Peter Carter is currently CEO of Casey-Cardinia Library Corporation, a regional public library service operating in the South-East of Melbourne. He has been working in public libraries for just on 30 years which he says is both scary and possibly a little sad. He has a particular interest and experience in automating library services and applying technology to libraries, he hopes in a practical and useful way. He is also very interested in ensuring that the library services we offer to our users reflects the changing needs and demands of that society. He lives in Frankston with his partner Margaret and has two teenage children, which he also finds useful in making him think about the services we offer. His personal interests are aviation and military history. Here’s his answers to the LINT 5.

Why do you work in the library field?

A number of reasons: I was influenced by a friend of the family who worked in public libraries and suggested I might like to check it out as a future career: I did, and ended up at RMIT in the 70’s studying for my undergrad qualification at the school of librarianship there. I have a natural leaning to books and reading, having been exposed to them all my life and being interested enough to have my own reasonably large collection - I suppose there was a bit of a natural ‘fit’. I also feel strongly about the role of public libraries in developing and encouraging positive traits in our society – I enjoy the fact that my work has a ‘public good’ effect that is not primarily motivated by money or profit (not that I have any problems with applying business practices to the way in which we run our services)

What is your favourite library joke?

I always like jokes about ‘how many Librarians does it take to change a light bulb?’ I know there are many versions and I find most very amusing, but I really like this response:

Three: one to change the bulb and two to talk about how unprofessional changing light bulbs really is.

It’s funny and also nicely barbed.

Is there someone you have worked with you would like to acknowledge? Who, why?

From about 1981 to 1990 I worked at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Library Service which was run at that time by Ray Trott. I had come down from working at a public library service in outback Queensland and was still very young and naïve; during my time at MP I learned a great deal from Ray. He was an unusual type for a librarian in some ways: he did not have a full career background in libraries, was not much of a reader and did not follow the conventional line. Although his views did not always sit well with other library service managers in Victoria at that time, I have a great deal of respect for him and what he achieved. We got some very good developments going – led in some library automation work in the early 80’s – had very positive growth figures in our loans and visits, and did some innovative things with planning and budgeting. Ray was not afraid to pull ideas from the business world, something which was far less common then than now, and he was very interested in the use of personal computers and networks to run accounts and other backroom activities, again something not common at that time. I learned a lot from Ray, and though I did not always agree with his views and methods, he influenced a lot of my thinking on how we could do things in public libraries.

What do you wish they’d teach in library school?

When I went through Library School it was particularly focussed on the traditional skills and learning (particularly cataloguing and classification). The closest I ever came to anything resembling a computer back then was doing some programming with punched cards (The younger readers of this should probably go to Wikipedia for that reference!). In fact they did a very good job of instilling the concept of the ‘profession’ – eg ethics and integrity in terms of avoiding personal bias, respecting any inquiry no matter how apparently ‘dumb’, etc, etc. However, that was not the problem.

What we did not get was any exposure to the day to day issues of managing budgets, dealing with staff, conflict, the media, political lobbying, etc. I know it is probably not practical to actually ‘teach’ these, but it would have been enlightening to have a visiting professional or two come in and tell you some hard facts about life in the real world, rather than getting a crash course in your first position. Oh well.

What do you think are the more important issues affecting librarians today?

Well, this is the deep and meaningful question. I could say it depends…but I do think we have to ensure that we reflect the needs, aspirations and dreams of our current society; whether or not we agree personally with some of the directions that society is taking. Relevance is a trite word to use in some ways, but we do need to stay relevant. If we don’t, then we will be marginalised and eventually shoved aside: that would be a shame and ultimately I believe disastrous for our society in the long term. We have to balance providing the traditional services and values of the profession against dealing with and accepting the need to provide new and challenging services that are not our usual fare. I am fascinated by the often entrenched opposition within elements of the profession to facing up to the fact of dealing with changing technology and different ways of providing services to our users. This occurs at a range of levels. There is often a perception that it is the CEO and the senior managers that oppose change or new services that are suggested by the staff, but often it can be the circulation desk staff or line staff that are quite conservative in dealing with changes in services. We recently introduced computer game consoles (X-Box and Playstations) at one of our branches. An external YS Librarian from another service, when inquiring about the new initiative asked our YS Librarian how she had managed to get management to agree to it. Actually the project had been initiated and supported by the senior management team. It was interesting to see the assumption that the senior managers would have been against such a new and radical idea. What was also fascinating from my point of view were the concerns over the project from some library staff (not necessarily at the branch which put them in), who raised such issues as ‘dumbing down the library’, or were concerned about noise or managing the consoles. While I was happy to respect their concerns and work through the issues, it was intriguing to think about some of the reactions to the computer games which, outside of our profession, are well established and popular activities.

I guess we have lots more work to do – but we do need to stay relevant and challenge ourselves on what we provide and how we market our services.