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This Saturday sees a national day of protest against 400 planned library closures and there is a fantastic article in The Guardian today about libraries and in particular the libraries on the Isle of Wight of which nine out of eleven on the Island are under threat of closure.  One of the libraries featured in the article is a beautiful library - Ventnor library   which, as The Guardian says , 'sits four-square behind a broad pavement on the High Street towards the top of town, a solid, stone-fronted edifice first built in 1850 for a splendidly Victorian outfit called the Ventnor and Bonchurch Literary and Scientific Institution.' I don't have a picture of Ventnor Library but here is one of the town, looking down on it into Ventnor Bay. Looking north into Ventnor Bay Looking  south down into Ventnor Bay with the town on the right  'Ventnor public library  has 7,401 registered users (the town itself has a population of just under 6,000). Last ...

The Reading Agency has said libraries should "not be a soft target for cuts" after statistics released last week showed a continued decline in library visitors as a result of which as many as 1,000 libraries in the UK could be under threat from local government cuts. But when you dig deeper into the headline statistics, as The Reading Agency has done, they showed that there was not just a "straightforward picture of a decline in public interest and take up" but that children and young people's use was steady, with children's book borrowing rising for five years in a row, and that libraries do more to deliver added value by playing a vital social role in our communities. In my own local area, Portsmouth Central Library has already been forced to close all day Friday and Sunday (although it is now temporarily closed for a period of approximately three weeks because vandals flooded it last week). Fortunately the books were not damaged including the very valu...