Well, it’s been a very nasty few months for librarians, library staff and everyone who cares about public libraries, and about the principle that citizens should have comprehensive access to these wonderful institutions. We’ve seen them sent straight to the top of the list of services that councils are choosing to cut as the effects of the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review bite and local government finance is squeezed until the pips squeak. But, in some ways, the public debate this policy has provoked has been every bit as bruising.

Because, along the way, we’ve had to swallow some harsh lessons that we probably weren’t expecting about the way some people think about libraries, and how irritatingly successful these naysayers are in getting their negative and inaccurate views into the mainstream. The fact that many of them haven’t been in a library for 20 years and are proud of that, or that they think that everyone has access to the same financial and personal resources that they do, or are paid political lobbyists, or can’t for the life of them see why a few minutes with Google fails to top years of training, experience and professional development, or think libraries have brought it on themselves for not operating to their exact personal specification, only does so much to take the sting out of all this. Or the fact that we’ve seen such a wonderful groundswell of support from those people who do use and value libraries - since their voices seem to be getting drowned out, especially at a local level, and especially when it comes to making the case for libraries to elected representatives.

So taking the opportunity to get together with like-minded folk who have been campaigning for libraries all round the country was pretty much essential. This is why nearly 100 people gathered in London on Saturday to share their tips and experiences, find inspiration and support, plan future action and listen to messages from high-profile campaigners from the library world such as the authors Philip Pullman and Alan Gibbons – speaking via video due to the fact he is currently in Africa. The conference attenders came from three groups, although I’m sure many people would happily describe themselves as members of more than one. They were those who had founded, run or taken part in campaigns for a specific library or group of libraries; people with a professional interest in books, literacy and libraries; and trade unionists (mostly from the library staff union Unison). Following the introductions, conference-goers had a chance to hear from three groups of people who have been right at the sharp end of the libraries fight - campaigners in Brent, Doncaster and Gloucestershire.

The activities of Brent campaigners who found themselves sleeping outside branches and confronting workers sent to empty buildings of stock and computers have been reported widely in the national press. But I learned that the reason the Kensal Rise protesters in particular are so concerned to ensure continuity of use is because the building and land is in the gift of All Souls College, Oxford - and, as soon as it stops being a library, it will revert back to that institution. In Doncaster, the campaign for a less dysfunctional service has been going on for some considerable time now, with its local authority attempting to claim that it is running a ‘comprehensive and efficient’ service despite employing next to no professional staff over the course of years. It is also suffering under one of the less productive experiments in democratic tinkering to come out of the Local Government Act 2000 - that of a directly-elected mayor with no sympathy for or understanding whatsoever of the role of public libraries, especially in deprived communities.

In Gloucestershire, we heard, a friends’ group for one library expanded and gathered momentum until it was representing the whole county and had gone all the way to the High Court in a bid to stop the local library service being gutted, obtaining an injunction against service cuts along the way. The message I took away from this was an important theme of the whole conference. Almost all library campaigners have started from exactly the same place - a sense of unease about what was happening, a feeling that something badly needed to be done about it, followed by the realisation that they were the people who would have to do it - or no-one else would. The people who have found themselves spearheading really big campaigns with a national profile started out in the same boat as the rest of us, with the same motivations – in fact, any of us could find ourselves having to do the same kinds of things. And it was very interesting and useful hearing them share their stories and talk about all the expertise they had picked up along the way.

Next up was a talk from Pete Challis of Unison on understanding the relationship between central government policy and local government finance. He explained how the various streams of revenue that flow from one to the other had been cut or limited, with changes to business rates, revenue support grant and the ability of councils to raise money via council tax. He said we were looking at the biggest cuts to local government funding in living memory and suggested the figure topped 30 per cent even if inflation was not factored in. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he suggested that the solution to this and other public sector funding problems was national political action. However, the point that local campaigners now need to organise on a national level rather than just concentrating on their own neighbourhood battles was made again and again throughout the conference and was one of its most important themes.

My first workshop was a more detailed session with Mr Challis on understanding local government finance. I was hoping to acquire some concrete tools for understanding how library funding was being handled and some arguments to present that would counter the inevitable point that councils needed to make large-scale savings. I judged the session to be reasonably successful on both counts, with a briefing on which finance documents contained the information and at what points of the year they are prepared and published. There were also some suggestions from both the workshop leader and attenders on counter-arguments including using libraries as community hubs, to offer joined-up service delivery, to save on building costs and to ameliorate the costs of later interventions in areas such as literacy or social care by giving people the support and information they needed early enough to prevent later, more acute reliance on services. It was also pointed out here and elsewhere that pitching libraries against services like social care is particularly dishonest since often users of these services are the same people rather than two distinct groups.

My second workshop, run by Abby Barker of the Save Rosehill Library Campaign in Suffolk, was on marshalling arguments and organising events. This was a practical exercise in drawing on the experience of everyone attending and using it to develop a checklist of points which could be used in the organisation of any library campaign. It was an invaluable exercise and an extremely well-run workshop which highlighted the need for organisation, research, planning, thinking ahead and, perhaps most important of all, sharing the workload among a group of people with clear responsibilities who can support one another through the highs and lows. A summary of this and all the other workshops can be found via the links at the bottom of this post.

Campaigners joined forces once more for a plenary session in which workshop leaders reported back and gave a five-minute summary of what had been learned. There was a short period of time allocated for questions and comments with several calls for campaigners to step up action to a national level and suggestions of how that might be achieved, and how we might organise in the future. The conference ended with one of the day’s highlights – a totally uncompromising, furiously angry and gloriously rabble-rousing speech from author Philip Pullman reiterating the theme that the current threat to libraries is a national problem only likely to be solved by action on a national scale.

Pullman characterised the situation as a “war on stupidity” and asked why we seemed determined to accept life in this country becoming “more expensive, more complicated, uglier, more difficult to deal with, more difficult to find someone responsible, in every way worse” thanks to the introduction of market forces into areas that really do not benefit from them. He also challenged everyone to treat national rates of child literacy and child wellbeing as the serious problems they are rather than looking past them. The full speech is linked from the bottom of this post and is a must-read, so please do look at the full version.

So, what did I get from the conference? A sense that starting small and low-key is just fine – it’s how everyone started. The chance to meet a lot of people in person that I’d only previously known online, and some great conversations with them. I was also able to catch up with some old contacts, get some solid practical ideas for campaigning, contribute to the discussion about national action, and get an insight into some of the obstacles that mature library campaigns regularly meet, especially when they can’t persuade elected representatives to work with them, or even listen to them. I learned that the personal cost of campaigning in the face of setbacks can be very high, and that it is essential to make sure you have enough support. I also left with the thing I had come for – practical tools and ideas to help me in areas that are not necessarily my strongest, such as organising events.

Thanks to The Library Campaign and Voices for the Library for organising an inspirational event – and I look forward to meeting and working with members of both in the future.

• The Library Campaign website
• The Library Campaign blog
• Voices for the Library
• The Bookseller: Philip Pullman’s speech
• Alan Gibbons’ conference introduction
• Public Libraries News: Library Campaign Conference - includes a 12-page summary of the conference and workshops