John Vincent: Libraries, the universe & everything
I interviewed John Vincent by email in February, 2018. I have known John since we were both chief librarians in London in the 1990s.…
Decolonization
Decolonization is a powerful and contentious word. What does it mean exactly? Is it feasible? Is it desirable? And what does it mean for…
The Great October Socialist Revolution
October 2017 marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution which began a new stage in the development of librarianship by creating the objective…
Cultural appropriation
“No man is an island entire of itself.” ~ John Donne Cultural appropriation is a “hot button” and deeply polarising issue that is being…
Fake news and manufacturing consent
"Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance" – George Bernard Shaw Given all the fuss that has been made about fake…
To defend the revolution is to defend culture
Having considered the cultural policies of Ontario and the U.K., I would now like to turn my attention to Cuba, where culture has been…
Culture, Goebbels and 1984
The timing of the UK’s first white paper for culture in more than 50 years, and only the second ever published, is curious to…
Ontario’s culture strategy
Whenever I travel around the world I always visit the local public library because I think that this is an indicator of how progressive…
Class and librarianship
The current crisis of capitalism has led to the renewed interest in Marxism and its core categories of analysis such as class and exploitation.…
Libraries in Society
Libraries in Society (Clive Bingley, 1978) was published in the year that my career in public libraries began. In this reader, edited by David…
The Right ‘Man’ For The Job?
I am a big fan of titles which have question marks in them. The most important element of Open to All? The Public Library…
Open to all?
The title for this column was taken from a piece of ground breaking research which I took part in as Head of Libraries in…
Why Do Library Workers Not Have the Skills To Meet Community Needs?
The simple answer to this very Big Question is ‘because they are Library Workers’. In other words, they are trained in all of the…