Meeting rejects High Street library move plan
SELKIRK’s community council and residents who turned out at its meeting on Monday have given an emphatic thumbs down to moving library services out of Ettrick Terrace.
On a show of hands, the gathering voted 17-3 to reject a plan to close the library and relocate its stock on the ground floor of the Municipal Building at the east end of High Street.
Selkirk is one of seven Borders towns in which Scottish Borders Council (SBC) wants to combine library and contact centre services in a bid to save cash.
On Monday, senior SBC officers, including head of customer services Jenni Craig and properties manager Andrew Drummond-Hunt, briefed the community council on its proposals for the Royal and Ancient Burgh.
“The integration proposals for Selkirk have raised a number of challenges, not present in other communities, particularly around property,” their report said.
And it went on: “The integration would enable library and contact services to be provided from a single site. This would be achieved by having staff within the intergrated facility being trained to deliver both library and contact centre services to the level currently provided on the existing separate sites.
“This would allow a higher number of staff to be available to customers than is currently the case.”
The meeting heard that if the merger takes place, it was proposed to reduce both library and contact centre hours to reflect demand.
Selkirk is one of the least used libraries in the Borders and it and the contact centre have considerably fewer visitors than other facilities in the region, the report said.
The new hours for an integrated service would be 10am-1pm and 2-5pm on Monday and Thursday, 2-7pm on Tuesday, 10am-3pm on Friday and 9.30am-12.30pm on Saturday.
It would be closed on Wednesday – the only day of the week on which a new SBC bus service to bring people from the Ladylands area into the town centre operates.
The SBC delegation outlined two options – moving the library to the Municipal Buildings and vice-versa – and clearly favoured the former as it would maintain at least the current library size, and provide easy ground floor access and was close to other amenities in the town.
Moving the contact centre to the current library would reduce available space within a building and make the services less accessible, take them further from amenities, and ignore a recent major capital investment at the Municipal Building.
Summing up the view of the meeting, community council vice-chairman Dr Lindsay Neil said the vast majority of his colleagues and members of the public favoured the second option.
But he added: “There is much concern that the work of qualified librarians is being devalued, while a major fly in the ointment is that SBC does not accept that the library in Ettrick Terrace is part of Selkirk’s common good.
“SBC makes a decision in October. We have until the end of this month to make a submission, expressing our dissent. We will be doing this in the strongest possible terms.”
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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