It's possibly a bit early to judge the community library bid on their delivery, since we don't take charge until October. Hopefully we didn't make too many rash promises in our bid document, which can be found at http://www.freewebs.com/foresthill/Libra...public.pdf

P1971, myself, and others involved in the bid are well aware of some of the criticisms of the community library model and are working to ensure we do our best to address these concerns. The loss of talented staff is a real pity and not something that we would want to see, but it is also not something we are in a position to solve.

What we are working to ensure is that users will still be able to pay fines at the library, that stock levels are maintained and that space for books doesn't significantly reduce. We have managed to get the council to agree to leave the existing public IT equipment in the library rather than having to replace it, and we want to work with all the existing groups that ran classes and activities in the library to keep them going. We also have new activities that we intend to bring into the library and the rear of Louise House.

I don't think any of us involved in the bid would claim that this is better than a well run and properly funded council library, but if we have to have a community library, we are determined to have the best possible community library that we can.

So far we have over 80 people signed up as volunteers to help run the library. If anybody else would like to volunteer a few hours per week please email me, michael@fhsoc.com

Finally I would say that if you are not happy with the community library when it is operational please let us know, or complain to your local councillors - who I expect to help hold us to account. We are not a group of outsiders coming to take over the library, we are part of the community and we know that we will be judged by our friends and neighbours on what we deliver. That's scary for us, but I'm quite certain we won't let you down.