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

[spindizzy]

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.

The Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 requires local authorities to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service for all desiring to use them, and I believe that by passing almost half of the service to communities, the council will directly be going against that.

Community-run libraries have a historical precedence for succeeding in affluent areas, where there are people with the money and time to donate to library running costs and keep the building staffed, which can explicitly reduce social inclusion (Cavanagh, 2017) due to the divide in resources and ability, contrary to the current goals of the county council. This means that community libraries are less sustainable that council-funded and -staffed libraries (Cavanagh, 2017) as in many areas after the initial enthusiasm and fear of loss has worn off the libraries become harder to maintain. (Public Library News, 2018). This is especially the case as the council has targetted poorer areas, that have smaller libraries anyway, and is proposing a tiered library service that is unlikely to provide an equal service to all. In addition, many community libraries provide an inconsistent standard of service anyway due to variations in training and support from local authorities (Cavanagh, 2017), which is the opposite of what this change is supposed to achieve.

Also, this devalues current library staff, especially those of us with further qualifications specifically in library-related areas – after all, if we're so easily replaced by untrained volunteers, what was the point? In many libraries with successful volunteer programs, volunteers have served to supplement paid staff, rather than replace them. Historically, community-run libraries have worked best when they have remained under council control with at least one full-time paid member of staff to be responsible for rotas, training, and answering in depth queries, which many cannot do.

In particular, it is unlikely that volunteers will be able to further the current goals and activities of the county council, specifically increasing digital inclusion and helping customers with Universal Credit, and it is unlikely that many will volunteer for a job where they are likely to have to interact with both problem customers and bodily fluids (Public Library News, 2018).

When other authorities have done this, it has been considered emotional blackmail against communities (Voice for libraries, 2011).

Our customers deserve better.

Sources:
Cons: Reasons against "community managed libraries", Public Library News (2018), http://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/campaigning/volunteer-run-libraries/cons
Are Community-Managed Libraries Effective, M.J. Cavanagh (2017), https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/LM-11-2016-0081
Volunteers in libraries: Program structure, evaluation, and theoretical analysis. E.A. Nicol and C.M. Johnson (2008), https://www.jstor.org/stable/20865035
Are volunteers happy to run libraries? Voices for the library (2011), http://www.voicesforthelibrary.org.uk/2011/05/happy-volunteers/

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.