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January 8, 2010
West Sussex County Council
There is an article being circulated from 'egov' - a sort of internal, within the citadel, magazine for government and local government cronies. It is about the public libraries in West Sussex and opens with the sentence
"Already the West Sussex Library Service has been bucking national trends in recent years by increasing its lending, and the easy access it provides across a range of services. "
I looked up the figures for West Sussex library service and found that in West Sussex county council, from 2001 to the last published figures, visits to libraries fell by 13%, book issues fell by 27% -only 8.7% of the library budget is spent upon them. The book stock has fallen in number by 23%. The active membership of the service has fallen from 34% of the population to 21%.
The article talks about additional opening hours, but it does not address the question of the quality of the book stock.
By every measure used by any government or local government method, this is a service that has totally failed. But no one says so!
I reflected that, as we have been hearing performance figures of some major retailers announced in the past few days, that if, for example, the ceo of Marks and Spencer, or of John Lewis, had given out figures for their results like the actual performance data for West Sussex, they would have lost their respective job many years ago.
It is wrong to allow the same managers who have been running it to continue to use public money to run West Sussex library service. Simple.
If councillors aren't told the full and realistic truth about how library services perform, how can they possibly do the job we ask them to do and apply some commone sense when working out their plans for the future.
Why do we let this go on year after year?
Posted by Perkins at January 8, 2010 9:33 AM
Comments
West Sussex was for some while thought to be one of the better library authorities. When people moved into Brighton and Hove, they took care to keep a West Sussex ticket.
Word now is that West Susses is flogging off such books as Festing-Jones's account of Samuel Butler...
Posted by: Christopher Hawtree at January 9, 2010 6:39 PM