Issues in Vendor/Library Relations -- Cycling Through

Against the Grain, Dec 2014

By Bob Nardini, Published on 12/16/14

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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 Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation - 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)


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Bob Nardini. Issues in Vendor/Library Relations -- Cycling Through, Against the Grain, 2014, Volume 23, Issue 4,