Fulbourn Village Library was re-opened by volunteers in November 2003 after having been closed by the County Council in October 2003. We remained in the Old School Building until May 2009, when we moved to new premises at The Swifts, Haggis Gap.

The Library Service provides us with 2 computers for public use and another computer, which is used by the volunteers and links us to the computer system operated in all of Cambridgeshire Libraries. This link enables us to request books for our customers from anywhere within Cambridgeshire Libraries. Anyone with a Cambridgeshire Library card can use our Library. Within the Library Service our Library is known as a Library Access Point (LAP) and there are currently ten LAPs in the County.

To supplement our stock, we rely on donations of books, both fiction and non-fiction titles, and due to the generosity of the community we have a steady supply of donations. Friends of Fulbourn Library are also very generous with providing funds for new books.

We have kept the same opening hours as before, 7 sessions, totalling 14.5 hours per week. We have 40 volunteers who give up their time to help run our Library. We have 2 volunteers on duty at all Library sessions. Our volunteers also sort out the donated books and get them ready for the Library by sticking in date labels & bar codes. All of our volunteers have to have Criminal Records clearance.

How can you help us?

If you are interested in becoming a volunteer and are 18 or over, then please visit the Library and leave your details with the volunteers on duty.

If you wish to donate books to our Library, then please bring them in during opening hours.

The most important help you can give us is by joining the Library, if you are not already a member, and by borrowing lots of books. The Library Service constantly monitors our success by looking at our borrowing figures. So far we have achieved the targets set, but if we are to ensure our continued success we need to increase our borrowings.

Library users are really pleased with our selection of books and are very grateful for all of our efforts. This makes it an extremely rewarding and worthwhile venture.

Fulbourn Village Library does have a future

One of our volunteers has likened running our Library to climbing a mountain – we just make it to the top to find there is yet another peak to challenge us.

As you are aware Cambridgeshire County Council has to make savings in its Library budget. Although the proposed cuts will affect us, we will be able to continue as a volunteer Library and we plan to work with the Library Service to minimise the impact of the cuts on our customers.

We will still be linked to the Library Service’s computer system, therefore you will continue to be able to request books at Fulbourn that are in any other County library in Cambridgeshire, and continue to return books to us that you have borrowed from another library in the county. Both of these services are free of charge.

The proposed cuts will affect the number of books we receive from the County Council, but we will still receive Large Print books and be able to rotate books with other libraries.

So it is business as usual in the Library and as I write this we are looking forward to the Summer Reading Challenge with the children during the summer holidays.

We have an excellent group of volunteers who are happy to continue running the Library but we will need a lot of help and support from the community if we are going to survive in the future. You can help us by:

· Visiting the Library often and borrowing lots of books

· Donating good quality, recently published books to the Library, both adult and children’s books

· Offering your help as a volunteer

So the next time you are discarding a book you have purchased in Tescos or from Amazon, please consider donating it to the Library - there are lot of people in Fulbourn who rely on us for their books as they are unable to travel to another Library – and while you are in the Library you may see something on our shelves that you want to read.

We will continue to run the Library, but we can only do it with your help.