The volunteers have been trained and ready to run the new Edward Edwards Library in Niton. Picture by Jennifer Burton.
WIGHT LIVINGEDWARD Edwards, let’s hope you would be happy to see what is going on in Niton now.
The Victorian founder of modern municipal libraries is buried in the village churchyard and, just down the road, more pioneers are at work.
The tiny ex-telephone exchange is about to become the Island’s first community library after the IW Council cuts the purse strings and stops running it directly. A band of volunteers has been trained ready to help the public and many hours of work have gone into jumping the legal and business hurdles necessary to get the project off the ground.
As a result, Niton is getting ready to throw a party. The newly renamed Edward Edwards Library is set to be taken over by the community in the middle of October and an official opening ceremony held soon afterwards, when the volunteers want to welcome the community at large to come and have a look at what is going on and maybe enjoy some tea and cake as well.
Once the balloons have come down, the aim is no-one will really notice anything different. People using the library will find everything as normal — a rotating stock of books on the shelves, internet access set up for those who want to use it and all the other services expected from a branch library.
Users will still be able to reserve books held at other branches still under council control, return books borrowed elsewhere, buy their green bags for garden refuse and all the myriad other services found in libraries on the Island. Users will still find DVDs and talking books, a big supply of large-print books and a full range of reference works plus the fantastic collection of children’s books.
And, most importantly, the core services will still be free. There will be no charge to borrow books and no charge to use the internet.
The process of setting up a community library started back in January when the council was exploring ways to cut spending by £17 million.
One of the proposals was to cut back the library service, keeping open the bigger libraries while sacrificing the smaller, often rural ones.
Niton Village Hall was packed one Saturday morning to hear council leader Cllr David Pugh explain why the much-loved tiny library in the middle of the village was set to go.
The atmosphere was, it’s fair to say, hostile but from the start there was a determination that, no matter what, the library in Niton would not close.
That determination was seized upon by newly elected councillor Dave Stewart and his predecessor, Bill Wyatt-Millington. Names were taken of anyone interested in getting involved in a community-run library and a few weeks later came another meeting.
That time the would-be volunteers — who represented every strand of community life, not just from Niton but the surrounding villages like Whitwell, Chale and St Lawrence, who also use the library — each spoke about why they were prepared to get involved.
People who live in Niton see it as a bit of a special place, a gem of a village where the school thrives, there is a generous handful of busy shops, packed churches and a host of community organisations. The library is a key part of all that.
Ex-army man Jon Boileau-Goad summed up the feelings of most. "It’s the line in the sand," he said. If the library went, what might be next?
His thoughts were echoed by the others there, who ranged from people who had retired and wanted to get more involved in the community, through those who had busy careers but were determined to find the extra time if it meant the library wouldn’t shut, to parents whose young children were regular library users.
Lots of technical stuff has followed since — the formation of a management committee, who have painstakingly sorted out all the details, and the training of the volunteers who will be at the frontline, behind the counter and helping library users make the most of the facility.
It has been clear from the start the council was fully behind the plan and it has done everything possible to make it successful, even though sorting out the nitty gritty of the details of leases and such like has been rather slower than at first was hoped.
The library headquarters team of John English, Rob Jones and Elspeth Jackson have done the practical stuff to get the volunteers trained. They held numerous training sessions, both in the village where they took groups through the process of running a library, and at headquarters, where detailed training on how to operate the computer system has happened. They made it informative, fun and even convinced the doubters among us that we would be capable of taking on the task.
The council’s Astrid Davies, who has the unenviable task of implementing the cuts policy as far as libraries are concerned, has backed the management committee every step of the way, gaining a reputation as the woman who always pointed out the pitfalls and problems and then did her best to find a way through them.
For the last few months, volunteers have been working alongside the regular library staff, manning the public sessions and putting their training into practice. Bill Wyatt Millington was the first volunteer to stamp a book for a member of the public and now 30-plus volunteers are regularly covering sessions.
The experienced library staff make the whole thing look effortless, issuing books, recommending good reads, answering children’s questions, tracing books held in other branches and finding just the book a customer wants with only the flimsiest bits of information.
We volunteers can only hope to eventually emulate the expertise of the experienced staff and hope library customers bear with us while we get into our stride.
It might be nerve-wracking to be behind the counter but it is also the most enormous amount of fun.
I’ve had some lovely chats with people I’ve never met before, discovered and re-discovered some favourite authors and learned something about our reading habits.
We Niton folk are all obsessed with crime, from the genteel village murders a la Agatha Christie to the dark and sophisticated novels of Ian Rankin, with an awful lot of blood and gore in between. Everybody, in my brief experience, loves a good detective story.
It’s impossible to leave politics completely aside over an issue like this and the would-be volunteers were concerned about people losing their jobs and the ethics of volunteers taking control of what had always been a council-run facility.
Laura Marshall is part of the management committee.
She said the community library plan had only ever been Plan B for everyone involved.
"It has always been a twin-track approach," she said.
"We were fully supportive of the efforts people made to keep the Island’s library service in its existing form and we were supportive of the legal challenge made but we were determined from the outset that, if the council went ahead with its proposals to close our library, then we were going to be prepared.
"The community library plan was Niton’s back-up, this was our Plan B," she said.
The community group also has to meet the running costs and lots of inventive ways are being found to come up with the estimated £2,500 a year plus it will cost to keep it going. An auction, jumble sales and a posh frocks gala dinner are just some of the suggestions and supporters can make financial pledges towards the upkeep of the library.
The initial aim might be that library users find no change at their local library but the volunteers hope that, slowly, the community might find they get even more out of the facility.
There are lots of ideas, involving poetry and literary competitions, storytimes and more book groups, floating around as to what can be done to keep up the levels of interest in the library and get even more people using it.
The village school is key and headteacher Ingrid Ramsdale-Capper has been fully involved in the community takeover.
Local author Wendy Harris is among the volunteers and is optimistic the community project could be the start of something big.
"I can see enormous benefits to the community," she said. "Libraries are very close to people’s hearts and there has been so much goodwill generated by this project. I think it could be infectious."