These days, libraries lack books and students lack learning, a university librarian tells Adam Branson
“I am a university subject librarian – or, as it’s sometimes called, an academic liaison librarian. My role is to unite people with the information that they need. In the days when I used to have a book budget, I would collect stock and buy books. Now I do a lot of what’s called information literacy work: I go into classrooms and teach students how to retrieve good-quality information from online subscription databases, which is the main way that journals are distributed these days.
Generally these journals are sold bundled together, covering a wide range of academic subjects, and students need to be taught how to structure research in order to get appropriate information. We also offer a desk enquiry service, so students can approach us in the library and say: ‘I can’t find this. How do I find that?’
A great deal of our work these days is teaching – and some of that is really almost remedial, because kids are coming into university without the skills that we would expect undergraduates to have. I’m also shocked at British students’ ignorance of their own language. I find that we have an awful lot of international students these days, and some of them have poor standards of English – but some arrive speaking much better English than our home students. And they all have a grasp of grammar. The poor English of British students shocks me – but I’m getting long in the tooth, and I can be a grumpy old woman.
In terms of higher education policy, the removal of polytechnics in 1992 got rid of a very valuable form of education that I think we sorely miss now. I worked for a polytechnic, and we were bloody good at what we did. It might have been boiler-making, but we need boiler-makers. Now we’re getting people who really aren’t suitable for university, but that’s all that’s available to them: there are no more polytechnics or boiler-making courses.
More recently, the new fees structure has made a big difference. Higher education now has become a business. When I first started, we spent time in conversation with people expanding their minds and horizons. But certainly since the introduction of tuition fees, our students have become our customers.
With the new fee structure, it’s all about getting bums on seats. As a result, universities are trying to invest in buildings and making everything lovely and shiny for the students, but they’re cutting back on things like libraries. It’s shocking: surely the fundamental thing that a university does is provide knowledge?
Certainly, our spending power is way down now, which means that we’re cutting back on all but the bare essentials. Students are paying outrageous amounts of money, and having to work to support themselves at the same time. To then be put in a position where we can’t give students what they need is deeply embarrassing and very upsetting.
Part of the problem is that we’re now tied in to these huge online packages, and we can’t cut their content despite the fact that some of it may not be relevant. We get the full set whether we like it or not, and it would be more expensive to buy the individual journals that we do need. We’ve reached the stage now that we’ve cut every print subscription that we can – they’re like hens’ teeth now – so that we can pay up-front for all of the electronic subscriptions.
I’m worried about the library profession. We’re seeing the closure of public libraries, and the rise of the idea that you can use volunteers to run a library. Certainly, people like me aren’t being replaced as jobs become vacant. Our staff turnover rate is very low these days, so we’re all becoming increasingly expensive, and the little money the library receives goes on the wage budget rather than on books.
I had an email from a PhD student recently who said that she’d suddenly understood what librarians do. She said that as an undergraduate she had thought that all we did was put the books back on the shelves; in studying for her PhD, she’s now realised what we’re here for. That says something about how poor we are at publicising what we do. We’re working a lot harder at it now, though, trying to get people to understand that we lead people through the maze of information until they find their true path.”