The Friends of Puddletown library
By Mike Chaney, Friend of Puddletown Library
When Dorset County Council cut library funding, Puddletown library became the first library in the country to be manned solely by volunteers, while still being fully maintained by the county council.
The Friends of Puddletown library volunteer at the library to extend opening hours. The urge to save our library is our very isolation. Villages all over are losing their schools, their pubs, their shops and their bus and we knew only too well of neighbouring communities where the heart has been knocked out of them by such closures.
We noticed that a high proportion of our older readers were unable to make use of the two public access computers we took action. A local charity was making grants to help counter the effects of rural deprivation and we were awarded enough to buy a couple of laptops, with separate monitors, keyboards and mice. Another charity was offering a laptop and broadband connection to village halls in Dorset and we qualified for that too.
Dorset Library Service agreed that we could teach in our library when it is not open for business, and we set about offering our services - free of charge - to anyone in our community who wasn't yet able to take advantage of broadband.
We offer six one hour lessons on a one to one basis, so that each learner has the same teacher for every lesson and can progress at his or her own pace. We try to tailor the course to the learner's needs, focussing principally on the benefits of the internet, but including things like handling photographs.
So far on our first course we have had people with no previous experience, who have never before confronted a keyboard much less a computer. At the other end of the scale we have people who have computers of their own and even email accounts but who have lost confidence, or have just forgotten how to use their equipment.
We have taught people whose hearing isn't what it was and others who cannot easily see what's on the screen. But with patience and encouragement we have so far had only one failure - only one person has given up in despair.
As word of the lessons spreads we keep getting new requests for training. We foresee being able to set more than two dozen people on the road to internet freedom in an area where self-help is perhaps even more important than it is in the cities.
Our biggest problem is finding enough people who are willing to take on the task of teaching computing and, to a lesser extent, the difficulty of meeting the costs of maintaining our telephone and internet connections.
The reaction of our trainees has been most gratifying. Some are now considering buying computers of their own.
So Puddletown is doing its small bit in the great broadband revolution.
