Tom Roper's Weblog

CILIP and the Führerprinzip

There’s a great deal of guff talked about leadership these days. It’s an epidemic. Even a shift supervisor in a fast-food restaurant these days is a leader, it seems.

Whether or not one subscribes to the modern cult of leadership, the proposal that goes to an Extraordinary General Meeting of CILIP on Thursday 23^rd March to establish a ‘Leaders’ Network’ is to be opposed, as a divisive move towards a two-tier membership structure.  A membership organisation like CILIP should apply the Napoleonic principle, that every member carries a marshal’s baton in his or her knapsack. If there is a leaders’ network, it’s the whole organisation.

Like most CILIP members, I’ll be at work when the EGM takes place, but I’ve cast a proxy vote against the proposals. If the meeting is quorate, and if the proposal is passed, I doubt that the network will succeed; given our membership crisis, on which Ridgmount Street has been deafeningly silent  of late - though recent board papers reveal that only 18% of the library and information workforce are now in membership and quote a 2016 membership figure of 12,632 (in 2002 we had 23,000) – it is hard to believe those who do commit to CILIP membership, and fancy themselves as 'leaders' will put their hands into their pockets twice over (the leaders’ network will cost an extra £220 a year, for unclear benefits).

Setting the record straight

The paper for Agenda item 8 at tomorrow's CILIP AGM factually inaccurate. It states, 'Council took a vote and decided by a majority of eleven to one to present the amended proposals to members for vote at the AGM. The Trustee who abstained on this decision, Tom Roper, then took the decision to resign from Council citing the difference of views from the other members of Council on these issues.

That's not how it happened. I abstained on the proposal that the President and Vice President must be CILIP members and elected trustees and not appointed trustees, because it ignored the central point that the President should be elected directly by members, as madated by a past AGM. I then voted against proposals for a third of Council to be unelected appointees, and the consequent changes to the  Royal Charter, Bye-laws and General Regulations. The minutes are clear, though they do not record my name as a dissenter, which I requested. 

I did not resign at the meeting, but did so on 15 July, after a few days reflection. 

Was the CILIP Governance Review conducted 'in plain sight'?

Nick Poole, CILIP Council member and former Tresurer, has made the assertion at Public Libraries News that CILIP’s Governance Review, on which we vote at Saturday’s AGM, was conducted ‘in plain sight’.

Not so. I have commented as follows, ‘I am afraid that Nick Poole is simply wrong when he says that the discussions on the Governance Review were carried out ‘in plain sight’. The review began in 2012. The minutes of the March 2013 Council meeting state, ‘C2013/05 Governance Review Report Council discussed and agreed proposals from the GovernanceReview Board’. Intrigued by this, on 11 July 2013 I wrote to ask when the proposals would be in the public domain. The Chair of Council replied to say that they would be available in October of that year. By the time I attended my first Council meeting in January 2014, they were still not public. The discussion on them at that meeting took place in camera, and my proposal that the discussion be moved to open session was defeated, finding no support from any of my fellow councillors. The subsequent consultation was perfunctory. I know, I was a part of it.At my last Council meeting, members defended this secrecy, claiming that they would not have been able to talk freely if the review had been conducted openly. I fear I cannot see why members elected to office in a membership organisation by their peers should be scared of openness.'

The same post conveys the news that the site’s tireless author Ian Anstice has resigned from CILIP. I very much regret this; Ian has done more for the profession than many a card-carryng CILIP member. I hope, if we can maintain the democracy of our professional association, we will be able to welcome him, and many others, back.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Public Libraries News: Two past presidents on the CILIP governance proposals

The influential Public Libraries News site has published statement from two past Presidents on the CILIP governance review. Tom Featherstone and Bob Usherwood. 'CILIP members are rightly proud of the part they play in maintaining democracy and want their professional body to reflect democratic principles. For many members, the governance proposals under discussion do not do that,’ they say. Read their views in full at http://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/2014/09/2-past-presidents-express-fears-over-cilip-leadership-proposals.html

I shall be at the AGM, and would be pleased to cast proxy votes for members who can’t be present. Forms in MSWord format can be downloaded at AGM Proxy vote form 2014.doc and must be returned to CILIP by 1.15 pm on Thursday 18 September. Contact me for my address, which you’ll need to put on the form. 

CILIP and the cobbler's children

I commend to any reader interested in the affairs of our professional association this blog post by Brian Kelly on his UK Web Focus blog, Wikipedia, Librarians and CILIP. Brian has been encouraging library and information professionals to get involved in editing Wikipedia. He pointed out that CILIP’s Wikipedia page contained membership information from 2012 and suggested, in keeping with Wikipedia’s neutral point of view principles, that members might like to update it. 

To do so, Brian tried CILIP’s website, but there he could only find annual reports back to 2010. He used the Internet Archive and the UK Web Archive, but without success, and he is now asking members to check their personal archives so that the Wikipedia article can be expanded with full membership information.

I hope this works, and I am checking my own papers, both dead-tree and electronic. Nevertheless, I can’t help wondering why our own website does not contain this information. It is important, because we are accountable both to our members, who should be able to find this basic information on their professional association’s website, and to the public, on whose behalf we regulate the profession. 

There is a saying that the cobbler’s children are always ill-shod. It seems to be the case that our organisation, which should know more than any other about standards of information management, has not applied these to our own website. I hope this can be corrected. 

 

Tony Benn's five questions for the powerful and the CILIP Governance Review

The late Tony Benn in the years when he left parliament in order to devote his time to politics devised five questions to ask anyone who exercises power. They were these:

1. What power have you got?
2. Where did you get it from?
3. In whose interests do you exercise it?
4. To whom are you accountable?
5. And how can we get rid of you?

'If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system’, he said. These questions are worth considering vis-à-vis the CILIP Governance Review proposals. Suppose the proposals for a third of the seats on Council to be appointed, rather than elected, were agreed, how would the unelected councillors answer these questions?

CILIP governance: a reply to Martyn Wade

I promised I’d reply to Martyn’s comments on my post about CILIP's governance review.

I’m grateful for the reply. I think Martyn is a good Chair of Council, and is trying to move Council in the right direction, towards more openness. 

1. On democracy: Martyn says that to have a third of the seats on Council appointed rather than elected is not undemocratic. I don’t agree. If any government were to propose that more than 200 out of the 650 MPs in the Commons were to be chosen by their fellow MPs, rather than by popular vote by the electorate, we’d have revolution in the streets. I don’t see why CILIP should not aspire to the modest standards of parliamentary democracy. In fact, I think we could do better as I may elaborate on another occasion.

2. On secrecy: dress it whichever way you like, it remains a fact that the governance review conducted its proceedings in secret. My requests to see a copy of the report back in July 2013 were met with fudge by the then chair of Council, John Dolan. As you know, it was discussed in camera  at the first Council meeting I attended, in January of this year, and we were not permitted  to debate the substance of the proposals, and my proposal to have the discussion in public was defeated 11-1. You say, 'The proposals have previously been discussed in closed business of Council to allow for full and frank debate’. I remember this argument being made at that January meeting, and I was so flabbergasted I think I was probably unable to argue coherently against it. I say now that I think that any councillor who is unable or unwilling to take part in open, public, documented debate when running the Institute in the interests of members, is unworthy to serve. I understand that discussions about the pensions fund had to be held in secret, but I cannot see how secrecy is necessary when talking about how we run a modern democratic professional organisation. 

3. On membership, yes, we have appointed a member of staff to help tackle the problem. That seems to me to be buck-passing. It is the responsibility of Council, above all, to turn the situation round, and yet it doesn’t even merit a mention in our risk register. I think Council is in denial. Yes, the auditors approved the accounts, but we both know that auditors are not there to assess the democratic health of the organisation. Unless we start to take this seriously, the catastrophic fall in membership is a graver threat to our future than anything else. 

I have my own views on CILIP’s governance. Meaning no offence to any individual on Council, it worries me that we have so many who are no longer working at the bench. Turning a third of the seats on Council over to non-elected people who need not be members of CILIP, nor even working in the profession, is going to make this worse.

These issues will be resolved at the AGM, one way or another. I’d urge Council to think about how that debate is structured; it could be possible to salvage something from the wreck, by separating the contentious elements from the non-contentious ones. This is something that has been hinted at. There’s some interest in bringing amendments to the meeting to help this process. Can we be assure that these amendments will be taken?

Farewell to CILIP Council

Today I e-mailed Martyn Wade, Chair of CILIP Council, to say I was resigning from CILIP Council. At the Council meeting on 8 July we debated, for the first time since I was elected to Council, the Governance Review proposals. 

I have written before about the Governance Review, and once more here: http://www.roper.org.uk/tr/2013/07/cilips-governance-review-update.html This review has been four years in preparation, and kept secret for most of that time. Indeed, at the first Council meeting I attended, in January of this year, the agenda item on it was taken in closed session. Then, only then, were the proposals put out for consultation.

Most of the proposals are innocuous, but there are two that are profoundly undemocratic, the proposal that a third of Council seats should be appointed, rather than elected from the membership, and the proposal that Council, rather than the members, should elect the President. Council is recommending these to CILIP’s AGM in September; I found myself in a minority of one when suggesting we should not support these when Council had its first opportunity to debate the substance of the proposals. 

The Governance Review has been conducted during a period of a crisis in CILIP. As well as last year’s failed proposal to change our name to ILPUK, membership has sunk, and continues to do so. At the beginning of 2010 we had nearly 18,000 members; this year, in March our membership fell to its lowest ever figure, 13,342. At Council meetings it seemed to me that tackling this was not seen as the central concern it should be. It is not worthy of an entry in our risk register. 

That crisis may explain why the Governance Review shows such a lack of confidence in the profession at large. We are not to be trusted to elect a President, and when we elect Council members, our judgment is likely to be flawed, so must be tempered by appointed members, who need not be CILIP members. 

We desperately need a strong professional association. We need it to set standards, to bring on new generations of professionals, to speak out for library services of every kind which find themselves under threat. If we mute the voice of members in the way our organisation is run, we weaken ourselves, and those who depend on the services we run will suffer. 

Why is there only one Monopolies Commission? A reply to Leon Bolton

Why is there only one Monopolies Commission, wits used to write on lavatory walls. In a similar vein, Leon Bolton, in a thoughtful blog post, suggests that the lack of competition may be a cause of CILIP's difficulties. I'm not sure I agree. There is competition. To take my own case, I am a member of CILIP, but also of EAHIL and the Medical Library Association; I have in the past been a member of the Special Library Association too. I've worked with, and been part of many networks of information professionals, some of which have had links with CILIP and its predecessor organisations, and some of which have not. For the young library and information professional, there's no shortage of choice of organisations and platforms to join in order to learn and develop.

What then is special, or could be special, about CILIP? I'd suggest the following:

• CILIP members are bound by the organisation's Ethical Principles and Code of Professional Practice. Someone who uses my services knows that I am bound to act at all times in accordance with these. if I fall short, my fitness to practice may be called into question and I may face disciplinary sanctions every profession has members who practice in a variety of fields or specialisms.
• A professional organisation unites us around a common, shared body of knowledge that we develop and pass on to new generations.
• 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' as Santayana observed. We have a history, the Library Association having been founded in 1877 (put 2027 in your diary now for the 150th anniversary). It's remarkable how people in the past have had to tackle the same issues as we now face. 

When I look at the professional organisations of the doctors, nurses and others I work with, I don't see anyone propose that the medical royal colleges, for example, should be replaced by an unconference. I wonder why we are so prone to self-doubt? Is it another manifestation of that traditional curse of our profession, a lack of belief in ourselves?

I can think of nothing that would gladden Ed Vaizey more than if CILIP were to dissolve itself into a loose, informal network. I know very well that CILIP has its faults, but better to bring a sense of purpose back to the organisation back than to abandon it. If we tackle the decline in membership and if we assert our professional values against their enemies in government and elsewhere, we have a future.

My first CILIP Council: Peace and Progress?

What did I expect? My view of CILIP Council, and of the LA before it, is strongly coloured by Edward Dudley’s sketches, latterly appearing under as his Clip Board  column. Edward’s Runyonesque prose evoked a world of Determined Ladies and Retired Layabouts. I was particularly disappointed that the toast to Peace and Progress, drunk, according to Edward, in warm sherry, seems to have been abandoned. It could have been worse—elements sympathetic to Vaizey could have  replaced it with one to War and Reaction. Latterly there was a Council blog, rain chiefly by Isabel Hood as I recall, but that seems to have vanished in the website reorganisation. The heady atmosphere of CILIP 2.0 seems a long time ago now.  [NB: this link, to Phil Bradley's blog, contains some material highly critical of Bob McKee, who, in a great loss to the profession, died in 2010. It was certainly not my intention to revive Phil's criticisms. My point was to illustrate how little progress we have made towards the goal, which Bob supported,  of openness in the way we do our business. For other accounts of the CILIP 2.0 meeting see http://www.joeyanne.co.uk/2009/04/27/cilip-20-open-session/ and I suppose I must mention http://www.roper.org.uk/tr/2009/04/cilip-20-and-subversion.html]

If this meeting is any guide, we do conduct an awful lot of our business in camera and I wonder if we should. Certainly the matters of greatest import were not dealt with in open session, so I can’t say much about them. This sits uneasily with our professional commitment to open information. It seems to me the default position should be that Council meetings and documents should be available to any and every member, unless they contain personally or financially sensitive information. At the moment the criteria for dealing with items in closed session are neither clear nor codified. 

There’s some good plans for the 2015 election, including CILIP debates on five topics. On membership, we heard about the free student membership plan and the recruitment of a member of staff to help rebuild recruitment. 

At the beginning of Council we had heard the results of CILIP’s FOI request, which established that the infamous page on gov.uk encouraging ‘community’ managed libraries had no ministerial sign-off. At the end, we heard that Vaizey is now refusing to meet the CEO. You can see Phil Bradley’s view of this at http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2014/01/vaizey-ignores-cilip.html and an alternative, in my view more cogent, on Leon Bolton’s blog at http://leonslibraryblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/17/why-we-dont-talk-anymore/.

For myself, I don’t think Vaizey’s fit of pique has much significance. Everyone knew that we were unlikely to get anywhere by reasoned argument alone. This government is utterly deaf to reason. Our task is to make the attempted destruction of public libraries so much an issue of public concern that Vaizey has to swallow his hurt feelings and meet us, whether he wants to or not. Public libraries, free, open, and professionally-staffed, will be here long after Vaizey has been forgotten.