apman,
Katie Wood,
Photos: Alex White
Photos: Keely Chapman
University of Melbourne
all
in ve
W nd brarians to promote the
e-resources over the past ten years is library patrons, there has been a loss y. The seamless “anywhere, anytime” -books) has also meant a loss of atistics which are then used to justify/ ntroduction of online collection items, n fact, semester opening hours were go to cope with demand. ely reduced in response to the use of s changed the nature of the work that shuffling of existing budgets to direct (like the learning repository and redefined also. Still, I am aware at RMIT ve apparently declined over the last ten
are overwhelmingly staffed by women yment of low salaries compared to other er proportions of male participants. n’t need any formal qualifications and rs and PhD qualifications on significantly ons.
We campaigned this year when the library made thirteen HEW 3 staff redundant: the excuse for this was that a new service model due to new technologies meant that the HEW 3 level was now redundant. It is obvious that HEW 2 student casuals will be taking up the work. We set up a campaign working group at the first members’ meeting which had nearly half of all library staff attending. That group was made up of a core of about eight or nine people who attended a weekly meeting to organise the campaign. We ran a successful stall on the day the renovations were opened to the public, a protest of about 100 staff and students with an article in The Age the following day, a petition signed by about 1000 people and numerous members’ meetings. Unfortunately, while we saved some jobs, we couldn’t save them all, but there are four or five people left in the working group who meet on a semi-regular basis and have done a couple of things since the campaign, such as hand out leaflets at a management-organised meeting on PDF changes. A week or so ago the Melbourne Uni activists met with three of the RMIT delegates to talk about common issues and what we are doing. It was a really nice thing to do and I hope in the future there can be even more communication between the different groups.
NEXUS SUMMER 2011