End of the librarian? Council cuts and new tech push profession to the brink

In my youth I spent a lot of time in libraries and to my recollection, there were various staff roles. There's a lot of labor involved in running a library and most of it was done by clerks and pages. Actual librarians were somewhat scarce and they weren't just shelving books, a lot of their responsibilities were pretty high level, such as assisting patrons with research, designing the library's various educational programs, and curating collections of significant works.

I can see how automation features like self checkout could replace some of the pages and clerks, but not the librarians. If for instance a journalist or historian (or anyone as it's a public service!) is doing research for their work, and needs to access the microfilms of old documents, the librarian is there to assist, and their function is invaluable - their existence is an investment by our society in increasing the accessibility and accuracy of facts. It seems like we need more people performing that function in the modern day, not less.

My local library service in England has had the "Open Access" scheme in place since before the pandemic.

I don't think there have been any major problems with it.

You need to go through an induction course on things like fire safety, then you use your library card and PIN to enter the building out of staffed hours.

It's very convenient to be able to go at any time from approx 08:00 to 19:30 every day.

The "tailgating" problem is a little overblown - you're encouraged not to let others in, but they know that you can't do anything to stop it, and they don't expect you to put yourself in any danger.

There are still staffed hours throughout the week, and these work on a sort of rotation so that a neighbouring library will likely be open if your local one is unstaffed.

https://beta.southglos.gov.uk/open-access/

Meanwhile Sweden and Finland are investing in their public libraries and these actually look cook

Realistically how much money are they even saving trying to cut librarians? They couldn't trim the fat somewhere else in the budget? Seems like a waste of time and money to try and "automate" this when they can find the funding elsewhere

For a bit of context, "Nearly one in 10 English councils expect to go bust in next year"[0]. Which means they're forced to make brutal cuts across all services. It's not necessarily that they don't like librarians.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/28/nearly-one-i...

> Officials in some local authorities are proposing that libraries can be operated at times without any professional librarians, relying on self-service technology, smartcards for entry and CCTV.

Like Amazon's "Go" self-service stores, which are working out so well for them?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-power...

My local library inherited the staff from other libraries that closed well over ten years ago. This means they have a constant staff of circa 5 people, meanwhile they do no real outreach into the community nor are they friendly, and I am fairly certain they get fewer than 10 people through their doors each day. I believe that libraries are an essential public resource, but I don't think it’s productive to have resources that are essentially beyond scrutiny as that in turn leads to a very poor service.

There are two kind of issues here: one is the preservation of human information fully knowing that sparse books are hard to change/destroy, while digital information on centralized sources is terribly easy to change, and we all know the power of information, so the interests of some to temper it for a large variety of reasons; the other one is the need of a sustainable economics. In certain period of prosperity even low output activities might be tenable, in a deep crisis they tend to be untenable.

libraries need to be looked at from a human perspective because looked at from a business perspective libraries are purely cost centers.

All the hallmarks of a poorly thought out proposal. With the decision made purely on assumed cost savings, which the article gives several clear examples of those being highly unlikely to realised.

> Library users with smartcards will be monitored by CCTV to ensure people do not “tailgate” into the buildings.

Seriously? How do they think a camera can prevent tailgating?

Total COVID-19 expenditures in the UK were £310 billion to £410 billion according to official figures. While BoJo was partying during lockdowns.

The same BoJo was very enthusiastic about financing wars and torpedoing peace agreements.

But financing open access libraries? Hell, no! People might start to think on their own.