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EW Year, same old Mediawatching – and in the interests of sustainability, a recycled intro as well.
Welcome to 2022 and more of the same from Mediawatching Towers, as we look ahead to a bright future, where Covid is nothing more than a bad memory, lockdowns are a thing of the past, and libraries are at the beating heart of every community. So, what better way to kick of the new year than with a book set hundreds of years in the future, with advanced drones, a shrunken civilisation, and cloned personalities that can be uploaded and borrowed. Adrian Smith gets in touch to direct us to late sci-fi writer Gene Wolfe’s Interlibrary Loan, which follows E. A Smithe, a deceased mystery writer whose personality is available to loan – a borrowed person, not a legal human. This follow-up to A Borrowed Man sees Smithe’s personality taking the route of an inter- library loan, leading to a little girl trying to save her mother.
Moving from the realms of sci-fi back to the real world, and Ray Ward has been in touch to let us know about author Malorie Blackman, who has been in the news, singing the praises of libraries. In a piece for the Evening Standard she is asked what she would do if she were Mayor for a day – her answer: “I’d fight against each and every public library closure. Local authorities should be given more money for ... provision of a proper library service with proper qualified librarians. I was visiting libraries from when I was five or six, when I was seven I was taking a packed lunch every Saturday and reading as much as I could, and some of my favourite books now were first suggested to me by librarians as they got to know me as I was there so often.
January-February 2022
So many librarians have been made redundant and while using volunteers is better than shutting a library for good they are not the same as having a qualified librarian.”
Taking a step back in time, and Atlas Obscura (
https://bit.ly/3IDWLYJ) has delved into the past for an article on American President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) – and more specifically the Pack Horse Library scheme. The WPA was Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression and was designed to help America get back on its feet after years of economic hardship. The Pack Horse Library, mostly staffed by women on horseback, delivered books, newspapers and magazines to households. The Book Women, as they became known, had their salaries paid for by the WPA but “Counties had to have their own base libraries from which the mounted librarians would travel. Local schools helped cover those costs, and the reading materials—books, magazines, and newspapers—were all donated.” A new arts podcast from the BBC, Turn up for the Books, is next on our list and it features Skunk Anansie singer Skin, who turned up on these pages just a few months ago. No doubt she will be delighted to have made it back and will be prepping some more library-related exposure so she can make it a hattrick. Thanks to Alan Bullimore, who sent in the following: “Episode One of the BBC Arts new podcast Turn up for the Books featured Skunk Anansie musician Skin giving a tribute to Brixton Public Library where she found a ‘second home’ as a child ‘I felt like it was my place, where I could go to my corner’.” Finally, most libraries might welcome the opportunity to redecorate, but spare a thought for
Not a typical Monday morning at Hythe Library.
staff at Hythe Library in Hampshire who had an unwelcome shock when they arrived for work one Monday morning. An elderly couple (according to reports) had somehow managed to embed their car in the front wall of the library. First reported by the Hampshire Live website (
https://bit.ly/3rQjPNa), the front of the car can be seen poking out of the stacks, amidst scenes of strewn books and magazines. The couple were able to get out of their car, inside the library – but found the doors locked and with no one around had to wait for Hampshire & Isle of Wight fire and rescue to arrive, before they could escape the building. IP
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