Packed Meeting to Save Grove Library

The public meeting to discuss the future of Grove Library was held last night and Old Mill Hall saw a huge turnout - at least 200 people by my reckoning. This shows the strong feeling of the local community and how they value the library as a local focal point as well as for the services it provides. The discussion was wide ranging and covered many issues. These included: the strategy/business case for e-books, how school children/parents valued the library in promoting literacy and providing books beyond the very limited resources of school libraries, the difficulties that elderly people and those with disabilties would encounter if they were forced to travel to Wantage, the recurrent costs and value of running the library (estimated to be in the region of £50,000/year), the fact that no account seems to be have been taken of the future expansion of Grove (a potential doubling of the population!), why the cuts cannot be applied across all of the libraries in Oxfordshire (e.g. through reduced opening hours) and, above all else, how to ensure that Grove retains it's local library.

Questions were asked about the Grove library usage figures and for the record here are some numbers. In 2009/2010, Grove had 23,400 visits with 28,099 items issued. The 28,099 issues break down as follows: 15,850 adults, 11,381 children with 868 AV (audio visual). This indicates that Grove really delivers very good value when you consider the relatively small amount it costs to run the library (less than £50k/year).

At the end of the meeting, it was agreed to form a local action group and volunteers were encouraged to come forward and help. Local district councillor Sue Marchant agreed to help co-ordinate the group and to agree a plan of action. This is, of course, reminiscent of how we set up the Friends of Grove Library (FROGs) when the library was previously under threat.

One thing that is worth noting is that Oxfordshire now has a Big Society fund of £600,000 to kick-start community initiatives. This has to cover other community activities (e.g. youth services), but certainly includes the possibility of bids from communtities wanting to support local libraries.

A number of people also came up to me at the end of the meeting frustrated because they had already volunteered to local or even national government to work on other matters, but had received little response back from the authorities. It seems that if the "Big Society" concept is going to really work there needs to be a lot more joined up thinking between the various departments and levels of government. Read the story in the press here.