The new £188m Birmingham Library will open with a fanfare to the public next Tuesday, with 400,000 new books – nearly twice the previous library's capacity – and an eye-catching design by Dutch architects Mecanoo.
At the same time, in other parts of the country, austerity-struck council leaders slash funding for professional librarians and close local library branches or hand them over to be run by groups of volunteers. Campaigners predict that there will be 400 library closures in the next three years.
Herefordshire, Lincolnshire and Sunderland are the latest authorities to clash with local campaigners over proposed cuts; they join Bolton, Doncaster, Gloucestershire, the Isle of Wight, Newcastle and Surrey.
In Herefordshire, where the council proposed closing all but the central library, campaigners and local MPs are in negotiations with the county council, pressing it to consider merging their library authority with two neighbouring authorities to reduce costs, said John Hitchin, director of neighbourhood regeneration specialists Renaisi.
"We have local city and market town councillors mostly on our side. We are pressing for a combined library authority for Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire to create real economies of scale," he said.
Such a move would follow similar examples in London and Northern Ireland. "Having 151 separately managed library authorities just in England is frankly unsustainable," said Desmond Clarke, library campaigner and a former director of publisher Faber and Faber.
Campaigners criticise Arts Council England, the agency with responsibility for improving and developing the public library service, claiming that it has "so far failed to announced a proper plan or to describe the expected outcomes of its work".
Meanwhile CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), the representative body for librarians in public and school libraries, as well as scientific, academic and corporate libraries, has drawn criticism for what is seen as a pointless and costly rebranding exercise. It has proposed changing its name from CILIP to ILPUK (Information and Library Professionals UK) at a time when library services are in crisis.
Charles Oppenheim, former professor of information science at Loughborough University, yesterday wrote to CILIP accusing its senior management of being "defensive, dishonest and lacking in rigour" regarding the rebranding exercise.
He wrote: "I expect certain things from my professional association: honesty, transparency and professionalism are among the most important. In this rebrand exercise, CILIP senior management has failed on all three counts … What have we achieved by the expensive, painful exercise? I rate the pros and cons of the new name and new acronym virtually no improvement on the pros and cons of the old name and old acronym."
In a further bid to drive the library issue up the political agenda, campaigners hope to meet with the All Party Parliamentary Library Group next month to set out their concerns, including evidence of what they see as a crisis in local library services.
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