Comment – Charging for the Internet in libraries

Barking and Dagenham Libraries have decided to charge for use of their public access computers, £12 annually for residents, £25 non-residents.  An extra charge of £1 is made is more than two hours are used per day.  People under 20 and over 60 still keep free access.  The resultant librarian discussion (featuring both the CILIP President and the last CILIP Vice-President) came down strongly against the move.  The main reasons against charging mentioned were: More >

There’s a lot of news to report today due to Thursday’s edition concentrating on Ed Vaizey’s important announcements and Friday’s edition reporting the darkly marvellous closed-library crazy golf.  I’ve therefore split things up a little more than normal.  First, there’s the fallout from Vaizey’s speech, especially the bit where he gets radically optimistic about the state of public libraries.  Secondly, there’s a selection of the many articles written about the disposal (“weeding” in librarian parlance) of over 200,000 books from Manchester Central Library.  Then there’s a couple of events – including a mass lobby of parliament over school libraries –  and we get back to normality. More >

The influential LGA have released details of a session at their annual conference this week. The session concerns how councils are changing library services in response to budget cuts.  It should be read in conjunction with this press release by the LGAabout a new report.Please find below a description of the LGA libraries session, I have included a list of the speakers.  All three come from councils which are boosting volunteers in their libraries and reducing paid staff.  On the plus side, one can at least be thankful that there is not a speaker from Brent. More >