Macau (MNA) – Following a recent investigation by the Commission of Audit (CA) which revealed that the Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC) was inefficient and, arguably, negligent in managing the public library system, a local librarian said that what is worrying about the situation is that the incident involved public money.
“I think people cannot believe that people are donating money and the books are not being taken care of,” said the librarian who spoke to Macau News Agency (MNA) on condition of anonymity.
In the report made public on Wednesday, the CA slammed the IC for the condition of books kept in warehouses, where some 100,000 volumes were found unattended and in poor condition.
The professional who spoke to MNA explained that there was a shortage of staff capable of satisfactorily operating the current library system in place in the city, and that the volume of work required made it difficult for staff to deal with the amount of books needing attention in libraries.
“To be honest, libraries here have no time [to organise] and I am not sure if they have enough people to take care of the books,” she said in reference to the IC case.
As our source argued, with a high volume of books being donated to the public library system, many volumes end up in archives, never to be circulated outside to the public, kept stored in warehouses and archives and left alone.
As with registering and cataloguing books, care of the archives would also fall under the library’s purview, confirmed the librarian, who works in one of the local education institutions.
She contended, however, that the weather conditions in Macau made the preservation of library collections “ten times harder” than in European countries, taking into acount factors such as humidity and the prevalence of pests such as cockroaches,causing books to generally deteriorate faster.
In a written reply to MNA, the IC said that on top of a copy kept in the library, back-up copies of books may be placed in storage, although it was not specified whether the books from the warehouses identified in the CA report had ever been circulated to the public.
The Commission found that the IC had taken eight and a half years to complete and improve an internal policy for developing its collection and had spent MOP15.71 million to purchase 168,064 collections from 2012 to 2016.
Immediately after the report became public, the Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture, Alexis Tam Chong Veng, released a statement in which it demanded the IC implement measures to improve service quality, management capacity and the use of public funds.
IC’s public response has so far been scant, with the Bureau only apologising and claiming it will ‘rigorously’ follow the Commission’s suggestions.
[Edited by Sheyla Zandonai]
