• Manchester/national – Listen to BBC Radio Four “You and Yours” 12 noon Thursday12th July.  “The row that’s emerged over Manchester Central Library’s decision to dispose of more than a third of its books. Academics and writers have signed an open letter calling for the library to halt the process.” 
• Surrey – Surrey Libraries Action Movement are organising a protest outside County Hall on 24^th July, 1pm – 2pm.  This it timed to coincide with the council meeting to reconsider its plans to remove staff from ten libraries across Surrey and replace them with volunteers.  “Please would you encourage as many people as you can, to come along? We would urge anyone who is not happy about the councils plans to come along – whatever their viewpoint.  Bringing placards and banners would be really good; with slogans on, that give your message.” More >

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 >