The Good Library Blog

Tim - hi.

I thought it might be helpful to clarify that the Business Service event at Chelmsford in November was sponsored by various private companies, and it was they who provided the champagne - not the county council.

Thanks
Martin

In the literature for the event mentioned by Martin (Secrets of Success, promoting our business information service), and at the event itself, it was made clear that we had obtained sponsorship. This fully covered the cost of the refreshments served.

Nice bit of judicial choice of facts there Martyn.
The event in question was a highly successful promotion of the library's Business Information Service of which we are justly proud. A full house (60+) of people about to launch their own businesses heard three successful entrepeneurs tell their stories and underline the importance of access to good information in achieving and maintaining business success. And yes - they all got a glass of the fizzy stuff, not at the expense of the library service but paid for by the event's sponsor - as was made clear on all publicity material.

But there is a question to be answered in Essex as to why book lending has fallen so much. There is an impression that I for one have gained, that the library service does concentrate time, resource and management effort on many many things-- but not the adult book collections. Is that unfair?

It seems more than reasonable that if you live within 2 miles of a library you do not also need a library bus.

My comment wasn't a judicial choice of facts, as I was aware that the event was sponsored, but a careful choice of words that champagne sends out the wrong message. In addition to the cuts in service I mentioned in my original comment Essex County Council intend to axe the Colchester branch Record Office, and have planned expensive redundancies in Human Resources. Perhaps some of the Essex readers of this blog could tell us what staffing changes are planned for Essex Libraries as there are a lot of rumours going around?

Yes only this week sixteen "librarian" posts were lost (we call them service devlopment officers here) the whole exercise totally mismanaged in my opinion. Letters sent out in the Xmas post and some people still waiting to hear their fate. As for the rest of us we can only wonder what will happen once RFID is fully implemented. We seem to be alienating our customers by bringing in new technology and chucking out the books. Because editing is done by non-librarians many books are being lost to us and I can only suggest our reader check out amazon. We must have only clean new young-appeal books to attract young clean readers. One library was told not to put chairs by the front door as this would attract OAPS and this was not the image we wanted to present.
Lucky Michelle Jones, Head of Libraries and chum of Tessa Jowell has managed to get a post out of libraries away fom the firing line so if this experiment goes wrong she will be far away. Soon the library will be a sterile environment without any character or characters.