https://www.publiclibrariesnews.com What's happening to your library? Tue, 05 May 2015 19:51:57 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 https://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/library-closing/conferences/speak-up-for-libraries-conference-22-november-2014#comment-6326 Mon, 24 Nov 2014 09:28:52 +0000 http://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/?page_id=8452#comment-6326 One or two points I understood differently from this report; our group, and the tone of the day, didn’t seem to me to support the view that volunteers should be ‘educated’ not to do take part in libraries. I felt the conference was largely sympathetic to groups who felt they wanted to support or save their library – even though everyone deplored the need.
I also didn’t think that Martin Francis said, ‘Libraries were just for borrowing books’. Quite the contrary; I thought he expressed his view that there was a wide range of services that libraries provided.
It seemed a shame that the question about how libraries supported key government objectives wasn’t put to Justin Tomlinson to try to pin him down further about the Secretary of States’ refusal to intervene in closures. I collared him at teatime and asked what should be done if local authorities act illegally to shut down the service if the SoS won’t intervene; he said we can vote them out at the next election and then re-open any libraries which have been shut previously to that. What to do if the buildings and stock have all been sold off in the interim? No answer!

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