[Eurchap] Support Greek Academic Libraries : HEAL-Link petition

[Tsakonas Giannis]

* apologies for cross-postings *

Dear colleagues,

please consider signing the petition of HEAL-Link (Hellenic Academic 
Libraries Link, the consortium of Greek academic and research libraries) 
at http://heal-link.gr/heal_petition/?lang=en against the decision of 
the Ministry of Education to dispossess 94 colleagues from academic 
libraries. Please find below the text of HEAL-Link that explains the 
situation and why someone should sign this petition.

With kind regards

Giannis Tsakonas

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The Greek Government’s decision on the administrative staff 
redundancy/mobility scheme has an enormous impact on the Greek 
Librarians working in the academic libraries. Ninety-four (94) of them, 
coming from the biggest (eight in total) academic institutions have been 
affected. A substantial number of administrative staff working in 
academic libraries, including the already limited staff supporting the 
horizontal electronic services offered by HEAL-Link 
(negotiation/handling of e-resources, Union Catalog of the Hellenic 
Academic Libraries, Hellenic Interlibrary Loan Network), has also been 
affected. Consequently, HEAL-Link sadly realizes that is unable to 
provide its well-respected services to the Greek academic and research 
community.

Moreover, HEAL-Link realizes that the academic libraries affected by 
the staff redundancy scheme, will be forced to minimize or even cut many 
of the services they provide, like electronic and in-library services, 
services offered to external users. Branch Libraries will seize to 
operate due to the total lack of staff.

It should be pointed out that the sustainability of many of the new 
services that are already in progress and are provided via the National 
Strategic Development Plan (ESPA), the Digital Convergence Plan and the 
Education and Life Long Learning Plan, are at high risk. Upon completion 
of the horizontal services, like ILSaS (Integrated Library System as a 
Service), Institutional Repositories, Greek e-books (Kallipos project), 
there will be no staff to continue to provide such services due to the 
staff redundancy scheme.

Last, but not least, HEAL-Link would like to express its support to 
those colleagues, who have worked closely with HEAL-Link over the years, 
and are immediately affected by being made redundant and thus 
unemployed.

The Greek Ministry of Education is currently implementing a cruel, 
unfair and rather unjustified “mobility” scheme in eight of the 
country’s bigger universities composed of forced transfers and layoffs 
resulting in a mean staff reduction of about 30%. This “mobility”, a 
part of the troika-imposed so-called “public sector restructuring plan” 
proposed though by the Greek Ministry of Education, will also have a 
huge impact on the Libraries of the eight institutions, since the Greek 
Government decided to include 94 ! librarians and a number of other 
library staff in the scheme. This policy is ruining people’s lives and 
devastating library staff morale, since instead of rewards for the huge 
improvement and expansion of university library services that took place 
during the last 10-15 years in Greece, library staff is inhumanely being 
removed from them and sent to oblivion. This decision maybe a result of 
the naive perception that since most library services are nowadays 
digital and web–provided, librarians are no longer needed, ignoring the 
fact that all web services are designed, built and maintained by humans 
and it’s not possible to sustain a single one of them without human 
souls behind the keyboards, a lot of them being librarians.