Subjects Matter!

Stony Stratford Library -photo credit Karen Parker

This is BRILLIANT!

People in a Buckinghamshire town have borrowed every single book from their local library to block plans to close it down.

Even here across the pond the New Yorker reports how ” more than a thousand Stony Stratford residents made their way to the red-brick building, scoured the shelves for their allotment of fifteen titles, swiped their library cards, and left the building completely bare of books.”

They’ve named their effort the “WOT NO BOOKS CAMPAIGN TO SAVE OUR LIBRARY”

The library calculated that books had been checked out at a rate of around 378 per hour.

“A local resident mentioned the idea, maybe as a bit of a joke, but we thought it was a great idea so we put it to FOSSL[The Friends of Stony Stratford Library],” siad Emily Malleson.

“I put it on Facebook and emailed everyone I could think of and it’s just gone absolutely mad.”

Photo Credit Karen Parker

And the best news of all? The Library’s got a year’s reprieve and other local libraries are learning from their example how to keep their libraries open.

Save, Saving, Saved! Photo Credit Karen Parker

Author Phillip Pullman on the wrongheadedness of library branch closures and why volunteers and energetic advocacy shouldn’t be all that stand between a library branch being open or closed.

In a way it’s an abdication of responsibility. We elect people to decide things, and they don’t really want to decide, so they set up this bidding nonsense and then they aren’t really responsible for the outcome. “Well, if the community really wanted it, they would have put in a better bid [or volunteered more] … Nothing I can do about it … My hands are tied …”

Pullman asks us to Imagine two communities that have been told their local library is going to be closed.

One of them is full of people with generous pension arrangements, plenty of time on their hands, lots of experience of negotiating planning applications and that sort of thing, broadband connections to every household, two cars in every drive, neighbourhood watch schemes in every road, all organised and ready to go. . . . They do have certain advantages that the other community, the second one I’m talking about, does not.

In the second community, There people are out of work, there are a lot of single parent households, young mothers struggling to look after their toddlers, and as for broadband and two cars, they might have a slow old computer if they’re lucky and a beaten-up old van . . . and the bus isn’t free, either – you can imagine it. Which of those two communities will get a bid organised to fund their local library?

Who are these people whose lives are so empty, whose time spreads out in front of them like the limitless steppes of central Asia, who have no families to look after, no jobs to do, no responsibilities of any sort, and yet are so wealthy that they can commit hours of their time every week to working for nothing?

Who indeed? Think about this the next time you listen to anyone trying to tell you that you can run a local library on nothing but volunteers and goodwill, or that branch users can just go to another branch or the main library.
Read Pullman’s full speech Leave the libraries alone. You don’t understand their value from a meeting of 20 January 2011, when he was called to defend Oxfordshire libraries.

Philip Pullman is the author of the popular His Dark Materials series that begins with the award winning book, The Golden Compass.

Newsweek reports in an article headlined “Closing the Books” that Libraries across the U.S. are facing funding crises as they become the latest victims of the recession.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/23/libraries-face-increasing-budget-cutbacks.html

Ray Bradbury describes why libraries are better for people than college and raising money for keeping public libraries open.  An  interesting NYT profile on one of SciFi’s best known authors.  I really enjoyed this article because the reasons why public libraries are important to people are as various as public library supporters.  What they all have in common, a sense that without the library and books they wouldn’t have become the people they grew up to be . . . that libraries = opportunity !

Weeklong shut down to save 655K for Seattle Public Library according to recent June news release.

I have often wondered if a similar approach would save the $ we need here in Fremont to reopen our main library on Sundays.  The release describes how a week-long shut down was selected over hours reductions or closing branches on specific days during the year.

Aug. 31 through Sept. 6 was the week was selected for the closure because general Library use at that time is not as high as other times during the year, school is not in session and there are fewer Library programs scheduled.

Other options, such as a rotating schedule of closures so that some Library service was available were examined, but did not produce the magnitude of savings necessary. Closing all branch libraries on Fridays for the second half of 2009 would have produced the same savings as a one-week closure, but service hours would have been reduced by 5,408, in comparison to the 1,437 hours lost by closing all operations for a one week. Also, a Friday closure of all branches would have resulted in an estimated 22 staff layoffs.

In a recent June 10th news release, Stanford University announced pretty deep cuts to library staff and “ plans to permanently close the Physics Library in the summer of 2010 and transfer its holdings to other locations, including the Engineering Library in the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center—currently under construction—and the Stanford Auxiliary Library in Livermore. ”

“All told, more than 60 library positions have been affected by layoffs, reassignments and other cost-cutting measures to meet the 2010 budget reduction mandated by the university. ”

Ironically, as physics library is being closed and its holdings are slated for transfer to engineering, that department already faced layoffs earlier this year.

A news report from may 20 describes how “a 21 percent cut in the school’s operating budget . . . . and notes that the School of Engineering recently eliminated 15 staff positions in the dean’s office through layoffs and attrition. Eight people lost their jobs; seven jobs went unfilled. “