North Yorkshire Council has increased the fine for an overdue book at its libraries from 30p to 35p per day.
The council said it was the first increase in almost a decade and was being made “in the light of increased pressures on finances”.
The changes will only apply to adult library members and not children.
The price to print an A4 piece of black and white paper at the library has also increased from 10p to 20p. It remains 50p to print a page of colour.
In an email sent to members yesterday, the council said income from fines and other charges goes into the library budget and contributes to ongoing service delivery costs.
The maximum fine for one book is £8.
The email added:
“Charges incurred at our community libraries goes directly back to the groups managing those libraries and makes up a valuable part of the income needed to meet their running costs.
“To mitigate the increase and to help customers keep track of items on loan we will be introducing reminders about when books are due back.”
For details of all library charges visit the council’s website.
Last year, Harrogate Library was the most popular in the county with 177,629 visits.
Visitor numbers at other libraries in the former Harrogate district area were Knaresborough with 110,191, Ripon with 73,428 and Starbeck with 18,676.
In 2015, the running of 31 libraries in the county was handed to volunteers in the face of mounting financial pressures brought on by austerity.
In this model, the council’s library service continues to provide the infrastructure including books and public IT, as well as some paid staff support to ensure consistency across the county.
The community libraries account for just under 40% of active library users and deliver on average 50% of the total business for book lending and computer access.
Harrogate primary school launches campaign to fill new library
St Peter’s CE Primary School in Harrogate has unveiled its new library.
The library aims to give children a place to build and nurture their love of reading. It was funded by the Friends of St Peter’s and a grant from local charity the Johnson and Mukherjee Trust. St Peter’s worked with York outdoor play company Playscheme to develop the design.
To celebrate the opening, the school and the Friends of St Peter’s have launched a wish list campaign in partnership with independent Harrogate bookshop Imagined Things, which aims to restock the school library with additional books.
Debbie Phillips, the manager and school’s co-ordinator from Imagined Things, said:
“We love partnering with local schools and encouraging that love for reading within their communities. We’re so excited by St Peter’s new library and can’t wait to help fill it with new books.”
Head teacher Paul Griffiths
Paul Griffiths, headteacher at St Peter’s, said:
“Reading from physical books in an inspiring environment is incredibly important to us all St Peter’s. It is at the heart of our focus on enabling children to become fluent, confident, lifelong readers, giving them access to all the wonderful opportunities available to them now and in the future.
“That’s why we are we are truly delighted to have been able to provide such a wonderful child-friendly and exciting space within our school.”
St Peter’s is a member of Yorkshire Causeway Schools Trust and is housed in a Victorian building formally home to Harrogate Hospital. The primary school is now looking at plans to further develop its nurture space The Nest.
Anyone can support St Peter’s library by visiting Imagined Things Bookshop on Montpellier Parade to buy a book of their choice that will be placed in the new library, including a personalised note if they wish.
Starbeck library celebrates £6,000 refurbishment of children’s area
Starbeck Community Library celebrated a £6,000 refurbishment of the children’s section on Saturday.
The building faced closure in 2017 when North Yorkshire County Council withdrew funding from smaller libraries.
Thanks to the support of volunteers, it has continued to operate but needed to find new revenue streams to upgrade facilities.
This year the library secured a £6,000 grant from the National Lottery Community Fund’s Awards for All programme. Starbeck Post Office boosted the total by £500.
The income enabled Starbeck-based Amara Jane Furnishing to refurbish the children’s area.
The refurbished children’s area.
Tina Harper, a volunteer who looks after the children’s area, said local people had indicated the “faded and jaded” area was most in need of improvement.
The funding has paid for a new rug, sofa and shelving and enabled the section to be brightened up.
Julia Moseley, one of the volunteers that helped save the library when it faced closure, cut a ribbon to mark the refurbishment at Saturday’s celebration.
You can find out more about the library here.
Harrogate district libraries will not ban or censor ‘offensive’ books
North Yorkshire Council has said it will not ban or censor books that readers find offensive in its libraries.
Novels have increasingly become tangled-up in the so-called culture wars, particularly in the United States where thousands of books have been banned in school and public libraries due to complaints about race or LGBTQ+ themes.
The trend has spread to the UK with research published this year by the UK’s library association, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, finding that requests to ban books in the UK have increased significantly in recent years.
Its survey of librarians reported a third have been asked by members of the public to censor or remove books and 82% said they were concerned about the increase in the requests.
But North Yorkshire Council, which runs libraries in the Harrogate district, has said it has only received one request to ban a book in the last five years.
Boroughbridge Community Library
The book in question was Hilary Bonner’s crime thriller Deadly Dance and the request related to graphic descriptions the reader found upsetting.
The council declined to remove the book on the grounds that it follows the approach of CILIP, which says access to information should not be restricted. Its guidance states:
“It is the role of a library and information service that is funded from the public purse to provide, as far as resources allow, access to all publicly available information. Access should not be restricted on any grounds except that of the law.”
The council added that its own policy does not permit the removal of any books at the request of an individual or group and that library staff do not label items to warn customers about potentially offensive or harmful content.
Book collection launched across district to support teenagers’ mental health
Books that support the mental health of teenagers have been put in libraries across the Harrogate district.
The North Yorkshire’s library service initiative coincides with today’s World Mental Health Day.
The pandemic’s disruption to young people’s lives, alongside issues such as growing concern about global warming, has increased uncertainty about identity, position in society and future plans.
In 2020, almost half of young people said they did not feel in control of their lives and almost a third felt overwhelmed by feelings of panic and anxiety on a daily basis, according to North Yorkshire County Council.
The new books, which are recommended by health professionals as part of the Reading Well initiative, cover topics such as body image, bereavement, social anxiety, boosting confidence, surviving online, sexuality, gender identity and mental health.
They cater for a wide range of reading levels and formats to support less confident readers and encourage engagement.
North Yorkshire County Council’s executive member for libraries, Cllr Greg White, said:
“Our libraries have embraced the Reading Well scheme for some years, already focusing on mental health, dementia and issues facing young people.
“This latest collection adds another strand to the support that young people can find at their library, again showcasing their important role in maintaining the health and wellbeing of the communities they serve.”
Every library in North Yorkshire, including Harrogate, Knaresborough, Boroughbridge and Ripon, will be displaying titles from the new collection and any title which is unavailable can be requested and borrowed free of charge.
The Reading Well collection is curated by The Reading Agency in partnership with experts from organisations and professionals including NHS England, leading mental health charities and library staff.
More information about the Reading Well collection can be found here.
Library visits remain low following pandemic, says councilLibrary bosses are examining whether the covid-19 pandemic has caused permanent changes to people’s reading habits.
A meeting of North Yorkshire County Council’s partnerships scrutiny committee heard while library visits in the year to April were at about 60% of pre-pandemic levels, book issues had returned to about 85% of the number being borrowed before March 2020.
Chrys Mellor, the authority’s head of libraries, said despite the continued low numbers of people using libraries in North Yorkshire last year, with 304,549 e-books and e-audio items issued it was clear communities still want to use library services.
She said although the county’s “almost unique model” of largely volunteer-run libraries had only reopened partially following lockdowns last year, it still attracted more than a million visits last and saw nearly 1.5 million books issued.
Ms Mellor said it was noteable that about 3,000 people had become library members during lockdowns to borrow e-books, which now represented about seven per cent of items borrowed, and that most of those people had remained as members.
Earlier this year a Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy study concluded that “only time will tell if this recent shift to digital will prove to be a long-term model for our use of libraries”.
Referring to the difference between library visitors and books being issued, Ms Mellor said:
“As yet, it is unclear whether that is the people who came in to use the computers were not coming in quite as much because they had bought them or the people who came in for our social activities who are not quite ready to come back in.
“Certainly these last few months has seen a rapid increase in visits. Whether people were simply coming in less and actually borrowing more, that’s still to be worked out.”
She said North Yorkshire had been among the country’s highest performing areas for last summer’s reading challenge for children, but that it had seen about 50 per cent of the usual number of youngsters take part.
Ms Mellor said:
“Considering people were still being fairly wary about coming in we were quite pleased with that.”
The meeting heard while libraries were nearly back up to pre-pandemic opening hours, the council was working to help libraries across the county facing issues finding sufficient volunteers to run them.
Ms Mellor said:
Harrogate primary school sets £10,000 target for new library“Some volunteers have decided they have found something different to do in the last year, others are still a little bit wary about coming in. We equally have had reports of a lot of new and younger volunteers joining us.
“We still had over 100,000 [volunteer] hours last year when we weren’t even open full time.”
Coppice Valley Primary School is hoping to raise £10,000 to improve its library and provide a space for students to be inspired by books.
The current space inside the Harrogate school is more than 20 years old and the second-hand shelving is beginning to collapse.
The plan is to use the funds to completely redesign the space with new storage, books and floor mats.
Ms Emma Meadus, headteacher, said the school set up a covid-safe book swap outside during the pandemic and because of that many books weren’t returned or were returned in poor condition.
The school wants to improve its current library.
The school has had a quote from a design company of £8,800. Any remaining donations will be used to buy new books.
Ms Meadus said:
“It’s been a make-shift, make-do area and the books are in need of an upgrade. We knew it needed to be better for our kids, we have a lot of catch-up learning to do after the pandemic and we want a beautiful space for the kids to be inspired.”
The school is celebrating its 50th anniversary in September and hopes the library will be a legacy project.
Although the target is £10,000, the school wants to raise £20,000 over the next two years it so it can build another library for younger children in a separate area of the school.
To support the school’s appeal, click here.
Harrogate library to close for two weeks on Saturday for maintenance workHarrogate library will close on Saturday for just over a fortnight to enable large-scale maintenance work to be carried out.
The project, which involves all three floors, includes remedial damp works, redecoration and the replacement of energy-efficient lighting.
The building will close at 4pm on Saturday and is scheduled to reopen at 9am on Monday, April 4. Customers will be able to borrow additional books to cover the closure period.
North Yorkshire County Council, which is responsible for libraries, announced the news today.
Neil Irving, assistant director for policy, partnerships and communities at the council, said:
“These much-needed improvements will have lasting benefits to Harrogate library; one of our largest and busiest in the county.
“We apologise for the inconvenience it will cause to library visitors but we are encouraging people to come and borrow a selection of books to keep them going over the closure period.”
The nearest alternative libraries are Starbeck Community Library, Knaresborough Library and Customer Services Centre and Nidderdale Plus Community Library.
You can also browse, reserve and renew items and access your library account online here or via the library app.
The work was previously scheduled to take place from January 22 to February 7.