I had a lot of opinions about closing libraries, I'm sure you're all SHOCKED.

So I was clearing out the drafts folder of my work email and I found this squirrelled away! The reason that I haven't been posting/tweeting about public libraries so much for the last year and a half is that the county I work(ed) for had a "consultation" on closing about twenty libraries (and/or handing them over to volunteers), and instituting a tiered hierarchy of libraries where the biggest library was the one that got all of the resources and everyone else got whatever that library cascaded down to them. Consultation was in speech marks because whatever anyone said, the council was gonna do whatever it wanted and obviously we could all go and whistle.

(For extra bonus points, the town containing the library at the top of this hierarchy? The borough council tried to pass a vote to join a different fucking county the year before this went down and had to be taken to court!)

And I, a sleep-deprived library assistant with a degree in librarianship and no access to the sources I needed, wrote a short essay explaining why this was a fucking pointless exercise in kicking the problem down the road.

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It didn't help; the council still closed a bunch of libraries and shuffled the staff who weren't on temporary contracts into new positions, and the tiered system is shitting on libraries further down the line, but... I tried? With the limits of a text box on a county council site and whatever I could scrounge from the internet, I tried.