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October 7, 2006
Lancashire, Essex, Suffolk and Somerset
Before anyone gets too pleased with themselves; it will probably surprise someone, but not me, to find that, after Hampshire, the four counties in which book lending is also in free fall are Lancashire, Suffolk, Essex and Somerset.
In Lancashire book lending also fell by 9%, in Essex and Suffolk by 8% and in Somerset by 7%
Message to these four: you are doing too many other glitzy things and not concentrating properly on your book collections-- and you haven't understood the problem.
Posted by Perkins at October 7, 2006 12:53 PM
Comments
I have just discovered D L Sayers (yes I know rather late in the day) and to prevent myself from going out and buying every single one (which I tend to do when I an author I have not read before) I decided to visit my local library (Colchester, Essex). Have not been in for a while for reasons I have blogged about, and it has got even worse. The walls have huge signs on now in bright scarlet HELLO behind the counter where only the dozy and stupid go if they cannot use the computers to check yourself in an out (I fall into this category). This morning they had all crashed so the queue was pretty lengthy. The music library downstairs has been shunted off somewhere else (in fact it may even have gone altogether) and we now have THE EXPRESS ZONE with all the latest blockbusters in paperback for you to grab and run (surprised it is not sponsored by Macdonalds but I daresay that will come); popular (as opposed to serious biographies) are there also REAL LIVES - dumbing down totally. Upstairs all the fiction books are labelled Romance, Sagas, Westerns etc etc. Gangs of teenagers are clustered around the computers, being noisy and rowdy and slightly threatening and the junior library is full of screaming children without a parent in sight. I KNOW I am sounding a grumpy old woman, I KNOW I am sounding a miserable old bag and NO I do not want the return days of silent libraries where you could not even cough, but surely there has to be a middle way?
Posted by: elaine at October 7, 2006 1:29 PM