The Good Library Blog

As a Hampshire resident I'm getting more and more annoyed at the outcry about our libraries. I regularly use the library and have yet to find a book shortage. Any book I request is either in the library or can be delivered to my library quickly. Our libraries may be changing but books and library services are the core. Books are a means to an end. It maybe information, reading for pleasure and so on, but with the availability of the internet the use of paper books is bound to change. What's wrong with adding other functions to the traditional library so that full use is made of expensive premises. Of course it is a shame when professional librarians lose their jobs, but the library sector can't be protected from the realities of local government cuts and the different environment that libraries operate in today. Your so called 'residents of Hampshire' would be the first to complain if council taxes were raised to support library services. Why don't you get real in this blog and stop carping on. It's 2007 and the world is changing. Libraries are not and should not be immune from change.

Gary is quite wrong to be so dismissive of the loss of professional librarians from the Library service. The factors behind this are not simply the pressure of cuts in local government expenditure. Scratch nearly every local authority and you will see that they have spent enormous sums on reports by management consultants - reports such as the "Cross-Cutting Review" carried out for Essex County Council during 2006, which cost nearly £1 million pounds. This "report" has never gone to the County Councillors, but has been used as the basis for decision-making by Senior Officers of the council to reccommend cuts in staffing in many different branches of the County Council, including the Library Service. At the same time the County Council decided to make the mobile library service to rural areas once a fortnight instead of weekly in order to save £50,000 per annum. If they had not commissioned this report they could have maintained a weekly service for the next 20 years. One of the reasons for the cuts in expenditure is a re-jigging of priorities, and libraries come low down the list.

Another reason for cuts in jobs in the front-line library service is that the pay for Senior Executives and Managers in local governdment has risen substantially in comparison to the pay of front-line staff - during a period of tight local government budgets these inflated salaries can only be paid at the expense of staff lower-down the pecking order.

Centralised services and administrative costs have also increased resulting in increased "oncosts" for frontline services. One of the accounting implications for this is that everytime you cut the frontline staff to pay for increased oncosts, the remaining oncosts form a larger proportion of departmental budgets - requiring further financial constraint.

Two other problems outside local government control are (1) increased property costs which have risen out of proportion to other costs and (2) the financial impact of the occupation of Iraq which requires cuts in all government expenditure to maintain.

The loss of trained library staff is damaging to the whole Library Service, as they have always been its greatest advocates. It reflects a de-skilling of the service which has consequences for all library users. Very few people in public libraries now have experience in book conservation, which has serious consequences for the bookstock. Very few now have the in-depth subject skills that librarians had a few years ago, again with disasterous results for bookstock. Librarians, however, have contributed to the under-valuing of their skills by failing to recognise that there is an undeclared war going on over the future of the public library service between people who see it as simply another part of the entertainment industry, and those who believe libraries should be street-corner universities. The latter role does not preclude Libraries from providing recreational reading and audio-visual services, but reducing libraries to a part of the entertainment industry excludes them from what has until now always been their purpose.

As for the rise of the Internet - web-based resources should both enhance the Libraries ability to act as "street-corner universities' and democratise provision, providing smaller and more remote libraries with a better service. Unfortunately smaller libraries are being axed to fund an increasingly centralised service, as Libraries are asked to pick up the pieces for the gaps in the services provided by other local authority departments,