Value

Being a student again has made me acutely aware of the fragile relationship between cost, benefit and value. Especially when it comes to books. While I have been as resourceful as is academically viable, there are a few textbooks that I do feel are essential, and I have been simply agog at what they can cost. Academic books get the short end of the law of supply and demand, and even an Amazon addict like me staggers at the prices. Knowing what those books cost, I treat them like gold.

Is that what it takes to value something?

At the state-funded institution where I work, textbooks are provided to students and staff for the duration of each semester, free of charge. As the English department has mushroomed, the storage area has spread almost virally from one small room to three, without rhyme or reason. The overflowing rooms are separated by hundreds of meters, two of them on the second floors of separate buildings. Nobody is personally accountable for the hydra-like book collection, but the head of department holds the only keys. There is no record of which books- or how many- the college has, or in which of the three rooms they are. Since the stores are in such disarray, books are often damaged or lost in storage.

When the annual ministerial textbook order arrived yesterday, the bill came to 67 000 Omani rials- over GBP 90 000. Over the past two days I have been making an Olympic sport of inventorying both the existing books and the new delivery, making space for the newcomers and trying to ensure some kind of system that will soften the coming storm- which is as much as I am able to do until other staff return. It turns our huge numbers of books in the storerooms have never, ever been used in courses, even when 200 copies have been ordered. They have just been sitting there. Why? No information flow. There is no line of communication to inform staff what books have been ordered, far less in which of the stores they are. But there’s more. Many of the new orders are for books of which there are more than enough copies in store to cover the remaining students- but nobody knew it, because the storerooms are so disorderly that the books have been out of sight.

All those books, laden with knowledge ripe for the picking. Underutilised. Undervalued. Free of charge. Perhaps it is better to pay.