Issues in Vendor/Library Relations -- Cycling Through
Issues in Vendor/Librar y Relations -- Cycling Thr ough
Bob Nardini 0
Coutts Information Services 0
0
0 and Steven Carrico, Acquisitions Librarian, University of Florida Smathers Libraries , Box 117007, Gainesville, FL 32611-7007 , USA
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Issues in Vendor/Library Relations — Cycling Through
Lwas in Ireland. The TV screens in my hotel
ast May I was in England when the Queen
breakfast rooms were full of news about
her trip. In London, the city had been placed
on high alert the day I hauled my bags through
the Tube system, but nothing happened. The
Queen’s visit, the first ever by a British monarch
to the Irish Republic, was widely called a
success, a sign of how, within everyone’s memory,
so much had changed. “Changed utterly,” one
might even say, two countries finding themselves
at a distance from the spirits of revolution and
violence marked by W.B. Yeats in 1916.
London, of course, is a museum for change.
One appointment for me was at the University of
Greenwich, in East London, which meant getting
off the Tube the night before at the Tower Hill
station, making my way across the street and up
a steep escalator, swiping a pre-paid fare card at
a reader station on the barrier-free platform, then
boarding the DLR, an elevated train of quiet,
sleek, driverless cars. This was the “Docklands
Light Railway,” which provides a splendid view
of the “Docklands,” a gleaming section of the city
where skyscrapers and one of London’s financial
hubs can be found today. The most striking sight
was an agglomeration of new residential
buildings — dozens of high, colorful, angular projects
whose architects seemed in competition to design
structures as unlike residential buildings as they
could manage. Together, they resembled the
masts and flags of an armada of ships.
Which, not so long ago, was what you’d have
seen in the Docklands. This was the area of the
great docks before containerization put the Port
of London out of business around 1980 and left
much of this part of the city empty and derelict.
Our DLR stop was Deptford, and not sure where
we were going, we walked down what turned
out to be the wrong street. Not long before I
had read Anthony Burgess’s novel about the
tavern murder in 1593 of Christopher
Marlowe, A Dead Man in Deptford, and the grim,
dark area we were headed toward looked about
right for the story.
But not for our hotel, and so we asked the
only others we saw on the street, a pair of
African men, for directions. Mainly with gestures
they turned us back the opposite way. A few
minutes and a couple of turns brought us to a
short side street where we checked into a chain
hotel, almost new, that had no reception desk but
instead crisply uniformed staff to help business
travelers and tourists register on kiosks. This
part of town was in an earlier state of
re-development than the Docklands. In one direction, as
we walked to a late dinner, was another
apartment project, new and nice but not striking, as
we had seen from the DLR. In the other, next
to a construction site, was a granite building,
apparently closed now and slightly forbidding,
identified by an inscription above its entrance as
a dispensary, 1875. We found our meal several
blocks further, in a lively area of restaurants and
pubs offering hospitality above what the unlucky
Marlowe had experienced not far away.
In the morning, at nearby Greenwich, we
met in one of the buildings of the old Royal
Naval College, a colonnaded masterpiece on
the Thames designed in part by Christopher
Wren. Lord Nelson lay in state there in 1806.
Now it’s a World Heritage Site. The University
of Greenwich uses parts of it. I needed to kill
time before my meeting and accomplished that
by walking along a courtyard, the river visible
at the open end of two long wings of a building
enclosing inner green space in a U. A workman
as I walked by asked if there was a lift inside
the building. Wren might not have thought of
elevators, but we didn’t need one for our room
on the ground floor, which once you entered
from the stone passageway inside the
colonnade, was a plain long meeting room like any
meeting room anywhere. We met with a dozen
or so librarians from around the UK who had
come to London for the day’s session.
The librarian next to me was from Glasgow.
She spoke in a brogue and was a little shy.
Another librarian, at the table’s far end, was from
the London School of Economics and spoke
like she belonged there. Earlier this librarian
had circulated a YouTube video of a student
flashmob that had taken place in the LSE library
at the end of exam week, a spontaneous event
organized via 2.0 that for a throbbing fifteen
minutes packed the library’s atrium with dancing
students. “A lovely event,” she reported.
Across the table from me was a young librar
ian, also from London. She had short,
geometrically-styled hair, and i (...truncated)