Hampshire County Council, who are no saints when it comes to closing libraries, held a conference yesterday, 24th February, on the future of public libraries.
It was a curious event. The attendees were there by invitation only, and, looking down the list, they were mostly from Tory-controlled authorities. According to the speakers' biographies, only one of the people who run public library services and held forth was in fact a librarian. The others seemed to have drifted into managing libraries from other local government departments. And of course there was no one there to speak for those who use libraries.
In a concession to openness, there was a good Twitter feed from @libconf and sporadic use of the tag #libconf,; most of the presentations went up, only to disappear again this morning and videos will go up early next week. But the speakers refused to take questions from the Twitterverse. At one point Tim Coates, the former Waterstones boss and self-appointed expert on libraries, claimed that half Britain's public libraries close for lunch. Evidence, Tim?
I doubt if this conference will be remembered as one that changed very much. I think Hampshire probably held it for PR reasons as much as anything else.
