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November 11, 2008
Celebrating the downfall of Edinburgh libraries
My breath was so taken away by the arrogance and patronising tone of this article in the Edinburgh Evening Paper that I rushed to look up the performance figures of the Edinburgh library service.
Where lending has fallen across the country by about 40% in 10 years, in Edinburgh it has fallen by 54%, according to CIPFA. This is probably a consequence of the fact that where Scotland as a whole just spends 7% of library funding on books, in Edinburgh that figure is just a miserly 4.5%.
And this well paid Wendy has the cheek to go out and tell the good people of Edinburgh to look for other things in their libraries than books. Who has given her that clever idea? Not the people of Edinburgh, to be sure.
Perhaps someone from Edinburgh or SCILIP would like to reply. Or someone from the Scottish Parliament, or the Scottish Publishers' Association or Edinburgh Council. Tell the people they have enough books already. Come on Elaine. Tell me I'm wrong and I'm out of date. Go on.
Posted by Perkins at November 11, 2008 9:16 AM
Comments
As a library studies student doing partime shifts,I found the tone of this article helped explain the poor staff morale in some of the city's Libraries and the recent proposal to re-name staff as 'Audience Development Officers' is just plain silly.
But our 'Audience' are voting with their pens.I recently showed a reader to the single section of General Fiction in English, in one of the community libraries and the next request was for a complaints/suggestions form.
Posted by: Milne at January 22, 2009 12:22 PM