Can Icelandic Cash Save Oxford's Libraries?

If, as we are told, Oxfordshire County Council has now started to recover the money it placed in Icelandic banks, a total of £5 million, what is going to happen to that money?
Library campaigners should speak up now and demand that some of it is ear-marked to saving threatened libraries. Let's cross names off the list of closures, let's restore library opening hours and let's insist on paid librarians instead of volunteers or automation.
Oxford City Council also had £3 million invested in Iceland and can hope to recover most or all of it, which is some of the best news we have had all year. I think it should make a contribution to the costs of running Bury Knowle Library. Why? Because it rents out the building to Oxfordshire County Council, thereby making us pay to use what we already own.
We the residents and council-tax payers paid first to buy the building. Then we paid to lease it from the City Council! The minimum we can expect after that is to get a guarantee that our library will be maintained and the costs of running it properly with professional staff will be met in the future.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-17399104

Are Library self-service machines dangerous?

A friend of mine tells me that he always gets an electric shock when he uses library self-service machines. You have to touch the screen and they zap you with an electric current.
This is just one more reason for disliking library self-service machines. Another one is that they cannot talk and cannot recognize you when you come back into the library next time. They can't answer your queries and can't sympathize when you return your books late and have to pay huge fines.
Are these impersonal contraptions going to be introduced in all our public libraries? Maybe everyone doesn't get electric shocks, but surely it is a loss of quality of life.
The world seems to be caught in an endless spiral of destroying jobs to save money, and thus putting everybody on the dole.

Headington Library as an issue in the City Council Election May 3rd 2012.

You may thank that our libraries are not an issue in the forthcoming City Council Election, to be held on 3rd May 2012. The public libraries are run by the County Council, aren't they? Yes, but Bury Knowle House and Park are owned by the City. (Note that I don't say thay are "owned by the Council" as public ownership does not mean being the property of the council. The councillors and council employees merely run the place).
Bury Knowle House and its park belong to the people of Oxford and are now leased out by the City Council to the County Council to be used as a library. I believe the lease is due to expire in 2016. What this means is that the people of Headington are paying to use something that already belongs to them. This does not seem to me either fair or logical. When there is a shortage of funding we cannot afford to pay for what we own already. I suggest that it would be better to make over the library building and park to the people of Headington for use as a library free of charge. Since the City Council used our own money to purchase the building, how can it then expect us also to pay rent?
The idea of one of our councils paying rent to the other just means that we are paying to use our own property - it is a stealth tax.
In view of the recurrent threat to libraries and attempts by the County to close them, I would question the right of the City Council to raise money by renting out our property and then spend the proceeds on anything apart from funding the library itself. The building should be owned by the local residents and used without charge of any kind.
This is one of my policy ideas and it will be on my leaflets in the forthcoming campaign (I am a candidate in Quarry and Risinghurst).
I have heard that there has been a court case that has decided that using volunteer staff to keep libraries open is illegal. I think that is unhelpful. Does the judge who decided this case ever use his local library? I wonder. He can probably afford to buy all the books he reads.
Of course I would like every library to have properly paid staff. It is awful to make librarians redundant and I don't want to underrate their specialist skills. However in a situation like the one we are in now with an economic mess on our hands, allowing volunteers to help could just provide one more option to avoid complete closure.

We Need This Money Ourselves

MPs are going to vote in Parliament on the allocation of billions of pounds to bail out the failing economies of the euro-zone. Greece, Portugal, Ireland...who next, Spain?
Write to your MP and tell them to vote against the bail-out. Write to your MEPs too and protest about it. This is an intolerable burden on our debt-ridden economy. The more money we give away, the less there will be left for front-line services in this country, which includes libraries along with helping the old, sick, unemployed, and homeless.
Why should we bail out countries like Greece where nobody pays their taxes?
For the past two decades, we have been subsidizing Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain to the tune of billions via the EU structural fund. If your MP or MEP makes excuses for this, ask them to talk some economic sense for a change!

I would call that Success

Following an extra provision of funding from the Government,
Oxfordshire County Council has finally, rather grudgingly, announced
that the twenty threatened libraries are to be spared and will be
allowed to carry on relying on a reduced staff eked out by community
volunteers.
It is the best outcome we can reasonably expect.
This happy news was announced today on Radio Oxford and it is also in
the Oxford Times.
http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/news/8927997.County_tears_up_library_closure_plan/

We can now wind up the online petitions since the campaign can be
regarded as a success!

Time for a party, perhaps?

I know it is not ideal in every way and I am not excusing the way the Council will be making librarians redundant, but under the present dire economic circumstances - and with our existing County Council - it really is the best outcome we could get.

Let’s help each other to save our libraries

Dear Library Supporters,
I am writing on behalf of The Save Kennington Library Campaign. We are of the opinion that all threatened libraries should work together to persuade the Council to adopt a fairer way of cutting the libraries budget.

If all Oxfordshire libraries are kept within the Oxfordshire network (Galaxy), then a modern library system can be sustained and indeed volunteers can step in to help ameliorate the cuts, and even sponsors, heritage lottery funding etc can be approached to fill the gap. To increase spending on hub libraries and close 20 rural and suburban libraries is discriminatory.

Kennington held a public meeting with Councillor Heathcoat (cabinet member with responsibility for libraries) and John Jackson (administrator- future libraries) neither of them answered any of our questions directly. If you are planning a similar public meeting, do get in touch and we can share information and the questions they failed to answer.

We have a campaign proposal and hope your library supporters may like to join in?
We shall print 15 different letters asking questions of Councillors Mitchell and Heathcoat and will try to get as many individuals in Kennington to sign individual letters. Assuming people are at home when we call, we hope to get 500-1000 signed letters. If every threatened library can do the same, perhaps we can collect 5000-10,000 individual letters that will require a response. (That is the reason for doing it this way rather than a petition.)

A particular time and day needs to be arranged to deliver the signed letters to County Hall with as many supporters as possible in attendance before this is voted through in February. At the campaign meeting to be held in Oxford Town Hall on Thursday 20: 7:30pm, we will ask Philip Pullman if he will spearhead the handover and get the Regional TV news, radio as well as the press to cover it? We think this may be the most visible way to show the strength of feeling on this issue and get maximum publicity. Will your group consider doing a similar thing? We can email copies of letters. But if your group prefers to get up a petition, that can still be delivered at the same time.

What are your plans and ideas? Will you consider coordinating our efforts?
For more info we have a blog spot
http://savekenningtonlibrary.blogspot.com/
To contact us
Paddy Landau- Chairman of the campaign http://www.kenningtonchronicle.org.uk/or me for the Friends of Kennington Library
Regards
Sylvia Vetta vettasylvia@aol.com

Invest in our libraries

Sir – It was heartening to read so many letters protesting the proposed closure of local libraries. We will indeed fight these plans, ‘every inch of the way’ (Letters, Oxford Mail & Times, December 9).

I can add only this to what has already been so eloquently said: if the council and the Government need to save money, then they need to keep the local libraries open.

The libraries are fundamental to our health. If we want to reduce social isolation, exclusion, bad parenting, obesity, depression and anxiety; if we want to raise standards in schools and colleges; if people are to get back to work; if we want the economy to grow; if we are to be engaged and well-informed citizens, we need to keep our libraries local, and we need to keep them open. If we want to cut costs in public health, in education, in tackling anti-social behaviour and crime, then we need to invest in our libraries.

We are deep in a recession; the public purse is shrinking. We cannot afford to close our libraries now.

Dr Tessa Roynon, Lecturer in English, St Peter’s College, Oxford
http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/about-faculty/faculty-members/american-literature/roynon-dr-tessa