I write to express my anger at the announcement of large-scale cuts in public library services.

My annoyance is not lessened when I remember very clearly my own excitement upon joining a library for the first time at the age of six: my first book (about Robin Hood), the sense of new worlds of imagination and information opening up before me, the perception that the local library was an oasis of calm, learning and imagination.

I have never entirely lost contact with these feelings. Nor will I forget that many of my own academic achievements were underpinned by access to my local library.

Crucially, without the enabling role of the public library service, I – and millions of others – would have been unable to afford to maintain the reading habit which has been so important to me. Without public libraries, regular reading would have become a rich man’s amusement.

The idea of using volunteers to run libraries is completely unsatisfactory. An important and complex public service should be run by professionals, rather than by amateurs, however well-meaning. Also, it cannot work – anyone with any experience of running local community organisations will realise that volunteers are increasingly hard to find. Not everyone has the time and money to volunteer. We are told that the public can buy books or use the Internet instead of borrowing from libraries. Yet again, there is the assumption that we all have plenty of money. Try telling that to the growing numbers of the unemployed or low paid, or to the disabled, the elderly, students or children.

Wiltshire’s per capita expenditure on state secondary education is amongst the lowest in the country. It can therefore ill afford the loss of the educational facilities provided by libraries.

Indeed, Wiltshire cannot afford to wreck its libraries. If some cuts are essential, we should insist that local and national government promise to restore library funding immediately that the government’s finances start to improve. Without such guarantees, one is entitled to suspect that public libraries are not casualties of an economic crisis. Rather, they are victims of an opportunistic ideologically-driven scheme to permanently shrink the state.

Dr MJ Lomas, Avebury Trusloe.