The opening keynote for today is from Roy Clare CBE, the Chief Executive of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (Roy has only been CE for MLA for 9 weeks).

Roy is relating how when he started working in Museums, he was told ‘oh, we don’t do it that way, we’re a museum’. However, for Roy we are basically just people doing ‘stuff’ – and so their is a lot of practice that is transferable even though this might be alongside things that are unique to museums – perhaps the same is true of libraries.

Roy is saying that as professionals we have debates about the services we provide, and are really engaged with it – however we need to move the debate from inside the profession, to outside the profession. For example, Birmingham have put forward proposals to spend £193 million on a new Library together with the Birmingham Rep – but this doesn’t seem to have broken what Roy calls the ‘public surface’.

A few of the conversations I had yesterday touched on the differences between Public libraries and Academic libraries. My own feelings are that Academic libraries have a much more focussed customer group (staff and students of the Institution) and mission (support teaching research) – we may debate how we best do this, and I don’t think the answers are obvious, but the mission is relatively clear. One of my fellow delegates (from academic libraries) said yesterday that her ambition was the library should become invisible to the users – she wanted the users to get the resources they wanted with as little fuss as possible. This became a bit of a debate, and perhaps to a relatively provocative stance (surely not) – but the point is that this might be OK as a vision for an academic library, but would probably be deadly for public libraries. Lorcan Dempsey touched on ‘invisibility’ of library services in a blog post, having picked up the Macquarie University Library strategic plan which states "In this new electronic environment we aim to become ‘invisible’ – by
making our services and resources available in a seamless fashion
within research, teaching and learning workflows."

Roy just mentioning the ebook readers – saying the Sony ebook reader is a lousy way of reading a book, although it is the best electronic book reader he has used, it still looks poor next to the physical book.

Roy’s talk (or at least the topic) clearly stirs deep passions – as you might expect – some impassioned comments/questions to him on how public libraries ensure they are talked about, used, and funded.

(Roy’s description of Museums and Libraries as just a "group of people doing stuff" reminds me of the Dr Who quote "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect…
but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more
like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly…timey-wimey…stuff.")