Question: How many librarians does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Only one, but first you have to have a committee meeting.
Admittedly this is a rather old joke, but it’s one that sums up the British Library to a tee. However, in reading it, and in understanding its implications, you have just saved yourself the arduous task of ploughing through numerous archive copies of the British Library Annual Staff Report.
I’m not saying that the Library is completely beyond redemption. There was a period during the Eighties (when the Library shared a site in Bloomsbury with its rival, the British Museum) when the British Library was a good place in which to work. Admittedly, its curators were dry as dust and they bled their specialist subjects of all human interest, but the Library itself seemed a positive place in which to work, and if you worked hard you would eventually be recommended for promotion.
But all that changed during the Nineties with the introduction of performance-related pay and the move to a new site at St. Pancras. With that one move, the organisation became less of a national library and more of a computer-based digital data archive with a very nice public restaurant attached. And everyone wore a suit. They became buttoned-down people with buttoned-down minds. An institution that was once dominated by chartered librarians and cataloguers now became dominated by people in suits who held a Masters in Business Administration and could use all the accompanying buzzwords (I believe this is known as the "fake it until you make it" approach to career progression). And it was their job to spend their entire working day at meetings, eating chicken wings, looking at pie charts, touching base offline and engaging in blue sky thinking. So, like much of public life today the old British Library has become an anachronism. It has gradually become less of a public service and more of a business opportunity. In fact, ‘going forward’, I can see their gross margins increasing as their new high-margin products gain traction...
However, the important thing to understand about the British Library today is that it is still divided by a strong sense of class. Indeed, without that sense of class division, the books that are ordered would fail to appear on the reading room conveyor belts and the supply of books to the reading rooms would grind to a halt.
If you look closely at the layout for the new St Pancras site, you will notice that its design has been based upon a careful reading of the science-fiction novel ‘The Time Machine’, by HG Wells, and that is no accident. It is to keep the working class (i.e. the ‘Morlocks’ - those who do all the work) in their place, and that place is a couple of floors below ground in windowless bunkers while their managers (the self-obsessed and ineffectual ‘Eloi’ who live above ground in the bit that looks like a supermarket) attend meetings, order chicken wing sandwiches and debate who they would like to sack next. It is this ‘supermarket’ side of the British Library that is feted by the mainstream media as a ‘cool’ place in which to hold televised award ceremonies.
Prince Charles once referred to the new building as an ‘academy for secret police’, and he wasn’t far wrong. It is a well-known fact that there is no such thing as employee confidentiality at the British Library. My advice - if you have to take time off to have an operation for Spagbowl Disease or to have your lingual frenulum removed - is to keep it to yourself! If you tell your line managers first thing in the morning, the news will become common knowledge on all three floors of the Library by the time you break for lunch on the same day.
This building still gives me the jitters every time I walk past, but if you want to see a visual representation of what it is like to walk through the piazza into the main entrance and towards the ‘King’s Library’ every day, I believe I can help.
There is a scene in the 1960 George Pal film of ‘The Time Machine’, in which the Time Traveller (played by Rod Taylor) builds a time machine that’s powered by crystals and uses it to travel into the future. Having arrived in the future, the Time Traveller attempts to engage the Eloi in conversation while seated at a dining table in a large open air banqueting hall. ‘I don’t mind telling you’ he tells them, ‘I have come a long, long way and I would like to know a few things’! But the Eloi ignore him and continue eating their food.
Eventually, rather than engaging him in polite conversation, they show him a bookcase full of old books, hidden from public view behind a very old curtain.
Outraged at the way his beloved nineteenth century book culture has been allowed to disintegrate and turn to dust, the Time Traveller storms out into the open air dining hall and shouts:
‘You! All of you! I’m going back to my own time! I won’t even bother to tell them of the useless struggle and the hopeless future. But at least I can die among men’!
