Our Nice Library

Last week a group of Leominster residents formally constituted the Friends of Leominster Library. We have a very nice local library that Susan and I use all the time. We’re both serious readers and the library saves us a lot of money. They also rent DVDs for a small fee, which we use from time-to-time.

Last winter there was a notice on the Library counter soliciting interest in a friends group. We signed up for the next meeting and went along to find out that the manager of our library and the guy in charge of libraries for the county were driving the formation of the group. The idea was that we would volunteer our time to help out at library events, promote the use of the library to various community organizations and raise funds to purchase things for use in the library that official funding would not cover. We were told that, in spite news reports that many local government authorities in England were closing libraries due to central government funding cuts, Herefordshire libraries were not currently at risk. Our time and money would not be used to replace paid library staff or offset existing budgets.

After the first meeting the group continued to meet monthly with control of the meetings gradually shifting from the county libraries manager to us as we got to know each other and began to focus on what we wanted to do. In the summer we realized that if we wanted to tap into existing sources of funding, we would have to constitute our group as a quasi-charity with a constitution, officers and a bank account. It took us about three months to agree on the wording of the constitution and we finally passed it last week. And, guess what, I was elected as Chair of the Friends.

We have a Committee that will organize the Friends’ plans and activities. We agreed that the Committee would meet in a couple of weeks to get things started. This was going to be worthwhile and a lot of fun.

The following morning I received an email from somebody I hadn’t heard of at the council with attachments explaining about an on-going project to reorganize “cultural services” in the county with a view to saving some money. They wanted a response from me to a questionnaire about my ideas on stuff like third party operation of the county’s libraries or merger with other services or other counties. This started off a flurry of emails to and from the other Committee members and a lot of Google research.

It turns out that this is not a local initiative at all, but part of a central government program to “rationalize” local cultural services. Herefordshire and Shropshire are working together as one of ten pilot projects in a program controlled by the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries. Now, our Prime Minister has made a lot of speeches about what he calls the Big Society. One of the principal parts of this Big Society is Localism, which is supposed to be the shifting of decisions away from London and out into local communities. So that’s why it took a lot of digging to find out what was really going on: it was supposed to look like a local initiative instead of a government project.

Maybe this Friends group isn’t going to be quite so much fun after all!