Edinburgh is ‘blessed’ with the National Library of Scotland. Words likely fail to express my feelings towards this particular institution, but I shall try anyway.
I have previously described the NLS’s attitude towards their readers along the lines of “Okay, so yes we are a library and as such we should let you touch the books, but if it’s all the same to you, we’d really rather not”. Add to this their ridiculously high prices for photocopying (10p per sheet) and their strict rules for the same – not so much copyright-related but more a matter of not allowing you to bend the spine of the book and then installing photocopiers where the glass plate starts about two inches from the edge so that it is technically impossible to photocopy anything without bending the spine – and there you have my main problems with these Lovely Helpful People.
So today I went in there to read the Geschichte der Sorben (Bautzen: Domowina, 1974–1979). I only ordered volume 1 as I really don’t care how the Sorbians fared under Erich Honecker. Of course they gave me the whole lot, all four heavy volumes of it. Why? No idea.
So I dutifully started reading, and in the back I found some maps. They were on loose sheets and they looked rather helpful: a map of the Sorbian language area around 1500 and one of the same around 1789. (Around, yes.) Time to photocopy!
Of course the bloody photocopier had to jam, as did the one next to it – because an institution like the NLS can’t afford decent equipment, I guess – so the office woman had to come and help. ‘Did you ask permission to photocopy these? No!’ (Said in a very kindergarten-teacher-telling-off-a-four-year-old tone.) The fact that it was only maps that were on loose sheets, that the books may be thirty years old but that surely not more than twenty people will have even THOUGHT of reading them in the past thirty years so that there absolutely is no danger of damaging them, and most of all, the fact that when I walked past that desk there was no one there to ask permission from, didn’t matter.
So here’s the plan:
I have previously described the NLS’s attitude towards their readers along the lines of “Okay, so yes we are a library and as such we should let you touch the books, but if it’s all the same to you, we’d really rather not”. Add to this their ridiculously high prices for photocopying (10p per sheet) and their strict rules for the same – not so much copyright-related but more a matter of not allowing you to bend the spine of the book and then installing photocopiers where the glass plate starts about two inches from the edge so that it is technically impossible to photocopy anything without bending the spine – and there you have my main problems with these Lovely Helpful People.
So today I went in there to read the Geschichte der Sorben (Bautzen: Domowina, 1974–1979). I only ordered volume 1 as I really don’t care how the Sorbians fared under Erich Honecker. Of course they gave me the whole lot, all four heavy volumes of it. Why? No idea.
So I dutifully started reading, and in the back I found some maps. They were on loose sheets and they looked rather helpful: a map of the Sorbian language area around 1500 and one of the same around 1789. (Around, yes.) Time to photocopy!
Of course the bloody photocopier had to jam, as did the one next to it – because an institution like the NLS can’t afford decent equipment, I guess – so the office woman had to come and help. ‘Did you ask permission to photocopy these? No!’ (Said in a very kindergarten-teacher-telling-off-a-four-year-old tone.) The fact that it was only maps that were on loose sheets, that the books may be thirty years old but that surely not more than twenty people will have even THOUGHT of reading them in the past thirty years so that there absolutely is no danger of damaging them, and most of all, the fact that when I walked past that desk there was no one there to ask permission from, didn’t matter.
So here’s the plan:
- The building that is currently being built on Crichton Street car park for Informatics will get a new purpose: an extension of the University Library. They will be connected through an underground corridor (which will also connect all the other buildings on George Square, something that is long overdue).
- All the books from the NLS will be transferred to the University Library, where we have sensible staff and sensible people handling books sensibly. (As opposed to crazy staff being paranoid that sensible people, who are handling books sensibly, will handle books craziliy.)
- We dump the computer geeks in the now-empty NLS building on George IV Bridge.
- Former NLS staff can work at Special Collections with all the old and decaying books that do demand some kind of extra care. Books from 1975 that have never been read before do not belong in this category!
So yeah, tomorrow it’s back to that oh-so researchers-friendly library to see how my Sorbian friends were doing after the German Farmers’ Revolts.
