The Reading Agency has come up with the idea of a universal reading offer for libraries. This is partly an atytempt at a form of shared services, but I suspect it will have more usefulness in benchmarking a standard group of library services.
The danger in most authorities is that that they preserve nominal libraries, i.e. the buildings, but cut back on the opening hours, staff skills and activities. Cutting back on all these can be readily achieved without the publicity that a building closure involves. Evolving a widely used set of activities could serve as a benchmark that would make that kind of rosion in service quality much harder.
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