LIBRARY NEWS

Libraries Gave Us Power

Jim Sells of the National Literacy Trust has had an idea - here it is in his own words:

Hello chums

Lots of you are authors, librarians or generally in the 'we love reading game', so I hope you'll like this and be pleased that I've emailed you, even if you haven't heard from me in a while! I've set up a facebook group to help save libraries. It's called A Design For Life - Save our libraries. It's a Jim Sells thing, not an NLT thing, but boy we do love libraries here.

So what's the group going to do? I've half inched the idea of getting Rage Against The Machine to Number One to stick it to the XFactor man, and, following Nicky Wire's excellent article in The Guardian in support of libraries (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/07/nicky-wires-library-closures-manics), decided that we should all try to get their A Design for Life song (opening line, "Libraries gave us power", I know you knew that) to Number One.

I've contacted the band's management and they are putting it to the band, so let's hope we get their direct support. And maybe some cheeky money for charity too, something which will help to keep libraries around for generations.

So what should you do? Join my facebook group : http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/home.php?sk=group_146435405415544. Tell everyone you know to join the group. At a given point, buy the single. We need to coordinate this and choose a date; I'm thinking Easter, please post your thoughts.

I've even made a personal sacrifice: I've got a Twitter account! http://twitter.com/#!/jimrockslots. So look out for me on that, where I'll keep pointing to pertinent articles and things we can do. If you can bear to follow me, please do.

So look out for updates on the group page, persuade all your friends to join, and keep adding comments yourselves too. If you like me, you can even ask to be my facebook friend. But above all buy the song, when prompted, spread the word and let's make this happen.

Keep it turned up to 11 mates,

Rock on. And, erm, read on too.
Jim