Shhhhhh!

The Times reports that regular patrons of the British Library have been complaining bitterly of late that the Reading Rooms are overwhelmed with undergraduates these days. The whippersnappers reportedly spend much of their time chatting with their mates, texting, using Facebook, and studying with their own books, rather than consulting rare and obscure materials from the BL's massive collection.

Given that I practically lived in the British Library (in both its old and new locations) while I was a postgraduate student, I was particularly interested in this story - and can see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, there's no doubt that the BL has a rareified, elite atmosphere (that's part of its attraction) and the readers can be a stuffy and inflexible bunch. When I first started going to the BL, it was still in its glorious original location within the British Museum. In a very grudging concession to modernity, however, there were about ten desks in the hallowed Reading Room with a power outlet nearby. If, as I did, you had one of those newfangled laptop computer thingies, you had to get there early in the morning to snag a suitable desk space. In 1997, when the new BL opened in St. Pancras, these Luddite tendencies continued as we laptop users were sequestered into one section of the new Humanities Reading Room - where the apparently intolerable noise of our fingernails clicking away on keyboards wouldn't disturb the scholarly peace.

On the other hand, flinging open the doors of the BL to all and sundry in the name of "access" is completely impractical, as workspace is finite. The BL is a research library, and there's no doubt that the average undergraduate has absolutely no need of its collections. It seems the BL's administration would have us believe that there are suddenly more undergraduates working on specialised projects, which require consultation of material in the library's collection. But I was also a bit worried to read that the Library's directors now receive performance bonuses based on the number of people who come through the doors.

Coincidence? I doubt it. So you can add me to the list of stodgy, elitist old farts wanting to bar the door against the philistines. :-D