How about some more enlightened comments about the library service in Wiltshire?

The public computer system had to be upgraded as the previous one was no longer being supported by the supplier.

This meant considerable changes to about 150 computers that are all networked together.

A bigger job than taking one’s own machine to the local computer shop. Yes there have been some problems, but my understanding of the scope of them is nowhere near as dire as one of your whingeing correspondents makes out. If a CIPFA survey of the library service in Wiltshire (quoted in last week’s Letters page) recorded that 30 per cent of people using the service did not find what they wanted, then surely this means that 70 per cent did.

I don’t know whether Andrew Milroy’s other figure about the reference library stock being reduced to 2,400 books is just as accurate but what I do know is that we have to move with the times.

A number of standard reference books are no longer published in paper form but only available via the internet and so are much more widely available to all library users throughout the county. Better to have 2,400 books which are up to date, well used and appropriate than 24,000 which gather dust.

He seems to confuse the issue by including the book stock of the Local Studies Library, previously based on the same floor as the reference library, as being part of the reference library.

This was never the case and this countywide facility, not just for Trowbridge residents, has now moved to Chippenham.

The reference library does now seem to be a sad place, housed as it is in such a ghastly building, rarely visited and a victim of the credit crunch.

How much better it would be for users and staff alike if some space could be found in the lending library.

We should have been looking forward to the opening of a new Trowbridge library in September, merging both lending and reference departments, but this is now on the back burner because of the uncertainty of the Waterside project. Let’s try to be a bit more positive and comment more accurately about this great service which is free to every person in Wiltshire.

Ann Pearse, The Pastures, Westbury