Austerity

I happened to discover this morning that about half of Bourne Hall Library has been given over to an extensive music collection, mainly scores, some of them in sets for use by schools, choirs and such like.

It turned out to be part of the Surrey Performing Arts Library, which had been there for about five months and which was due to move to Woking in another five months. And yes, outfits like the Epsom Light Opera could borrow sets of music, against a special annual membership fee of around £50. And no, the Arts Library was not particularly directed at schools.

Back home I ask Bing to find reference 1 where I find that on Tuesday 26 February 2019 Surrey County Council (SCC)'s Cabinet decided, inter alia, that 'Authority be delegated to finalise the phased transfer of the collection and equipment on a conditional basis for a transitional period to the Director of Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture and the Cabinet Member for All Age Learning in anticipation of a final unconditional transfer and gifting of the collection and equipment [to NewSPAL]'. Perhaps the long winded title for the Director of Education is supposed to be some sort of compensation for the fact that most of his schools have been more or less privatised and are no longer his concern.

Prior to its arrival at Ewell the material was housed on the Denbigh Wine Estate, of all places.

The first, and possibly only, time that I have come across this sort of mobile shelving before was in the well-stocked Eurostat library somewhere in what was the Kirchberg Tower, across the gulf from Luxembourg town proper, a gulf which at that time contained the slightly seedy Clausen area, over the years home to waves of immigrants, at that time just starting to be gentrified. I have failed to track the Tower down in gmaps, but I do remember that I owed to this library my introduction to language processing in the form of the rather solemn looking 'Journal of Documentation', which I have now finally tracked down to Emerald Publishing Limited. Having once been the flagship publication of ASLIB, a defunct British association of special libraries and information centres, founded in England in 1924 as the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux. A journal in which, at that time, the House of Commons librarian seemed to figure quite largely.

On the way out I came across a low, two seater car, rather sporty looking, no proper maker's mark that I could see, but a stick-on saying 'Battalion X'. Unfortunately it drove off before I could snap it and now I can find no trace of any such vehicle, although I have found out about a band in the Philippines called 'Ex Battalion'.

PS: many image processing artefacts visible among the rows of CD's in the version of the image on my laptop. Present, but not so striking, if you click to enlarge this version.

Reference 1: http://www.fospal.org.uk/index.html.

Reference 2: http://www.newspal.org.uk/.

Reference 3: Memoirs of Eurostat: fifty years of serving Europe - KS-49-02-183-EN-N - 2003.