Tuesday 27 May 2008

Margate Library

Since Margate library has been improved and has the new status of a Thanet gateway book lending has dropped by 40%, I can’t imagine a greater cultural disaster could happen to a town than to have its only bookshop closing and borrowing from the library nearly halved.

Possibly the Nazi book burnings of WW2 caused this level of drop in reading, but I would doubt it, certainly having council desks in the library is an unmitigated disaster for the town.

TDC and KCC need to understand that the primary purpose of a library is to make books freely available to the population, and to do to this it is necessary to have an environment that one can concentrate enough to read in.

It is time for a review of the function of libraries, I can see a good case for publicly funding the free availability of books, however is there a case for publicly funding the loan of DVDs which is the equivalent to publicly funding cinemas, or internet cafés, what do you think?

8 comments:

  1. While I'm not so sure that the loaning of DVDs (& CDs) should be public funded, I do think that everyone should have at least some access to the internet for free these days. This is just as important as free access to books in my opinion.

    Although I've occasionally used Margate Library in the past, the current layout has yet to entice me in (despite the fact that I walk past it several times per week).

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  2. no - this is not the case at all. more people have joined the library in the first few months of 2008 then joined in the same period in 2007 and all the book issue figures are up. go and see for yourself - the library is always busy.

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  3. 17.25 have you noticed how that Michael bloke is often wrong

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  4. Well, I visited Margate library for the first time since it became the Thanet Gateway and I thought it is terrible. Not a space I'd want to sit and read in or peruse the shelves. And nor would I want to share my inyimate details going over my council tax either. It seems to have woefully small shelves and amounts of books. It seems to be everything a library shouldn't be.
    So where do these library figures come from? It was closed and moved for much of last year?

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  5. I haven’t got the actual statistics for Margate library that apparently say that while 42% less people are visiting the library, they are borrowing more, I do however talk to my customers in the bookshop. Some of them work in libraries or for the council so I tend to have a fair idea of what is going on.

    I believe it would be possible to produce statistics showing an improvement by comparing periods last year when the library was in temporary accommodation.

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  6. Michael, I like the postcard, especialy the Timothy Whites lamp. Anymore of chemist shops.

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  7. The library service wastes a huge amount on dvds that never get borrowed and then get sold off for a quid. There are plenty of other places folk can borrow dvds and cds but not many places where you can borrow books. The old Boots Library went decades ago.

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  8. yes most of the fiqures michael says ae quite very wrong.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.