The University of London has just announced what is going on with Senate House Library. It's written in management-ese, but what in speak befitting a philosopher and not a management guru, here's what I think has happened. Instead of selling the library to UCL or one of the other colleges, it's still going to be managed centrally, but they are going to make budget cuts. They plan to pay off the deficit over a longer time. What it means to the end user is less books on the shelf and less journals in the archives. I'm actually pretty pissed off about this. Senate House is a superb library right in the center of London. What makes it so useful is that it's so general. It covers a huge swathe of disciplinary interest: literature, language, history, art, philosophy, psychology, religious studies, American studies, music, sociology and even a little bit of maths, science and computing. Obviously, for specific disciplines, there are other libraries in London with a larger collection of books, but Senate House is great because of it's generality. It really is a unique library, and a cultural treasure-store right in the centre of London. 
What pisses me off more is that the government can spend billions and billions bailing out the fucking bankers - a bunch of pin-striped bandits who've fucked up our economy pretty badly - but a library that enables thousands of researchers in a wide range of disciplines gets cut. When the government invest money in libraries, it gets spent on building new libraries that are heavy on architectural postmodern flashiness and low on books, while academic libraries don't get a look in. I think it's because the government don't believe in the mission of the university anymore. Heck, the fucking universities barely believe in it. Students certainly don't give a fuck about it. A university is more than just a place where a whole bunch of university courses happen. No, it's supposed to be a community of learning. That's why they have things like public lectures and seminars. And the library is a big part of that. We need to have a place where anyone on any course can go and take out any book on any subject. Philosophy students can and ought to read books by scientists. Scientists ought to read what historians have to say. Historians should go and read fiction. Everyone should try to fit in something extra-curricular in terms of reading and thinking. Synthesis from all over the place is a good thing, even if the stack of unread books and papers in one's own discipline nearly hits the ceiling (guilty). But de-funding general libraries is basically pulling up the departmental walls. On the way up to Senate House, one passes libraries used by historians and classicists. Their own libraries. I don't understand it. We should go much, much further to breaking down institutional and departmental walls.
Here's a radical proposal: why not have it so that any student and any graduate of any British university would be granted a pass upon request which would gain them admission and borrowing rights in any academic or research library? No, wait, why not go a step further: anybody who shows that they are of sufficient capability and interest to gain access. If the blimmin' train companies can sell a train ticket that works across all operating companies, why can't the academic libraries?
Our academic and research libraries are something we ought to be proud of: something we can stand on the top of the hill and shout about. We've got some of the best libraries of the world in Britain. And, no doubt, our governments both on the left and the right will do all they can to piss that away - for blinkered pragmatism (so-called) or out of some misguided notion that libraries are elitist factories of discrimination rather than the exact opposite. Our libraries will wither on the vine and die, only to be replaced with PFI-funded superlibraries - half the number of books, twice the cost, but don't worry because it'll only appear on the budget in 30 years time. Well, that's how it's worked with schools and hospitals...
