Thursday 18 June 2015

Editorial: Thoughts on a Dispute

(Our village library had our stock slashed and a forced reorganisation from the 'centre' that we really didn't need.)

Is there an argument to be made here, in this situation, about collaboration? Is there? How much of a collaboration is this library between Llangyndeyrn Community Council and Carmarthenshire anyway? Surely there must be some consultation to the local people and the owners of the facility, or is this arrangement purely one-sided and the administration totally autocratic? Every indication from the county is that the library service is indeed totally autocratic, monolithic and driven from the centre; driven from the centre to the point of madness. Throughout our times as volunteers at the village library we have striven to remain unnoticed, so as to avoid the hammer strike of utterly implacable and unmovable authority, and it has rankled from the beginning. Do people not realise that they are not dealing with employees any more, but living representatives of the communities they are serving, and that these restructurings towards uniformity are being pushed through everywhere, with no public consultation, no regard for the volunteers who work in our local libraries, and with no feedback from local members as to how to improve the service for their community? As the library services of this county, and of Britain in general, move into a phase of working with volunteers to keep front line services open, there will surely have to come a reassessment of how to work with people who are not employees, who are not stooges and underlings, but who are collaborators and partners in keeping the wheels of public service moving. It is unavoidable and inevitable that this relationship will have to change, and it would be far better for local government to champion this change in the status quo than resist it to its last breath.

Libraries may be among the first public services to go volunteer-led, but they surely won't be the last, and this issue will rise again. It will have to.

O.

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