Furthermore, this is not a single incident, but just the one I used to act as an example, because it could
refer to one of several library authorities and would not identify a particular one.
My reason for posting was precisely to raise the issue that the survival of the public library service is not always down to external factors and to get some 'mature consideration' from people working within the sector. The shame is that rather than look inward and consider if there are faults within services which are damaging their 'cause', the emphasis appears to be on keeping-up professional appearances and castigating someone trying to highlight a long standing fault which affects USERS - and doing so on a forum not used by members of the public.
Public libraries are fighting to keep professional staff in their libraries (rightly, in my opinion) and, as an example, I would have thought ILLs would be one of the services community libraries would be unlikely to offer and yet, in my professionally-run service, people in my village can't get access to ILLs unless they travel 38 miles, all due to a 'technical glitch' which has
gone uncorrected for two years: I - and local authority councillors - do not view this as a professional service.
I hope a professional public library service survives, but if all list members react in this way, I fear it won't; that will be rather a shame.