I have been fortunate, I suppose, in being allowed to use university
libraries without charge to look at specific items. Much more serious,
in my view, than the difficulty of getting access to university
libraries is the problem of the decline in local authority library
services, touched on by Mary Mills in her comments on Greenwich
libraries. Libraries do not buy books, subscribe to journals or obtain
books on loan for you in the way that they did a decade or more ago. I
read recently that between 1988 and 1998 average book prices rose by 50
per cent. In the same period library book funds increased by just five
and a half per cent. The result has been a serious decline in book loans
to the public in those years, from 600 million to 460 million a year.
Last year I wanted to look at the journals of a number of north Wales
historical and archaeological societies. The local reference library has
runs of them, but in most cases they came to an end in recent years
because they stopped subscribing to them.  Two years ago I started to
subscribe to a prestigious journal, the Welsh History Review. It costs
only 13 pounds a year for two issues, but no local authority library in
north-east Wales now subscribes to it. It's bad enough for someone like
me who can afford to find ways round such problems, but the effect on
the student population (of all ages) must be very serious.

The only thing that senior librarians and councillors seem to spend
money on now is buying IT equipment, because specific funds are
available for it. But in a few years, if Internet access becomes as
common as mobile phones are now, I suspect that this money will be
largely wasted. It's as if librarians in the 1950s had decided that
books were on the way out, and television on the way in, so they would
buy TVs rather than books; fortunately they didn't. If libraries don't
spend reasonable sums on buying books, there is little point in them.

Christopher J Williams, 65 Stancliffe Avenue, Marford, Wrexham LL12 8LN
Tel: 01978 852601