STOURBRIDGE MP Lynda Waltho has asked Libraries Minister Margaret Hodge to investigate after the News revealed thousands of the town's library books were removed from the shelves and binned in a skip. The Labour MP described Dudley Council's book-culling saga as "one step away from censorship and book burning".

And now, amid fears the removal of books is just the start of Dudley Council's controversial library modernisation plans, she has asked the Government's library chief Margaret Hodge to keep her eye on the situation -which comes nine months after the council rubber-stamped its unpopular proposal to close five of the borough's smaller libraries.

She told the News: "Not content with riding roughshod over the wishes of local people especially in Quarry Bank and Dudley Wood, we are now insulted with the binning of many thousands of well-loved, and useful texts.

"To hear staff are being instructed to throw away stock that is only a few years old just after the much-loved local archive has been taken from us has made many of us suspicious that the town library is being undermined ready for another bombshell to come."

Dudley Council claims the books were thrown away to clear the backlog resulting from a decade's worth of poor stock management - and has said there are no plans, either during or after the Crown Centre regeneration, to close or relocate Stourbridge Library.

Library bosses are also promising £8,000 worth of new stock for Stourbridge by Sunday June 22 and are extending the library's opening hours to include Sundays and later nights on Wednesday evenings.

Worried library users, however, remain concerned about the future of the Stourbridge the borough's busiest library - which has seen its user numbers drop by 50 percent between 1998/9 and 2006/7, according to research by Wall Heath councillor Dave Tyler gathered during his fight to save his doomed village library, which is set to close on Saturday June 21. Meanwhile Amblecote Library, based at Wordsley's Brook School, closes this Saturday (June 14), just two-and-a-half years after £50,000 of public money was spent on creating the facility for both the public and schoolchildren to use.

Head teacher Lynn Cartwright said: "It's very sad; it's closure of a really good up-to-date facility that could have been developed to the benefit of the local community. I think it's shortsighted."

She said the vacated library space would be used for new classrooms and the children's books from the facility would be donated to the school.

The above text was taken from the Stourbridge News June 12th 2008

The reporter was Bev Holder

In a previous report on this terrible waste of books, it was stated that many of the books were in top notch condition, my personal view on this is that it is disgusting to think that so many books got thrown in a skip when they could have gone to local charities book stores or schools. The humble book is a very important thing to people and to just waste information and the books containing them like that is completely stupid. Sure, we have the internet nowadays to look things up on but sometimes we need a good solid book to just pick up off the shelf for reference. Plus reading is fun and informative, it's one of the fundamental tools we have available to us to grow and learn from. I'm absolutely appalled by this news and to think that someone must have thought it was a good idea in the first place is even more ridiculous.

If given to local charities they'd go to a worthy cause and put money in the hands of people who could aid the community. If supplied to schools or colleges they would provide much needed information and aid the learning curves of their students, plus help save on some of the library costs of such institutions. If sold in a local book store they would at least end up in the hands of people who wanted that specific book and would cherish the texts plus they would serve the businesses well. I can't believe that the best idea they could come up with is to throw a load of books out into the rubbish tip. Just because a book may not have been borrowed from the library for a short period of time, doesn't make the book worthless, it simply means that in that library full of books the person who wanted to read it hadn't arrived yet. To someone at some point it may well be checked out for reference. To throw the books in the skip and render them worthless is simply denying a service to someone in the future. I'm so angry that this could happen. Beyond this words fail me.