Starting on Monday I will be taking over at the helm for the Voices for the Library Twitter account. If you don't know what Voices for the Library is, then it's quite simple, they're here to give a collected voice for libraries.
The purpose of Voices for the Library Tweets via a different library and information person each week is to find out about their thoughts, experiences and ideas - all in 140 wonderful characters.
Why am I doing this?
I would like to Tweet for Voices of the Library as I don’t always feel I engage with the library community as much as I should, and that I think this is an interesting opportunity to spend a few days making more of an effort to do so. I think like so many of us, whether it be librarian, cataloguer, information specialist, database manager – colleagues think they know what we do, but they’re usually far off the mark – I hope this will go some way to readdress that.
In recent years I have rediscovered the power of the local library through my little girl who is an avid reader and we have both come to appreciate the ‘local’ in our libraries, for me a second time round. I feel that in this ever-changing world that libraries should be heralded as hubs of the community, they are informative, grounding, inspirational and contain much more knowledge than just books and computers but the people who never tire of helping people.
If you want to know more about the group, read on...
"If you read the papers, listen to the radio or watch the news you have probably seen or heard people expressing their opinion of what Public Libraries should be, or even whether they should exist at all. Most of these people either don’t use libraries, have an agenda to follow or think the library should only provide what they personally want.
Our agenda is to give people the facts about Public Library Services in the UK, and about the work librarians do, and to save Public Libraries.
We aim to provide a balanced view of the service and the professionals who work there, and to discuss some ideas for the way forward. We don’t want to lose our libraries, and we aim to ensure future generations continue to enjoy access to free unbiased public libraries and librarians.
We are inviting everybody who uses, loves or needs the services UK public libraries and librarians provide to join us, share your stories of why you want to save the services, explain what they mean to you, your friends and your families.
We believe that working together is the best way to create the public libraries we all want to use, providing as wide a range of information, recreational reading and activities supporting learning and literacy as possible. Not just for now, but forever.
We have the following aims:
1. Share positive stories from public libraries and librarians across the country.
2. Provide factual information about library usage in the UK.
3. Provide spokespeople for the media from a variety of different public libraries
4. Be a voice for communities and individuals to speak out about why they value their public libraries.
5. Support local campaigns to save libraries where it is apparent that the local council has not properly considered the impact of cuts to library services."
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