National Libraries Day

Saturday  4th Feb 2012 has been designated “National Libraries Day”

There are  activities across the country including all Wokingham Borough libraries.

Click here for information on the planned activities including crafts, coffee mornings and talks.

Civica Annual Conference 25-26 January 2012

Civica, the provider of Wokingham Libraries’ library management system and probably one of the companies in the ‘competitive dialogue’ process, is holding its annual conference for local government officers later this month. There are four seminars planned relating to libraries.

Brian Gamble, Assistant Director – Culture at Birmingham City Council will speak on “Libraries, the Community Hub & Service needs in the Online age.” He will acknowledge the severe budgetary restraints but regards many of his senior colleagues are maintaining an outdated view of local libraries and their role in the community and fail to grasp the concept of libraries as community hubs and thus fail to commit the necessary funding.

The SELMS Consortium in which 11 library authorities have built a framework with Civica as a specialist service provider and technical facilitator will be the focus for discussion on Shared Services. Wokingham libraries were a founder member of the consortium but have subsequently withdrawn on ‘value for money’ grounds but still use the library management software.

In the seminar entitled “Reduce Costs, Balance Staffing Levels & Drive Service Improvements through Outsourcing” Simon Parkes, Director of Library and Learning at Civica envisages that many libraries in future will be partially or completely outsourced to private sector companies such as Civica. This move will transfer libraries’ investment needs from capital budgets to operational expenditure. ‘Balance staffing levels’ is a euphemism for getting rid of staff as the main means for reducing costs.

The final seminar is on “How Do You Exploit Technologies & Collaborative Working to Re-invent the Community Library?” It looks to changes in publishing and how we consume written material in electronic formats that will force libraries to re-consider how they provide information and charge for it. The centrally-driven mandates for community outreach as well as trends towards online information and study is forcing them to re-evaluate how they manage loans, collections and front desk services. Through exploiting technology and taking a collaborative approach through service integration can help re-shape the libraries of tomorrow and increase both the physical and virtual footfall.

The seminars will present strong cases to local government to encourage outsourcing to the private sector. The library seminars do not appear to acknowledge the vital need for professional staff to design and manage the programme of change that the potential contractors envisage.

For full details of the conference see www.civicaconference.co.uk

WInCS CIC Christmas Tree

WInCS CIC contributed a tree to the recent Festival of Christmas Trees held at Trinity Church, Lower Earley. The Festival was in aid of Help for Heroes. Our tree was lit by a series of illuminated snowballs which were much admired. Decorations on the tree were based on quotes supporting advocacy for libraries.

Debate at Wokingham Borough Council Meeting

A petition to ‘Save Our Libraries’ generated sufficient responses to instigate a debate at the Wokingham Borough Council meeting on the 17th November. The Mayor initiated the debate by warning Councillors that they could not discuss anything that related to the ‘competitive dialogue’ process that was stilll ongoing. As a result the ‘debate’  was limited to the semantics of the word ‘privatisation’. The opposition LibDems were concerned that the process was one of privatisation but the governing Conservatives denied this and described the process as one of seeking new expert partners to take the library service forward.

Wokingham future library provision documents

Documents published on 26th May 2011 to consider a way forward for Wokingham library services.

Welcome to the window on Wokingham

We are using this blog to share news and likely changes to the Information and Community Services of Wokingham

We are dedicated to letting you know about  the proposals to outsource the borough’s entire library services

We will publish a timetable of meetings, tenders and community activity relating to this proposal

We will share documentation as it becomes available