Tragedy of the Commoners

This is too funny - London's literati are up in arms because the British Library (shock horror) has got people in it - sez The Times:

Two years after one of the world’s greatest libraries opened its doors to undergraduates and anyone working on research, high-profile writers and academics say that the struggle to find a desk is now intolerable. Library directors stand accused of increasing visitor numbers to boost funds and performance bonuses.

Although there are 1,480 seats in the library, the author Christopher Hawtree was last week forced to perch on a windowsill while the historians Lady Antonia Fraser and Claire Tomalin have swapped horror stories of interminable queues.

Poor things! Isn't it terrible that this free, hugely useful, tax funded resource is being used by - the people who fund it! But clearly if you are one our Literary Elite, being of the people and for the people is one thing, but having them all round you is a Tragedy of the Commoners:

"Access has many good points, but making the British Library, which was for specialist readers, into something for general readers seems to me terrible.”

The historian Tristram Hunt said that it was a scandal that it was impossible to get a seat after 11am when students were there. Many people travelling from outside London complain that they cannot get to the buidling any earlier. “Students come in to revise rather than to use the books,” he said. “It’s a ‘groovy place’ to meet for a frappuccino. It’s noisy and it’s undermining both the British Library’s function, as books take longer to get, and the scholarly atmosphere.”

Not only that, but the peons are revolting !

Ms Tomalin described the crowds as intolerable: “It’s full of what seem to be schoolgirls giggling. I heard one saying, ‘I’ve got to write about Islam. Can I have your notes?’ It’s what you expect to hear in a school.”

(Actually, mathematician and satirist Tom Lehrer sent up the academic fraternity on this in one of his songs, the refrain being:

plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...
Only be sure always to call it please, "research".

I do have some sympathy though, having experienced noisy giggling people in the reading room (but they were in their 40's and quite clearly researching a dangerous liaison of the non-literary kind ). Clearly you can't fill a resource like this with too many people who are not using it for its intended purpose, ie research using the materials at hand, but also quite bluntly you can't expect taxpayers to pay for stuff and then deny them entry, even for the shocking pursuit of...studying. That's basically taking working class people's money to pay for expensively educated people's pursuits, which is the National Lottery's job

So how about we suggest you have to....gasp...pay for passes to the reading rooms. That, as any economist would know, will quickly remove the tragedy of the commoners problem. £120 a year OK, a tenner a month, the pound a day in the locker is theirs for keeps?

I'll bet that would generate even bigger wails of protest

(Disclosure - We do a huge amount of our background research at the British Library, when we started using it 3 years ago it was fairly unique in London in having great space, good coffee and the added bonus of the Business and Science reading rooms - which are usually far emptier than the Socio/Literary ones by the way . Its biggest problem is no free wifi as yet. Maybe the Literati should come on over to the Biz rooms - a few good novels or histories on patents, or the market for concrete, for those crowded out....)