The National Library of Spain (BNE) plans to start recovering, as of November 1, services that it stopped offering with the restrictions of the pandemic and that have remained in force to date due to lack of personnel. This announcement will materialize in the end of the previous appointment to go to the rooms and the possibility of making a request for funds directly, without the need to reserve them in advance, although still with time limitations. Between 2020 and 2021, due to the closures of the Covid and the slow recovery, the BNE has registered a drastic drop in the indicators of attention to the public.
This gradual return to the usual services will be possible thanks to the arrival of 27 new library assistants, according to sources from the institution. They correspond to the oppositions of 2018 and 2019 and will be incorporated into their jobs, in principle, “for the start of November”. Anyone who has a researcher or reader card will be able to access the different rooms of the Recoletos headquarters, without prior appointment, and the advance request for documents will only be mandatory for the funds that are in the Alcalá de Henares headquarters , since its transfer cannot be carried out at the moment.
The BNE continues to recommend advance request to avoid waiting times
The ‘in situ’ requests, yes, will only be available between 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m., when before the pandemic it could be done at any time. So the appointment system will continue to have more weight than the face-to-face one. The BNE, in fact, continues to recommend advance request to avoid waiting times and that the copies are available to researchers and readers at the time of their arrival. The center will remain closed on Saturdays. According to the BNE, “the hours for direct request for funds will be progressively extended” and “work is being done on other improvements to the services offered to its users.”
In addition to these 27 officials who will carry out tasks such as customer service on general information or loan of documents in the readers and researchers rooms, the institution expects that new “assistants and faculty will be incorporated when they finish their training courses within the selective process. The Report for the year 2021 indicates that of the 511 jobs necessary for the daily operation of the institution, only 353 are occupied; In the section dedicated to customer service there are 78 vacant places out of a total of 337.
Sources from the UGT union, on the contrary, warn that a trickle of casualties continues to occur, “either due to retirements, or due to the search for better working conditions.” In addition, “the selection process that is open at this time for labor personnel (contracts of a maximum of six months) are insufficient to mitigate the non-call for vacancies for these personnel in the 2023 Public Employment Offer, which the Public Function has pushed back.” UGT fears that the new batch of assistants is a “mere patch of two years, the time that new staff need to be able to compete for a new destination.”
UGT fears that the new batch of assistants is a “mere two-year patch”
During 2020 and 2021, all the indicators related to customer service have sunk, coinciding with the closure due to Covid and the subsequent capacity limitations. However, when normality was restored in October 2021, the BNE continued to limit services because they did not have enough staff to recover them. User visits plummeted from more than 104,000 in 2019 to around 36,000 in the two years since.
Similarly, if in 2019 there were 35,550 valid cards, at the end of 2021 there were 21,636. Fund loans fell 59.5 percent in 2020 and another 7.4 percent in 2021. What did improve last year compared to 2019 was the volume of advance requests: 40,246 compared to 38,349. The only way to consult documents was through this channel. According to the BNE, in the second quarter of this year reader and researcher cards have increased by 27.36 percent and loans in theaters by 47.98 percent compared to the same period of the previous year.