this ancient contraption may result in increased stress levels and some degree of radiation poisoning”.

The health annexe, incidentally, is a small collection of freely-accessible books on physical and mental health – a noble and humanistic enterprise in theory but it contains a number of inexplicably positioned tomes, perhaps most notably a copy of Ray Mears’ Bushcraft Survival).

It’s noisy in here. Most of the noise is the squawking of staff at the counter. It’s cold. There are naughty kids literally running all over the place. I am episodically forced to listen to the one-way conversation of a passport photograph booth (“Please ensure your face appears within the red circle” etc). Half of the collection consists of soul-destroying detritus. And they wonder why no one uses public libraries any more.

I attended a library-based I.T. ‘basic skills’ class yesterday (at a different, slightly nicer, library in Giffnock). While a good idea in theory, it proved to be – in my opinion – fairly disastrous. the venue for the lesson was the local history room: a nice, old-fashioned part of the library with a real librarian at the desk, a card-index and perfect silence. There were three young guys in there sitting fairly far apart from each other and studying contentedly from Maths books (or possibly Physics – I’m not sure but it involved calculators). As we kicked off our lesson (attended by one elderly and clearly mad Jewess who smelled vaguely of cack), the three guys had little choice but to abandon all hope of study, for the nature of our work forced us to be a loud and intrusive presence. I can see why libraries are hoping to expand their remits with initiatives like these classes but seldom do these things fail to get in the way of existing and more worthy library services.

In 2001, the council decided to change the ways in which the local libraries were managed. Specifically, they pulled librarians out of their branches in favour of their working from the aforementioned offices here in Barrhead in order to ‘justify their professional status’. The trouble is, now that there are no librarians in the libraries, 17% (that’s official!) of the stock on the shelves shouldn’t be there (i.e. it was officially withdrawn from the collection as long ago as 2003) and over half of it is in the wrong place. Expensive measures are being taken to rectify this and library issues have decreased this year alone by 6%. But at least some professional statuses are justified.

I have to give a 30-minute talk to the managers of this library in two weeks time. Either I have to confront them by pointing out that their service is shit or I must lie to them consistently. My stress-induced eczema is exploding.