As part of her fellowship, Claire will be required to run an informative session for the library staff, something that will enable them to learn from the professional practice of colleagues overseas. This prospect gradually fills her mind as she walks beside the lake. She has prepared nothing, and though the session is not scheduled until late in her stay, she already feels anxious. The Haarlem library is extremely well organised. The librarians, like Annika, seem competent and ambitious, already familiar with current best practice, probably more familiar than Claire herself. They all seem to have Information Studies degrees, whereas Claire ascended to her position through sheer endurance, beginning at the bottom, as a shelving assistant, and getting to know her library inside out, its cold basements and miles of clanging shelves, every miserable faux-Egyptian lintel, every bubbling radiator. She developed a protective, proprietary sense of custodianship as she watched the people come and go and the building endure. Still, it took years before she distinguished herself enough to be promoted to full librarian, and years more to become what she is now. She has proven herself to be capable and reliable, outlasting the young men and women with Librarianship MAs and no common sense (one of them failed a shelving test!) who were appointed above her.

Now she is known, at work, for possessing all the answers, but they are answers that do not travel: where to look for missing periodicals, how to game the system to stretch your budget, which professors will explode if you’re tardy with their reference lists. It’s a role she has self-constructed from whatever came to hand, like one of those birds who build their nests out of shreds of old carrier bag. She knows the higher-ups think she isn’t dynamic enough: they’d like someone more dazzling, better published, in her role, someone they can put on the marketing materials to make the prospective students go, Wow, their librarians look like that? They don’t want her moony, ruddy face, her frizzy hair, her unpainted nails in the open-toed sandals. So she’s made herself indispensable instead. When they look at her, the managers, she wants them to see a stalwart, one who cannot be dislodged without imperilling the whole operation.

What of this could possibly translate to a conventional training session? She cannot say what she really thinks – that the arcane, the Byzantine, the unrepeatable, are the true essence of a library – not in a climate of rabid standardisation and frictionless transferrals of knowledge. It would seem like a daft romance. All the Haarlemers, with their shiny qualifications, would grow impatient, shift in their chairs, question her right to speak. She pictures the director of the library folding her arms tight at the back of the room, and knows what she needs to do. The work with the seniors is sluggish, anyway; she can put it aside for a few days, and turn her attention to recent Information Studies journals. She will find something current to talk about.