Rozhovor se členem IFLA Ianem Stringerem. Část II.

Rozhovor se členem IFLA Ianem Stringerem. Část I. 

G: We have read that you are an Information coordinator, what does it mean, what do you really do? You have got many materials. It´s a shame that our readerss couldn´t see the materials.

IAN: I do the website - to start with, so that means everything, so you must look up the website: http://www.ifla.org/ and then you go to the public libraries website, so you will see there´s a newsletter and you can download the newsletters - they go back twelve years, so that´s one thing I do. I do the information brochure, that we are sending out. It´s in four different languages this information document. It´s on the internet again you can download it. Sorry it´s not in Czech. But we have got it in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. And we hope we do it Swedish for this year´s conference.

When there´s any questions to IFLA and public libraries of which there are many I get a direct contact from IFLA and then I use it to pass them on to someone who knows the answer. So I am the coordinator - I am not the guy who is answering, unless you go to see some mobile libraries - that´s my specialism. But for some reason, mobile libraries get more questions than anything else. I think because it is such a specialism. So they go for help quicker than running a public library where lots of people think: "oh, I can´t run a public library". Probably wrongly.

The vision is, that mobile libraries are hard to run so they do come for special help early. So I get probably one inquiry a week - about half of which are in English and the rest are in French, German, Spanish. Fortunately we have French, German and Spanish speakers on the committee so I can put it down to line to someone at least to translate the question so that we can do the answer and then translate the answer. I have a particular amount of French this last year, coming from Africa. So 2 years ago we had put a thing on the website to say that we have got funding for Africa and even there´s a long time since it is finished, we still get in people the good news has passed through.

A lot of people just won a donation... they think IFLA is a charity, which is certainly not and we cannot just keep donations, we need it. So I do a lot of request for donations and I do get an awful lot of peculiar requests. People think that we can answer on any subject. I use these to pass it round the committee to comments and the committee replies. So e-mail is wonderful for this. It can be sent round the committee within 24 hours because the time difference everywhere as we have said.

G: So we know that there are many other projects which are in competence of your Public Libraries Section. Could you tell us some information about this project? I know that it´s not your specialisation but maybe a few words.

IAN: We have been doing the public library guidelines and we have got that published in about 20 languages now and the sheer hard working in publishing them in different languages was unbelievable and also some people make a charge for that. We are trying to get members of our committee were possible to translate as part of the job. But we had been very successful in doing the far eastern languages, a lot of the Indian languages. One of our past chair - John Lake, man who´s got a contact for the right person in India who put up lots of different languages. We have done help for lots of places in times of disaster.

John went out to Sri Lanka and did a lot of work for them. Primila Gamaga, who´s the Sri Lankian librarian on another committee has got help and organised help and she has done a lot of help herself. When there was an earthquake in Haiti we got lots of emails round and translate into Spanish and there has been another disaster in Spain. I can´t remember which way they were... So it´s great having a committee, that speaks lots of different languages and that can get things round.

T: Do you have some other ideas on project which can help people in bad case?

IAN: Yeah, as I said earlier, it´s the one about people online and I think that getting online is a big thing. At IFLA last year I spoke to another section which is teamed with partially sighted people and this is a problem of Talking books. Talking books at the moment most people get them either on cassette or Cd and the word of the music industry is that these books are going to die. So the library will need to wake up to the fact that all books need to be downloadable in a format for a blind person. I have done a lot of work with this, my son is an IT specialist we have been going round, giving courses in that but I have to work with the IFLA committees on downloads and I think downloads are just not going to be an issue for blind and partially sighted people. They are going to be an issue for the whole library world and we need to make pre-vision to see what libraries in fact are going to do.

Books exist on library shelves, when the people actually come to the library or whether the library will just be a website that you click on to. So I think librarians have got to be aware of this and trying to maximize use. It´s alright saying that now everybody has internet at home but not everybody can use internet at home. And you could said that everybody has got books at home but we still manage to have libraries for hundreds of years. So I think that´s the really be challenge - it´s the downloads. And I think it´s your responsibility - not mine :-).

G: Tom, I think you could have a question about some virtual worlds and libraries there.

T: Today it´s emerging technology 3D worlds and a second life if you know and we are doing our virtual campus in my school, so it´s just a question - what do you think about this technologies.

IAN: Well I think librarians have got to be quicker off the mark. So many librarians I know are still saying I want my library to be full of books. There is a big amount of people out there who want their libraries to be full of books but the reality is there´s a growing number(....) can go with both media and gradually it will die out I think. Just as some jarred books had died out as a sort of person had died out. When I started at the library the most popular fiction genre was reading about the second world war and the cowboy books and now the same people are still reading them but they are all now 80+ and the younger generation just don´t read the same extent. So as that as naturally died out so I think the books will die out. I would be happy to be wrong, I do have a sneaking suspicion that if you would told people in the computer world that actually you can get something that didn´t need battery power and that just can be put in the back-pocket and it could be read in the swimming baths, on the train... they might think twice.

But as I have said I have been doing a lot of courses on virtual downloads and in fact a lot of the problems are not the technical problems - they are the publisher´s problems. The basic problem is at publisher - as to make money to make a living. And without making  money, he won´t make a living so you have got to give the publisher an amount of money that covers what he is doing. When you have a talking book - a CD - it´s a tangible thing. So - two libraries. A big one and a small one. The big one buys three copies, the small one buys one. That´s a ratio that everybody can understand. And the publisher can publish knowing that´s the ratio. But when you have downloads, it´s one download at a rent, so how is a publisher going to make a three-times as much money as from this library. And that´s the equation. What you could do is say that this library has a population 600 000 this has 200 000 we will charge them three-times, but different cities have different rates. The small library might use a lot more books than the big library because it might be rich people in the area with lots of leisure time or lots of students - the other might be coal-mining town when hardly anybody reads. So it´s unfair to charge... So that´s the equation. So it´s all about: "Not - can I do it but - may I do it!"

And that´s the big question, so if we have downloads we can download onto MP3 players. People of a certain age can´t really use an MP3 player, they can´t use docking  stations... do you understand what I mean, which makes it like a big tape-recorder. Once you have loaded the MP3 - that could belong to the library not to the customer and the library could lend out MP3s. Then if you loaded 10 books on the MP3 and it goes to costumer 1 then it goes to costumer 2, but how many times they have the right which allows them to lend it round? Because if you pay for the rights once, one library might lend it 10,  another 200. If it were as with books - to lend to a hundred- you would need to buy at least 4 copies. So that´s the problem - it´s not "can I do it - but - may I do it!". The publishers have got to think this through. They all (In Britain certainly) were a bit fast on the mark. In train to get us all into categories and do certain things and now they are finding that the reality is - it doesn´t work like that.

What has happened with online reference work in Britain? At first - it was the matter - if you want Encyclopedia Britanica online (that´s the big british encyclopedia) they said - it used to cost as a book 2000 pounds per library. So if you´ve got 5 libraries you would spend 10 000 pounds. They wanted the online version to cost about the same, but they found that some libraries haven´t bought the 5 they have only bought one and it was the same equation as I am saying. How did that this library have paid for ten and this paid one? And so they were saying if you get just one version it will be a 1000, if you get 5 it will be 2000. So a poor library could only get one and that didn´t seem fair. Because you lived in a library that was poor and you should suffer as a user - that´s not fair. And so it has just been made agreement last year, that the government will guarantee an even price so that the Britanica will get the same price for every library, it doesn´t matter how many times... Every library now gets Britanica to use in every branch library. I don´t know whether that has happened in other countries? It certainly surprised me that we have managed to get such a good system going in Britain and it´s helping. I think one of the main thing why they agreed on Britanica is that they realised that if they didn´t do something - we would all use Wikipedia anyway. So WIKIPEDIA - that´s an interesting line 

it´s what me and my son were doing on the courses. My son is profoundly following Wikipedia and most librarians would be profoundly against Wikipedia . The fuel is of course that the Wikipediea is done by the people and for all the people.

So there was an experiment, when we did the course last year, we looked on Britanica and Wikipedia about a singer you may have heard of called Michael Jackson. This was the week after he died, when we did our course and of course on Britanica it didn´t say he died yet. They didn´t know. The date was on Wikipedia, of course. It was full...

We also looked at  the capitol of North Korea - it is PCHJONG JANG and Britanica suddenly shows incredible American bias. The view on North Korea is very much one-sided. Wikipedia of course gets people from North Korea and China and the thing of PCHJONG JANG was so much better on Wikipedia. And I thought that was a good indication. Unlike most librarians of my age I am pro-Wikipedia. I think it´s the standard for a future, politicians can no longer manipulate us, because I feel things like Britanica are run by people to make money so their end product is:  "let´s make money" - it´s not "let´s give information out". Now, you could say that Wikipedia is also by people convinced on misinformation and that´s the danger of any website, but it´s the danger of any book. And certainly in the UK we have read books for years and now looking back at them is a terrible bias. I was brought up at time when we were told that the British empire was wonderful thing. We had slaves all over the world doing the best things for us and those books were seen as good! I mean that they were by people with solid names and still going. But now - looking back at them- they are absolutely unreliable. Well as I feel if it had been Wikipedia at that time well it would have import on all the poor people in South Africa or India growing tea for Britain and we would have seen them in different light.

T: I saw the pictures of mobile libraries. It´s really cute. Really nice.

Ian: Yeah, that´s the book I have written. You can certainly take copies of the magazine.

G: And I have got a question. How are the books in a mobile library protected before falling to the floor during the ride of the bus?

Ian: It´s a lot easier than you can imagine........ they just slide the sloping shelves and the whole way the book stays. The only time you drop books is if you are over two bumps in a row together. If you are over a bump the books jump up and come down but if it is coming down and there´s another bump - that´s when your book is over. I know that, I was a mobile library driver.

G: So it´s a great experience.

IAN: Oh yes. I have done it for about 6 years.

L. Nivnická: I don´t remember if you have mentioned how many mobile libraries operate in Great Britain?

IAN: 500 in England, 50 in Scotland.

G: Five Hundred?

IAN: 500 yes. About 35 in Wales and about 15 in Northern Ireland.

G: And is it popular with people?

IAN: Yeah, I used to run Mobile libraries in my authority and we did 600 000 books out a year. So that´s going something... We had authorities with about 12 or 13 mobile libraries... And in my authority there are 4 mobile libraries, all painted different colours. So if  you go to your mobile library stop on Monday...the first Monday it´s the red van, the second Monday it´s the green van, and then the blue van and yellow van. And so you can see that the books have changed because you have got different van. So the stock on the van like...eh...what could it be...12 metre vehicle...4000 books. So with 4000 books on the vehicle and another 5000 in people´s homes say you have 10 000 for a vehicle. With 4 vehicles you have 40 000 books, which is probably more than in a branch library. So they can be good. Mobile libraries as I have said they were camel libraries and elephant libraries.

T: Something about congress. What do you expect? What are the topics?

L. Nivnická: It is not prepared in detail yet but the main topic should be about types of library funds. So because today´s library must collect books, cd´s and other types... and I think this is the main topic for Sweden but another important topic is marketing for public libraries and also lifelong learning.

G: What do you appreciate the most on your librarian´s work? Is it possible to say it?

IAN: Yeah, it definitely is. You can go home at the end of the day feeling you have done worthwhile job and that you have changed somebody´s life and that you are dealing with people. You are not dealing with abstracts like money or litigation. You are actually eyeball to eyeball with people. So we had meetings about what we called outcomes. So an output is how many books go out to the library and outcome is what good they do and we have met all sorts of interesting little ones like the man who walked to the library for a book on repairing on Wolkswagen Beetle and drove back the following week to return the book. Only little outcome but that was change in somebody´s life over the next week.

So - things like... somebody coming and say: "Have you got a cookery book?" and next week brings you a cake. So it´s only a little way... but libraries change lives. And little things like that (driving your wolkswagen is better than walking)... for certain things. It´s that feeling, that you are a part of the community. Particularly when you are working in a mobile library or a branch, you get out there and even though you might not be from that area personally - for that time you are part of the community.

You learn all the things that are going on - you learn all about the marriages and deaths and romances and about children at school... to help somebody come through, to have people to come back to the library and saying: "Thanks for your book, my daughter has just got the first class on this Cambridge University!", which was what I got in my first year in library, that somebody got to Cambridge - it´s the famous University in England. So it´s the great feeling of working with people, because I have been on mobile libraries, I have actually worked on them in 8 different countries and that was the big surprise - how similar the people are face to face. Once you got over the fact that some live in mountains and some other live in deserts and that your mobile library might drive on the other side of the road or you might have travel for hundred kilometres to them - the basic problems are the same.

I was in Australia when new Harry Potter was launched and traditionally in Britain I always knew that it was a midnight event and so I thought - Australia is 10 hours ahead! They would end before they begin in Britain! But no. You won´t. It´s launched at 10 o´clock in the morning in Australia. So we were at the mobile library. We could take the books out the first day and not give them to anybody and it wasn´t until the second call the second day at ten o´clock, when we were allowed to give out Harry Potter. But by 3 o´clock children were coming on and said that they have read it already. So that was really interesting.

T: I have a special question at the end. On the internet I have found the statement:

The whole world respects librarians - make the most of it!

I think you have said it.

IAN: Yes.

T: What do you mean by that and why do you think so?

IAN: Librarian´s scene is non-political. Their scene is fair. We give out or should give out information not advice - so we never tell somebody - you must do this. We say to someone: "here is the case, here are the options, so if you want to know - just travel. The librarian can give you the train times, the bus times and the air-flights.  But the librarian wouldn´t say you must fly, because it´s quicker or you must go by train, because it´s greener. The librarian is sort of against that and famously through the ages - librarians have stood up against governments. I have personally stood up three-times against our government over issues about books.

We had a big Muslim author, who wrote a book, that the Muslim people found objectionable. I don´t know whether you personally know this - he is called Salmon Rushdie and he wrote a book and the Muslims wanted it to be banned. And the chief librarian had the meeting with other librarians and said: "do you want the book-banning in the library and we said that we don´t want any books banning in the library - it´s just like another and so we took it out. Famously I was returning on my mobile library one evening to find there was a protest in front of the town hall and I have to drive through the Muslim protest knowing that on the back shelves of my vehicle was the VERY book! Fortunately nobody thought." perhaps the mobile library might have be book on it". Otherwise I could have been in trouble.

The excitement to be a mobile librarian. I think the thing is that the librarian is quite a status - when you go anywhere, you go to company - you know - it´s acceptable job. For a man it sometimes look down on a bit - for somebody it´s the most boring job but I found it anything but boring! Because you are dealing with people and you never know what´s going next through the door with people. It´s not like been on a production line, sticking nails in piece of wood or something. It´s different every day. And I think that´s one of the joys - you never know what tomorrow will bring.

Just to end, perhaps, one of the saddest notes to say how you do affect people - when I delivered books (what we have called house-band library service - taking books to people´s home, when they can´t get out). I went to house and the husband told me that the wife was actually in bed but I could go into her bedroom take her the books and then you know come back the next time and he said: "but make sure they are good books, she has been given six weeks to live!" And so I had to go back to the library and choose the last six books of somebody´s life. And so I gave that problem to all my library stuff - what would you give to somebody who has six weeks to live and I think that shows how important the library is.

G+T: So we think that we can thank you for your interview. It was great to talk to you. Thank you.

IAN: Thank you. It has been my pleasure to come to BRNO.