'Surely the branches can take the local history material?'

Having read on Voices for the Library the excellent, if saddening, comments of Roger Taylor, the outgoing Performing Arts Librarian, on the loss of specialisms in Somerset libraries, it seems timely to tackle the issue of specialisms in Devon Libraries. Sadly, specialisms in Devon are going the same way as Somerset as in the new structure all the specialist librarian roles were, to use a wonderful piece of management-speak 'deleted', regarded as outdated and too expensive to maintain. As many of the specialisms were housed within the Exeter Central library, the directorate management appears to have misunderstood the 'Head of Department' tag given to each of the specialist librarians and decided that this was just departmentalism and created 'silos' within the building. This manages to ignore the fact that the Performing Arts Library and Westcountry Studies are both entirely separate libraries with county roles which happen to be within the same building as the main lending library. It also ignores the county nature of much of the work done by the Lending, Reference and Childrens libraries. The specialist staff in many of the larger branch libraries such as Barnstaple and Exmouth were also 'deleted' and deed superfluous to modern library needs. 

The quote which heads this post sums up the attitude of the directorate management as this is what was said when the county role of Westcountry Studies was put forward during one meeting regarding the restructuring. The manager in question, whom we shall call Mr Suit, seemed genuinely to believe that the material held in this exceedingly specialist library was in a small enough quantity to be able to be split up and moved out to the branches. He was also taken aback when one member of the Westcountry staff pointed out that much of the material was also rare and valuable! Where exactly Mr Suit thought Napoleon's death mask, the 100,000 or so illustrations, the endless newspapers or the enormous Burnet Morris index (a huge card index to a vast variety of local history references put together between the two world wars and bequeathed to the library service) should go one cannot imagine, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. But then one can also imagine that Mr Suit doesn't know of the existence of any of those items. It also had to be pointed out that many of the branch libraries just don't have the space to house local history collections as the pressure on storage and shelf space in every library is great, particularly as most do not have the luxury of a stack. The branches as it is frequently have to weed out the lesser used stock, which is often the more specialist material, in order to make space for new items. As it is Westcountry takes a huge amount of this material and adds it to its own collections in order that it is still available for the public to use. The Performing Arts library would also be well aware of this situation as it fulfils a similar role in taking ex-branch stock that the branches no longer have the space to keep. The branch librarians reinforced this view by telling Mr Suit in a further meeting that they needed specialist libraries to field the enquiries that they were not equipped to deal with and to ensure that the depth of stock and knowledge which the public expects is available. 

If you've never visited either the Performing Arts Library or the Westcountry Studies Library you may not be aware of exactly what they do, although you may have benefited indirectly from their services. If you've ever attended a family history workshop in a branch library, or if you've attended a concert or play performed by a local choir, dramatic society or orchestra, then you've benefited from their expertise. 

Performing Arts provides a county-wide service for sheet music, playscripts and specialist books about all aspects of the performing arts  - film, theatre, dance, television, radio, music of all kinds - and also provides this service to the entire country via the inter-library loans system. Performing Arts offers a hire service for sets of playscripts for performance and sheet music for both orchestras and choirs and therefore is often instrumental in the performances given around the county by countless local community organisations. The hire terms are pretty good, particularly when contrasted with the fees charged for hire by most publishers, and I suspect that if groups only had the option of hiring from the publishers, many performances would not be able to go ahead. As Performing Arts is part of a network of libraries similar to itself around the country, if they don't have what you want in stock the likelihood is they can find it for you. The only thing which stops them is a lack of availability which is usually resultant from conditions applied by the publisher. For example, you cannot get librettos - that's the script for a musical or opera - of Linonel Bart's 'Oliver' as the publisher still holds the rights on them. Likewise trying to find an orchestral set of Vaughan Williams 'Fantasia on Greensleeves' is virtually impossible as the composer was subject to a change in copyright law about 12 years ago which saw a number of composers works end up back in copyright. Incidently Performing Arts has about the only complete set of this work available for loan in the country. If you need 300 copies of the Faure Requiem, Ratcliff Novello edition, for a choral workshop, they'll find them for you from all over the country. This part of the service is free, all you do is pay for the hire of them for the period you need them. Oh, and they'll even send them out to your local library for collection if you want (quite often to the branch library's horror as 18 boxes turn up and they've no-where to put them...). They also offer advice and expertise as the staff know their stock well and know a thing or two about the subject matter. The staff across the years have been musician, actors, film-makers and enthusiasts and dancers, they often have a particular interest or love for a particular aspect of the performing arts and they know the stock inside out. They understand the importance of the right translation of a play or the right edition of a piece of music. They know what a BWV number is (its a number assigned to the works of J.S Bach which makes finding them rather easier), that there are several composers named Bach and that Haydn had an annoying tendency to write all his masses in Bb and name them three times... If you go and say 'I'm looking for a piece of music but I don't know what its called or who its by but it goes like this' and hum it to them or quote the lyrics, they'll have a damn good go at finding out what it is for you (and quite often manage it). Or perhaps you want some plays for your reading group to read through but you're not sure what sort of thing you want. They have a playset guide put together by the staff which lists plays by type, and more importantly, by the number and make-up of the cast. Looking for a comedy for 6 women and 2 men? There's probably one in the guide for you. You wouldn't get this service without the staff who know and understand the subjects in question and their stock. 

Equally, Westcountry Studies performs the same sort of task but for local history. Tracing your family tree and don't really know where to start? Westcountry Studies offers one to one sessions with a member of staff to get you started or help you out of a rut if an ancestor is proving particularly tricky to trace. Want to know more about your town or village or the street you live in? Westcountry will be able to provide newspaper cuttings, books and maps of the area - although of course for some of the tiny villages there isn't much to go on. The library basically does the other half of the Record Office's job - the Record Office keeps all the surviving documents for Devon, Westcountry keeps all the printed material. The collection is made up of books, maps, periodicals, newspapers, illustrations and photographs, pamphlets, articles and ephemera (all the stuff that doesn't fit neatly into another category - playbills, theatre posters and broadsides for example). The level of expertise on hand is quite extraordinary as the staff have a deep knowledge of the stock, local history and where else one can go for help. If they can't help you, the odds are they know someone who can. The type of enquiries they deal with can vary massively from family history to the origin of place names, the history of holiday camps in the region, earthquakes in the 18th Century, the settings of Jane Austen's novels or  the life of a local artist or writer. The holiday camps and earthquakes are genuine enquiries which the library has had, as was the query over Jane Austen's travels in the Westcountry. In each case the library was able to help, providing guides to sources, help on finding them and in some cases such as the earthquakes question, undertaking the search of 18th Century newspapers for the enquirer. Enquiries are often from abroad, particularly in terms of family history and often the enquirer has no other way of obtaining the information they need. If you look at the Devon libraries web pages, there is a link marked 'factsheets'. On the factsheet page there are a number of article under the heading 'local studies' - all of these were produced in-house by the staff to using library resources and their own knowledge and are a brilliant demonstration of the expertise the library provides. Or have a look at the Devon libraries Flickr page (www.flickr.com/photos/devonlibraries) which showcases some of the images in the Westcountry Studies library collection, as well as some really beautiful books from the Exeter Reference Library special collections. 

With the axing of the specialist librarian posts, some of this knowledge and expertise in the service is going to be lost forever. In terms of the Westcountry Studies library, they are set to lose two of their staff. That's two brains stuffed full of local history knowledge that are just gone. In each case the librarians in question have years of experience and amassed a vast knowledge right across the local history spectrum. In Performing Arts, at least one post will go and again the loss will be huge and impact across the county, particularly as the other service with Performing Arts in particular provides is the full cataloguing of all the song books in the county. The Performing Arts Librarian also has a particular knowledge of classical music and as such spends much time selecting stock for the library in terms of recordings and sheet music that would probably be otherwise missed. However, according to the consultation document for the restructuring "Some staff in frontline roles are undertaking stock selection and this may be preventing them from focusing their work on the delivery of high quality customer services." which totally misses the point of what Performing Arts, Westcountry Studies and staff in the lending, childrens and reference sections of both Exeter Central and the branch libraries are doing. In selecting stock according to their knowledge of both the subjects and the readership in their libraries, they are aiming to provide the best service possible in terms of stock for their readers. This is being dismissed as a waste of time and something which could be done centrally by either an automated system or someone who has no contact with the frontline in this way (I will point out that a lot of stock is centrally ordered, and this in no way detracts from the job the staff administering this do, its just that it is then focussed and supplemented by staff on the frontline). 

Sorry, this has become the longest post ever, but I wanted to ensure that you all understood what is being lost and why it is important. What the loss of specialisms represents is a drain of knowledge and expertise from the service which will ultimately leave the library users the poorer. The management at the directorate level cannot see this and instead see it purely in terms of numbers - that professional and specialist librarians cost more to employ than library assistants and therefore to save money they must be 'deleted'.