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March 14, 2007
Libraries saved in Brent
Because of the actions of two honourable journalists, at least four and probably six libraries have been saved in the London Borough of Brent.
Here is tonight's piece in the Bookseller which gives credit to the DCMS-- which is a very unlikely-- but rather amusing spin on what actually happened.
Bless the Bookseller and the Evening Standard
"Brent council has withdrawn proposals to shut four of its twelve libraries. Alex Sydney, deputy head of libraries, arts and heritage, said: "A report was going to go out where that was one of a range of proposals but at the eleventh hour we were asked to withdraw [by stakeholders]. As things stand, the council is committed to maintaining all its libraries and resourcing them appropriately."
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has been putting councils under pressure to avoid shutting library following a spate of bad press over closures."
The officers of Brent appeared, at least, to have prepared a plan to go through the executive steps and get to the point of no return, before their councillors found out. Of course once the press office was humming, the councillors did find out and papers were shredded "at the eleventh hour" before last week's meeting of the exective board of the council
At the recent meeting of the Friends of Libraries in London Group, fears were expressed that if Brent got away with this, the sisterhood of chief librarians in London would cheerfully follow suit, being far more interested in their pay and pensions than in actually running a decent library service. But they didn't get away with it.
Posted by Tim Coates at March 14, 2007 9:34 PM
Comments
This is exceptionally heartening. In Waltham Forest we're losing the St James Street branch library (and could lose our two top museums--shades of Wandsworth) with no notice in the local WF Guardian whatsoever, as far as I can tell.
Posted by: barb at March 18, 2007 9:19 PM